From the "On The Scene" Archives:

by Stephen Garrett

If the LAIFF is any indication, the vanguard of American independent cinema more and more seems to be documentaries. No other medium more consistently challenges and questions audience expectations than non-fiction film, and the wealth of product showcased over the weekend in Los Angeles is the proof. "Perhaps it's because documentaries don't make financial sense," mused Jason Constantine, an acquisitions exec for Trimark. "It attracts a different kind of filmmaker who's passionate about the subject, or about making films. There's a high shooting ratio and an indefinite post-production period, and all the filmmaker can say to an investor is, 'we're not sure when it'll be done, or even if it's going to be good.' So making it is based purely on artistic reasons and not financial profit."

In a way, it was no surprise that the father-and-son globe-trotting odyssey "Pop and Me" won the audience award for best feature, since it's the perfect example of a movie made from the heart and without any distribution goals in mind. "Pop and Me" is Richard and Chris Roe's travelogue of a six-month world tour in which Richard, the dad, promised to cover all the expenses on the condition that his son Chris film the trip and that they interview other fathers and sons they met along the way. The irony is that as they allowed other fathers and sons to open up to each other for the first time and grow closer, the two filmmakers found their own relationship becoming more strained. From New York to France, Israel, Egypt, South Africa, Vietnam, and Australia, the dozens of interviews show the universality of tensions and generosity in father-son dynamics; and the experience ultimately brings the Roes closer together. It's an emotionally button-pushing topic and one that definitely plays well to large crowds -- its screening last Sunday at the Director's Guild's mammoth theater received the only unanimous standing ovation at the festival. "Pop and Me" is therapy lite: very entertaining, undeniably narcissistic, slightly thought-provoking, warm and fuzzy and easy to digest.

Meanwhile, a very different sort of love-in was going on at one of the few major critical hits of the festival, David Schisgall's "The Lifestyle," a clear-eyed study of America's increasingly popular swingers subculture, in which orgies are just as likely to have outdoor barbecues and potato salad along with sex harnesses and mattress sponges. "Swinging is sport fucking," spouts gleeful "Wild Bill" Goodwin, a 73-year-old Costa Mesa resident who lifts weights with his penis and hosts parties with as many as 200 guests at his horny home, the "Panther Palace." Three million strong and professionally organized into hundreds of local and national groups, today's swinger population is as likely to be Democrat or Republican as they are to be 29 or 69, although the bulk of coupling couples tend to be in their 50s and 60s. Sex, like schmaltz, is an automatic crowd-pleaser; but to his credit Schisgall profiles some very eye-opening personal philosophies and reveals delightfully liberating body-image attitudes: "It doesnŐt matter anymore," one 62-year-old swinger sighs happily about his sagging flesh.

"Hot Irons" is music video director Andrew Dosunmu's loving look at another very rich subculture, hairstyles among African-Americans and Hispanic men and women from as far north as Michigan and as far south as Alabama. Concentrating his interviews on Detroit-based hairdressers and specifically the "Hair Wars" competition held at a downtown hotel, "Hot Irons" reveals big hair and loud fingernails as a wonderfully extravagant form of self-expression among middle-class minorities. The more outrageous the plumage, the more accepted and regaled a person becomes, as they sport French Rolls with a Zulu Twist or a dry-wave pin-curl ponytail.

And "Better Living Through Circuitry" rocked the house in its Saturday night slot, with a capacity-crowd of electronic music fans plugged in for filmmaker Jon Reiss' kaleidescopic tour of today's rave culture. "I eat, sleep, and shit techno," said a member of Sonic Groove in one filmed interview, and he's not far from the prevailing mood: "Circuitry" makes a convincing argument for the positivity philosophy that sprouts out of the all-night dance binges, with truckloads of plastic teens sucking on pacifiers and sporting stuffed animal backpacks as they bop and squirm to pulsing video screens and thumping loudspeakers. The hyper-stimulating attitude make for an overwhelming lifestyle of musical, spiritual, and chemical stimulation, and some over-enthusiastic audience members gushed that "Circuitry" was the best documentary they had ever seen, while other more skeptical doc-watchers felt that the movie left them drunk on the images but hungry for more background.

The fifth documentary, "The Accident" had the least flair but the most emotional resonance out of all the non-fiction films. Filmmaker (and youngest child) Joseph F. Lovett approached his siblings to find out about his overbearing father, who died of cancer, and his emotionally distant mother, who was killed in a freak car accident right in from of Lovett's eyes. His probing examination of his parents, in lesser hands, could easily have turned into a self-serving family album of interviews with brothers and sisters. Instead what emerges is a genuinely moving portrait. Lovett insightfully declares his intentions to reflect on "reality and perception and where memory fits," and therein lies the film's secret: it is in comparing perceptions, and honestly confronting one's own memory, that the reality of truth, and coming to terms with the past, becomes a little more possible.

By far the most delightful ticket at the festival was for a program of documentary shorts, which revealed the extent to which wildly original filmmaking is still very much alive and kicking. Among its charms were a portrait of a funeral director's love life (Rolf Gibbs' "The Last Guy to Let You Down"); a formalist rumination on the birthplace of Buddy Holly (Bill Brown's "Hub City"); a pair of nuns in a retirement convent (George Reyes' "Cradle"); a black grandmother's history lesson for her indifferent grandson (Camille Billop's "Take Your Bags"); a surreal look at singer/songwriter Elliot Smith (Steve Hanft's "Strange Parallel"); and a wry take on Lars Von Trier's countdown through the rules of Dogma 95 (Sophie Fiennes' "Lars from 1-10"). The doc shorts never ran too long or felt too slight: they were a perfect example of a perfect medium for what the filmmakers were trying to accomplish.

One happy coincidence in the fiction films this year was that two movies, one made in the past year and the other thirty years ago, both used non-fiction devices to tell their stories. "The Love Machine" is a faux-documentary about sex on the internet and the kinds of people who log on to get off. Technically accomplished and convincing, although dramatically a little weak, the film generates its own hypnotic power from the genuine possibility of its reality. Writer/director Gordon Eriksen used Jean Rouch's cinema verite groundbreaker "Chronicle of a Summer" as the model for his confessional film, and the conceit still holds its potency. Thirty years earlier, Milton Moses Ginsberg was inspired by Jim McBride's mock-documentary "David Holzman's Dairy" to make "Coming Apart," using the movie as his petri dish to study how the free love generation was trying to get a grip on its own pop-psychoanalytic sensibilities and libidinal overdrive.

Almost all the documentary features were shot on video, either VHS, Hi-8, Beta, or DV, with a smattering of 16mm film later transferred to video. The rare exception was "The Lifestyle," which actually made a point of shooting on film (in this case, Super-16) because they consciously wanted to avoid the porn aesthetic of video. In the case of "Pop and Me" and "Circuitry," ease of transit made shooting on video a necessity. And if the audience award for best film is any indication, moviegoers are growing more accustomed to the video format. But audiences also have to get into the habit of seeing theatrically-released documentaries, because otherwise distributors will only see the stigma of them not being a fiction film. "I've definitely noticed over the past year that the documentaries at Sundance, at the LAIFF, and at other festivals have always been excellent," Constantine added, then paused. "Let me qualify that: excellent from a creative standpoint, but not necessarily for distribution."