Subject
Jennifer Tiexiera and Camilla Hall’s intriguing documentary is about the people who have been the subject of other documentaries.
Subject matters: Mukunda Angulo
Most people on learning what Subject is about will surely think that it is indeed a very good subject for a documentary film. It is certainly a novel notion to study at length the impact that can result from taking part in a documentary about one's own life or about the family of whom you are a part. The effect of becoming a subject in this way is the central concern of this work by Jennifer Tiexiera and Camilla Hall and they go about it by giving a platform to participants from five documentaries made between 1994 and 2018. While that is the chief focus, Subject also considers a number of contentious issues that have developed around such films and underlines the extent to which this genre has increased its appeal in recent years.
In some ways that could be seen as turning Subject into a film of two distinct aspects. When it comes to the subsidiary matters raised, it calls on directors, producers and film festival organisers to comment. What is touched on includes whether or not participants in documentaries should be paid and in extreme cases whether or not subjects required to talk about highly distressing personal experiences should be offered the support of therapy. There is too the question of integrity when it comes to directors incorporating staged scenes that may be taken for real (that classic example from 1922 Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North gets a mention here) and there is also the question of how the passing of time may alter attitudes to films of an earlier era. Thus, today's concerns about who tells a particular story can rightly or wrongly challenge past approval for an acclaimed film made by an outsider (for some Hoop Dreams now leaves them uneasy because its study of black lives was made by a white director). And then there's the fact that the wider release of documentaries driven by their appearance on Netflix and other platforms can both widen and lengthen the time during which an impression can be made by such works: on occasion a film may by its character become increasingly inspirational in retrospect, but it can also freeze a subject as he or she was when filming took place regardless of any subsequent change of character or the discovery of later information which could alter our perception of that person.
These various matters come up and raise interesting questions but without there being time to delve deeply, let alone come to any conclusions. However, the position is rather different when it comes to the principal contributors, those whose stories were told in the five works put in the spotlight here. Thus, we have Margaret Ratliff and her father Michael Peterson from The Staircase (the TV miniseries from HBO which started in 2004), Mukunda Angulo from The Wolfpack (2015), Arthur Agee from Hoop Dreams (1994), Ahmed Hassan from The Square (2013) and Jesse Friedman from Capturing the Friedmans (2003) while more briefly Bing Liu comments on putting himself in his film about sexual abuse, Minding the Gap (2018). Liu apart, the directors of these titles do not appear but that only counts as a drawback when we learn indirectly that Andrew Jarecki was himself an advocate for the need for a sequel to his Capturing the Friedmans to cover later facts not apparent as things stood when the film was made.
If numerous other films are represented by the briefest of shots, those five linked by appearances by their subjects become central but, in the event, don’t really fit the form imposed on them. One slightly problematic element is the question of how much of a description of the chosen works is necessary given that some viewers will have seen them and others not. But the real concern is that this is basically a film of talking heads and one jumps around from one featured film to another and back again. It's workable, but it leaves one with the impression that a TV series would have been a better format: it could have taken one film at a time and gone even deeper where appropriate while yet leaving a final programme to tackle the other issues utilising wider discussion than here.
As it stands Subject intrigues without making the best of its material. Film buffs will enjoy it especially if they have seen all five featured titles - but others may find it too much a matter of bits and pieces to satisfy fully.
MANSEL STIMPSON
Featuring Margaret Ratliff, Michael Peterson, Arthur Agee, Mukunda Angulo, Ahmed Hassan, Jesse Friedman, Elaine Friedman. Bing Liu, Susanne Reisenbacher, Kirsten Johnson, Davis Guggenheim, Daresha Kyi, Sonya Childress, Thom Powers, Gordon Quinn, Assia Boundaoui.
Dir Jennifer Tiexiera and Camilla Hall, Pro Jennifer Teixiera, Camilla Hall and Joe Caterini, Screenplay Jennifer Tiexeira, Camilla Hall and Lauren Saffa, Ph Nick Aldridge, Zachary Shields and Ahmed Hassan, Ed Lauren Saffa, Music Jonathan Kirkscey and Rafaël Leloup.
Lady & Bird Films/Time Studios-Dogwoof Releasing.
97 mins. USA. 2022. UK Rel: 3 March 2023. Cert. 15.
