The epistolary novel is a form so
textual that it doesn't really translate to visual mediums. Yet I think there's been an attempt to take the
epistolary form and use it to create a confessional and often
cathartic form of documentary. One of the most notable films in this
mode is Kurt Kuennne's Dear Zachary, which is a love letter to
multiple parties. There are shaky, clumsy bits in every love letter
when a person discloses too much or confesses something too raw and
inartful, and moments of Dear Zachary have that feeling, but the earnest attempt to render wild emotions in a recognizable form
can sometimes make formal criticisms moot.
I thought about Dear Zachary a
few times with three films that screened at this year's Tribeca Film
Festival: TransFatty Lives, Thank You for Playing, and
Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, the last of which opens today in
select cities and will play on HBO later this year. All three are
epistolary docs in their own way, and they're all types of love
letters.
TransFatty Lives is probably the
most epistolary of these epistolary docs since it's structured as a
letter via voiceover. But it's more of a letter by way of Tarnation,
Jonathan Caouette's memorable psychological collage. TransFatty
Lives centers on director Patrick O'Brien and his fight against ALS. He was once a DJ an NYC scenester, but those days come to an end in
his twenties when he's diagnosed with the Lou Gehrig's Disease. We watch his
heartbreaking decline. It comes so rapidly. He loses the use of his
legs, he loses the use of his voice, and yet he continues to
chronicle the ups and downs of his struggle and makes art with the
help of his friends. TransFatty Lives is a love
letter to Patrick's son, a child who may never get to know his own father, but
this moving artistic document might make that possible.
It takes a
brief moment to understand the form of TransFatty Lives—the collage love letter, or a
memoir as love letter, or both—but its hook is its vulnerability and determination to chronicle. While Patrick is short of breath, losing his ability
to breath unassisted, he asks his sister to document the moment. She
cries uncontrollably into the camcorder as Patrick commands her to
film herself, not him, and to keep recording this moment. He's
directing to his dying breath. His body might go, but his mind is
still there, and the mind says his art must live.
Thank You for Playing (
which
I reviewed over at Flixist the other day) is another kind of love
letter to a son. Directors David Osit and Malika Zouhali-Worrall focus on indie developer Ryan Green's videogame
That Dragon, Cancer.
Ryan's son Joel was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer while still
a baby, and the videogame recreates the experience of losing a child.
Like
TransFatty Lives, this is a heartbreaking document of
decline and also a love letter to a son. Interestingly,
Thank You
for Playing crosses two documentary modes—the making-of and the
epistolary doc—and the game
That Dragon, Cancer is a sort of
love letter itself. Ryan and his wife Amy are trying their hardest to
write to a child they'll never get to know, but to know that he was
there and that they loved him is all that matters. They've written a message in a bottle.
Brett Morgen's Kurt Cobain: Montage
of Heck is a love letter to a daughter, Frances Bean Cobain; and
like TransFatty Lives and Tarnation, it's a collage.
Morgen's approach combines Kurt Cobain's home recordings, notebooks,
home movies from childhood, home video while strung out on heroin,
concert footage, photos, talking head interviews, animation, demos,
doodles, and anything available, as if joining all the stuff of a
life could somehow recreate a person. When the film is at
its best, it's like one of Robert Rauschenberg's paintings: the messiness reveals patterns, purpose, and moments of
emotional, aesthetic, and intellectual clarity. In one of the most spellbinding sequences in Montage of Heck, a young Kurt Cobain recounts his
first suicide attempt, which is preceded by an ugly moment of teenage
cruelty and adolescent desperation. It's recreated in animation, accompanied by a string quartet
rendition of "Smells Like Teen Spirit"; it's masterful.
Morgen loses his way in the middle of
his Montage, however, once the focus of the film turns to the
success of Nevermind, the grind of touring, and how much
Cobain hates being interviewed. The structure becomes repetitive,
whereas everything that comes before and after this middle portion of
the film feels revelatory and propulsive. There's a more succinct
summation of the In Utero days, and Montage feels like it
treads water for roughly 20 minutes. Morgen also reuses multiple
Nirvana songs rather than reserving that distinction for just one
song. Montage of Heck could have been structured a bit better
had Morgen considered a corresponding Mix-Tape of Heck. Yet the
candor when the film works shows the good and bad of Kurt Cobain, and
Morgen, with the cooperation of Courtney Love, has made a solid
archival love letter.
There's an air of sadness to all of
these epistolary documentaries because they are just a single letter rather than an exchange of multiple letters. They're made by parents or
on the behalf of parents, and often to children who either can't
respond or can never get to know their respective correspondents. If love letters
are meant bring us closer, these epistolary docs may be a profound
reminder of the gulf between people who love each other, and how desperately we want to
make sense of a person's absence by creating something as a bridge.
