34: Adventures on the New Frontier (1961, Richard Leacock & Albert Maysles & D.A. Pennebaker & Kenneth Stilson)

Owned version: The 2016 Blu-ray released by Criterion under the heading of The Kennedy Films of Robert Drew & Associates - a fascinating set of short films.

Acquired: This past July 4th at a Barnes & Noble as part of their semi-annual Criterion half-off sale. Seemed appropriate.

Seen before?: Once from this disc on the July 4th in question.

Part of me just wants to write just, like, "wow, so refreshing to watch a president being presidential!" and move on, but snark is only one tool in the box and overreliance on it can rot the soul. Besides, this film and its predecessor Primary make an impressive case study in how to critique a subject without overtly appearing to do so. While I plan (obviously, given the nature of what I'm doing here) to write at length about Primary down the road, I'll briefly note now that what struck me about it is how quietly but firmly the filmmakers aligned themselves with Humphrey over Kennedy without harming the project - indeed, the thrust of the film seems to demand Kennedy's triumph even as, during filming, it would have not been a foregone conclusion. It's a piece about the evolution of political campaigning in this country, and while Kennedy had issues and platforms he ran on and talked about at length, Drew and company hold that close until the final push towards primary day. They're more interested with his presence, his image and the near-messianic reaction he got from crowds, as opposed to poor Hubert Humphrey who's mostly seen doing old-school legwork for small groups in North Wisconsin farm country and greeting potential voters individually - the "man of the people" versus a man who seems to exist above the people, in a rarefied and inspiring space of his own. If we take that as the truth, Adventures on the New Frontier follows from there into the realities of JFK's ascent to governmental Godhood. It's easy to be inspiring; it's damned hard to be effective.

It's not just important, in the context of this project that you know about this difficulty. The filmmakers want you to feel it, to understand it in a bone-deep way. Adventures sets the stage for this in its opening minutes, with it first following JFK from behind, as though the camera were tethered to his neck - a newsman literally following the story before him as he walks down the halls of power. When the narrator says, "Now you will begin to move with the President," the double meaning of "move with" jumps out - that we are following the President as he goes about his day, and that we move as he moves, step as he steps, swing our limbs as he does... in essence, that we are forced into an identification with the President as he transitions from Great New Hope into, y'know, the actual fucking President. And, thanks to the miracle of then-modern access reporting, you will get to be in on that transition too! Given the thesis, it's then telling about the nature of the job and funny in a vacuum that we see much less of JFK than would be expected. While this is an act of media-blitz burnishment, made because JFK liked the work done on Primary, it prints the legend not by making its central figure seem godlike and perfect but by making him a regular dude with an irregular job, the white-collar boss of an office building full of diligent workers whose product is the fate of billions. He can sit in the Oval Office and smoke cigars and discuss, in calm and rational tones, a plan for nuclear disarmament as though there's nothing unusual about that, that he isn't discussing weapons that could vaporize entire populations in seconds, because that's the job. And because that's the job, it's not the sort of thing a man can do by himself.

So in addition to popping into the Oval Office to see JFK do things like create the Peace Corps, we follow Secretary of Labor Arthur Goldberg as he testifies to Congress about the weak economy and the plans to get things rolling, especially in grossly depressed places like the coal country of West Virginia, where unemployment is over twice the national average. (Coal country: dead now, dead then.) We jump to Puritan, a small coal-centric village in WV to see what damage this downturn hath wrought. And we follow Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs G. Mennen Williams as he prepares for, and ultimately attends a conference in Addis Ababa regarding the emergence of several newly independent states and a general push towards African self-governance. In following Goldberg and Williams, there emerges a clear interest in the space between stated policy and real-world application, between rhetoric and efficacy. I find the many ways in which the filmmakers pointedly use irony and contrast to drive home this idea that words and intentions are easy but action is much tougher. The most pointed example of this is likely a spirited bit of narration that concludes with, "The president is looking ahead," which had been preceded by an interlude in which a young Puritan boy hopes to get a shirt from a government-sponsored donation drive and is then followed by more testimony about the dire nature of the economy by Goldberg; meanwhile, Williams's preparation for his trip involves him discussing his diplomatic aims with Barrett O'Hara, the chairman of the subcommittee on Africa who boasts that he has been to the continent all of twice, and with Louisiana Senator Allen J. Ellender, who had been to 38 African countries that year alone and gets off the amazing line, "Anyone with common sense knows you can't raise chickens in a rain forest." This echoes further when a member of the African coalition at the conference states, "American opinion... was somewhat parochial before." Through it all remains a portrait of a flawed machine made up of men working towards something bigger than themselves, stumbling towards a sort of optimistic future and hoping the path they're on will get them there, working through disagreements of approach and policy via a shared understanding that this job is fucking impossible but equally fucking necessary. When the narrator speaks of JFK and "decisions he must make alone," well, that's another irony for you, since we see that no decision exists in a vacuum here. This is the kind of myth-making I can get behind.

(Retrospect also offers a look at a quieter form of myth-making that would have been unknown to all but the President's closest - check the stiff gait and tight-shouldered posture on JFK around the 18 or 19 minute mark and reflect that we know now about the panoply of ailments afflicting a man who was always sold as an acme of youthful vigor.)

31: The Agronomist (2003, Jonathan Demme)

Owned version: The 2005 DVD released by New Line Home Entertainment.

Acquired: May 20th, 2017, from used-media store CeX. I got excited when they put one in a mall near me, and I bought a bunch of stuff. Meant to go back from time to time but never could, owing to my work schedule. Now they're out of business in America. Dammit.

Seen before?: No - I've slept on most of Demme's documentary work. Because I am a fool.

Sat on this one too long - didn't mean to take a hiatus, but that's what happened. So instead of a proper review, here's some barely-digested thoughts culled from my notes:

 - If nothing else, this is a fabulous documentary because its subject is endlessly fascinating and Jonathan Demme, ever interested in the lives and thoughts of others, keeps himself inconspicuous and allows the subject to tell his story in the manner he sees fit. Jean Dominique is a firecracker, a passionate advocate for his home country of Haiti who also happens to be a raconteur of rare quality. Because he's interesting, the film is interesting.

 - When speaking on But, I Am Beautiful, the documentary film he helped make that spurred a mini-Haitian New Wave, Dominique proclaims, "The grammar of the film is a political act." This could also be said about Demme's tacit ceding of the floor to Dominique for the duration of The Agronomist - allowing Dominique to lay out the arguments regarding Haiti's history and the political quagmire therein without authorial intrusion is a political act, implying Demme's agreement with Dominique, as well as a deferential one (why try to stake a position when this guy's got it staked pretty well?).

 - In the above light, it's kind of tempting to see this as a flipside to Swimming to Cambodia - both are eccentric and energetic performance pieces (explicitly with the Gray film, implicitly here - the interlude involving Dominique's letters to his daughter that reveal a shy, retiring side he never shows in public suggest that he is, in essence, always performing and the radio microphone/camera allow the remove he needs to enact that performance) about Western exploitation of Third World nations. Swimming is an outsider's perspective on that idea, a man from a protected class reaching certain painful epiphanies about what had to happen for him to be afforded that protection, where this is from the inside, a man from one of those nations explaining the costs incurred. Both also see Demme hanging back and letting the subjects dictate the flow, asserting directorial control sparingly for maximum impact (the spectacular God's-eye-view cut in Swimming, the climactic still shots of blue sky here).

 - The title is apropos in a certain way; while Jean Dominique rose to fame as a radio broadcaster and political activist, his college degree was in agronomy and he did indeed find work in Haiti as one for a short period of time. Identifying him as "the agronomist," after his own self-identification ("I am not a journalist... I became a journalist!"), ties him to the land he fought for in a physical way that his more-famed occupation would not, his root impulse being that to nurture and foster the growth of His Land; furthermore, when Dominique quips that, as a hired gun, he was "an agronomist without land," that brings in the important political distinction between working land and having land, of being exploited versus being the exploiter.

 - When speaking on his youth, Dominique claims his love affair with Haiti stemmed in part from sojourns with his father to "the outside country," i.e. the rural villages where the poor and working classes reside. He fosters his relationship to his home by seeing the whole of the country, setting him in stark contrast to e.g. the Duvaliers, who only see (or pay attention to) the parts/persons they deem to have value. His father developed this love of country in order to instill a sort of nationalistic impulse within his son ("You are not French, you are not British, you are not American... you are Haitian!") - begging the question of what it means to be a nationalist in a territory with a long history of being denied nationhood. Also: interesting, living in a country where nationalism and militarism are joined at the hip, to see a fostering of nationalism meant to counter any impulses towards militarism.

 - Not the film's main thrust, but the role of the US in the Haitian situation is certainly not allowed to pass without comment - the election of Reagan spurring Dominique to proclaim, "Human rights no more!" followed by the discussion of "the phone call option." The complicity there is deep and ugly, and the point gets made without it turning into hectoring.

 - "the sound that you only hear when the record is stuck": boy, that's a hell of a metaphor