Personal Belongings: First-Person Documentary at Museum of the Moving Image

The Museum of the Moving Image film series Personal Belongings: First-Person Documentary in the 1990s, beautifully curated by Asha Phelps and Jeff Reichert (and starting this Friday), hit home for me as a welcome sequel to the first series I curated at MoMI (way back in 1986), also called First-Person Documentary. That short series looked at an earlier generation of the form, including such films as Ross McElwee’s Sherman’s March (1985) and Wim Wenders’ Tokyo-ga (1985). The practice of filmmakers inserting themselves as characters in their own films was fairly novel at the time. In their expansive retrospective, Phelps and Reichert reveal how first-person filmmaking flourished in the 1990s, and  “looked at white, non-white, mixed-raced, straight and queer, homegrown and immigrant stories, and took advantage of new affordability and access to recording and editing equipment.” There are plenty of rarely screened treasures in the MoMI series, with influential but now somewhat forgotten films by Sadie Benning, Sue Friedrich, Judith Helfand, Richard Leacock, Jan Oxenberg, Lourdes Portillo, Marlon Riggs, and more. Here are notes on just a few highlights:

Personal Belongings (Dir. Steven Bognar, 1996)

In 1956, with revolution in the streets, Bela Bognar left Hungary, against his father’s wishes, to build a new life in America. Living and studying in Berkeley, California and Madison, Wisconsin in the 1960s, he again saw revolution in the streets, before settling down with his wife to raise a family in the midwest. After visiting Hungary in 1986 for the 30th anniversary of the revolt in Budapest, and then experiencing yet another historical upheaval–the fall of Communism a few years later–there was a revolution in Bela’s personal life; he left his wife, against his sons’ wishes. Throughout his childhood and young adulthood, Bela’s son Steven, who would go on to a remarkable career as a documentary filmmaker, usually working with his partner Julia Reichert (they won the Academy Award for American Factory in 2020), often filmed his father. When Steven started his filmmaking career in earnest, it made perfect sense for him to turn the camera on Bela again; the result is this intimate, poignant, and wistful personal documentary. Bognar stitches together old home movies and new footage as he tries to pin down his elusive father, and to make sense of what he jokingly refers to as the “new world order” for his family that followed his father’s divorce. The most touching section of the film is the 1986 visit to Hungary, in lovely pastel color film footage that was seized from Bognar by authorities at the border, but returned intact nearly two years later. In this footage, the family and old friends visit the rural village where Bela grew up. They spend an afternoon in the sun, picking grapes. It is a moment of bliss, a reminder of the world that Bela left behind as part of a restless, never-ending quest for new adventures.

The Tourist (Dir. Rob Moss, 1996)
Rob Moss’s first-person documentary The Tourist quickly introduces us to the man behind the camera. As we watch a group of African children greet Moss one morning by playing with fake cameras and recording equipment that they built from bamboo, Moss, as narrator, succinctly says “filming other people is how I make my living. Sometimes I shoot my own films, sometimes people hire me to shoot theirs. In either case, certain problems arise.” We cut to Moss’s own wedding, and quickly learn that his wife Jean, an obstetrics nurse, has been having trouble getting pregnant. The film moves deftly between two sets of problems; the moral and social issues that arise when turning a camera on strangers, with the knowledge that conflicts and crises will make for a better film, and the pressing problem in Moss’s own life–his inability to father a child with Jean. Moss is aware of the irony that this personal problem also happens to make for a compelling film. Moss cuts between his globetrotting professional travels and his home life. In a scene in that African village, Moss films a woman at her home, beautifully silhouetted against the setting sun, talking in a language that Moss doesn’t understand. When he has the footage translated later, he learns that she was complaining about what a pain Moss’s camera crew was. Moss ponders questions about intimacy and about what it means to encounter strangers, all while he and Jean inexorably move towards the possibility of adoption. Documentary filmmaking aside, what more intimate encounter with a stranger can there be than that between a parent and their adopted child? Moss raises this question, and many more, as he invites us to be tourists in his own life.

Who’s Going to Pay For These Donuts Anyway?

Who’s Going to Pay For These Donuts Anyway?  (Dir. Janice Tanaka, 1992)

The drama of separation and loss at the core of Janice Tanaka’s poetic documentary Who’s Going to Pay for These Donuts Anyway? was the direct result of the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. And while the film’s implicit indictment of the vilification of a group of American citizens based on their ethnicity feels depressingly relevant today, Tanaka’s film is less about politics than about the psychological toll that followed her father’s imprisonment at the Manzanar Internment Camp when the filmmaker was just three. Tanaka didn’t see him for more than forty years; in 1989, she decided to track him down. Tanaka’s uncle (her father’s brother) has a key presence in the film. He has had a successful life, and is mentally alert. Tanaka’s father, on the other hand, was forcibly sent to a psychiatric hospital after his internment, and is a shell of his former self. If Tanaka’s film was simply a straightforward documentary about their reunion, it would be riveting and deeply moving. But she takes a more artistic approach, moving between past and present, mixing home movies, archival footage, photographs, and a reflective personal narration with impressionistic moments of abstraction, to express her interior state and to come to terms with the fact that her identity, an that of her children as well, was permanently affected by the internment. As she says, “when you learn your past, it is easier to believe that your present has a purpose, and to look to the future.”

Moment of Impact

Moment of Impact (Dir. Julia Loktev, 1998)

April Fool’s Day in 1989 brought Julia Loktev’s father Leonid a horrific and life-altering cosmic joke when he was hit by a car and left permanently incapacitated, unable to speak and barely able to move. Almost nine years later, the Russian-born Loktev, then an aspiring filmmaker living in Brooklyn, took a Hi-8 video camera and went to Colorado, where her parents lived, her mother Larissa consigned to the incredibly arduous task of caring for Leonid. Loktev knew there was a film to be made about this extraordinary situation, her father trapped in a state between life and death, simultaneously close to and painfully remote from his family. The resulting feature-length work, Moment of Impact, is nothing less than a masterpiece of the documentary form, a film that is at once harrowing, deeply unsentimental, and exhilarating, as we see Larissa (the true hero, although she despises that label) and Julia work through an astonishing range of emotions and thoughts. The experience has changed both of them as profoundly as it did Leonid. The deepest lesson for both also happens to be central to the art of documentary filmmaking; the importance of living in and observing and understanding the present. Loktev would go on to become a distinctive fiction filmmaker (Day Night Day Night in 2006, The Loneliest Planet in 2011); she credits the experience of making Moment of Impact as influencing her approach to fiction and heightening her awareness of the complexity and inherent drama of reality. Because of its length (just under two hours) and the nightmare situation at its core, Moment of Impact may sound like a tough watch. But don’t miss it. Its artistry, with its black-and-white imagery offering just the needed distance, and more importantly its candor and moment-to-moment vitality, make this a film that will do nothing less than give you a new perspective on life.