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By Julia Knobloch
For quite a while now, juggling and merging several layers of reality and fiction has been established as a standard in film narrative. Like almost everywhere around us, the boundaries between what is true and false, real and surreal, interpretation and fact are often blurred. Fiction is being told as if it were reality, and reality is often presented as fiction.
Yet there is always room for experiment. In this context, Edmon Roch’s feature film documentary Garbo – The Spy can be regarded as, if not an entirely new, nevertheless an original and fresh attempt at pushing those boundaries even further. To a great extent, Roch relies on clips from spy films and WWII movies (Mata Hari, The Invisible Agent, Our Man in Havana, The Longest Day, and Patton, to name just a few) to tell the historically-confirmed story of a Spanish double agent, Juan Pujol Garcia, who served both the Nazis and the British.
It is a refreshing stylistic approach in that the clips illustrate what usually is very difficult for historical documentaries to show, especially if they don’t use reenactment: the actual action—the what “really” happened—what nobody saw besides the people involved.
By choosing the archived movie scenes, Roch and his team fill in the blanks. This is not so different from reenactment, in the sense that any selection of footage or any scripted re-creation is always an interpretation of the historic facts, a placeholder for what has been lost in history’s maze of “what ifs.”
There are, of course, facts: Pujol—code named Alaric by the Germans and Garbo by the Brits—accepted both the Nazis’ Iron Cross and England’s OBE. After the war, he was reported to have passed away in Africa, a false reality his Spanish family had to accept while Pujol started a new life and a new family in Venezuela. Asked about the underlying motives for his maneuvers as a double agent, he emphasized that he wanted to fight the injustices of his time with the means at his disposal. One can interpret this as Pujol describing himself as a well-intentioned humanist, albeit a cunning one who had to make moral compromises.
According to the film, Pujol, who had defected from the Republican to the Nationalist side during the Spanish Civil War, played a major, if not decisive, role in the Allied invasion of Normandy in June 1944, when he convinced the Germans that the imminent landfall of Patton and his troops was slated to occur at Pas-de-Calais, and not, as it eventually did, on the Cherbourg peninsula.
It is a well-known fact that the Nazis were easily to be duped in their war-fueled intoxication. But the successful misleading of the usurpers in black leather boots was a huge, manifold and multi-faceted orchestration, which arguably did not depend on one person alone. Does it diminish Pujol’s undoubtedly important role in the Operation Fortitude (as the Allies codenamed their counterintelligence campaign) if one wonders whether selling him, as the film does, as the lone ranger who saved the Allied Invasion – or the world, as the title suggests – is a stretch?
Nevertheless, Garbo –The Spy is an entertaining, idiosyncratic and provocative film. It clearly involved a lot of time spent in archives and doing in-depth interviews. Tracking down people who by trade aim to remain invisible requires passion and persistence. Seasoned and visionary professionals, Roch and his team researched the facts, talked with trustworthy experts, chose from a nicely-filled pool of footage, and then twined all the layers together, according to their own personal interpretation of one moment in history.
A Review: Prayer for a Perfect Season by Julia Knobloch
Aptly timed, Marc Levin’s new documentary about a high school basketball team premiered at the Landmark Sunshine Cinema in Manhattan, prior to airing on HBO Sports this October 25th at 9 p.m. ET.
In Prayer for a Perfect Season, award-winning documentary filmmaker Levin returned to his home state to chronicle the 2010-2011 season of the St. Patrick’s Celtics of Elizabeth, New Jersey. The Celtic’s aim is to win the national championship, and the film’s finale unfolds during the last decisive match against their long-time rivals from St. Anthony High School in Jersey City.
But the feature-length documentary – crafted in solid, tried and tested television manner (a familiar mix of establishing shots, explanatory inserts, archive footage, situational sequences, and seated interviews with sports journalists and other authorities) – accounts for more than just the journal of a high school basketball team. The triumphs and tragedies of sport are merely the backdrop for a decisive chapter in the lives of the films’ protagonists.
Veteran coach Kevin Boyle and his stars Michael Kidd-Gilchrist and Derrick Gordon (both now freshmen at Kentucky and Western Kentucky, respectively), are portrayed as they traverse an emotionally-challenging year, especially on the personal level. Boyle needs to decide whether to leave St. Patrick and head for a better paying job in Florida. Kidd-Gilchrist struggles with his uncle’s sudden and premature death. (His father was shot dead when Michael was just a toddler.) And Gordon has a hard time coming to terms with his twin brother’s incarceration in a youth correctional facility. All this while St. Patrick High itself fights for survival in times of daunting insolvency, and the overall decline of Catholic school programs nationwide.
At the end of the not-too-perfect season, each protagonist – coach, players, their friends and loved-ones alike – has completed a hero’s journey. St. Patrick will not be the same as everyone sets out for the next chapters of their lives, ready to confront the triumphs and tragedies that inevitably await them.
WHERE ARE YOU TAKING ME? by Julia Knobloch
Prepare yourself for an immersive, unobtrusive journey straight into the heart and soul of Ugandan daily life. The film takes you to a lush high society wedding, observes a female weight-lifting competition, joins a break-dance performance and visits a school for former child soldiers. It saunters through the lively streets of Kampala and wanders across dusty, red country roads, while resting its eyes on a myriad of Ugandan faces. Through the very intimate lens of filmmaker Kimi Takasue’s camera, the African country, recurrently associated with an overall bloody history, appears like a kaleidoscope of beauty, vitality, diversity and hope.
Commissioned by the International Film Festival Rotterdam with the aim of promoting African cinema and unbiased films about the continent, this deliberately meditative collage without voice-over or a narrative thread gains and convinces even more once you read the director’s statement. Kimi writes: ““Where are you taking me?” also moves beyond curiosity into a confrontation of the politics and ethics of the documentary contract.“
Takasue has often pondered the possibilities and limitations of observation, and this recent work is an astute example for her artistic vein and motivation. What at first sight may seem like too random a collection of footage, if beautifully filmed, reveals to be a very private and profound discussion of the power and legitimacy of images.
Telegraph21 is hosting a free preview screening of Where Are You Taking Me? as part of its “Documentary Selections by Telegraph21″ this Tuesday at 5pm at the Big Screen Plaza in NYC.
