SUBJECT - Mark Reviews Movies

Subject, Greenwich Entertainment

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | November 2, 2023

A fictional movie ends, and that's the end of the story. A documentary ends, and the lives of the people within it continue. How often do we really consider that fact or, more importantly to Subject, the consequences of what it means to have one's life put on full display for an audience?

Those are the main questions of directors Camilla Hall and Jennifer Tiexiera's own documentary, which interviews people featured in some of the more well-known and popular documentaries of the past several decades. This is much more than simply catching up with the lives of people we might be curious about after seeing their stories unfold in front of us on a screen. It's about what has happened to them as a direct result of being seen and even judged by others by way of a story told through a filmmaker's lens.

The bigger questions, then, are about the ethical responsibilities a filmmaker has to their subject before, during, and even after the making of a documentary. For that, Hall and Tiexiera also interview fellow filmmakers (but not, intentionally and pointedly, the directors who made the movies being used as case studies), film professors and historians, and psychologists. As one might expect, the answers are varied and often contradictory, as all queries of morality and ethics will inevitably become.

One thing's for sure, though: There's something—and probably many things—fundamentally wrong with the art, industry, and business of documentary filmmaking at the moment. Much of that is how commercialized it has become, with television networks and streaming services churning them out with regularity and high frequency—because they're relatively inexpensive to make and ensure that there's always new "content" for an audience every week.

A lot of it, too, is that it's much easier to find, learn about, and keep up with the subjects of a documentary in the era of the internet. They become celebrities of sorts, even if they didn't ask for it, such as with Margaret Ratliff, who appeared in the three-part documentary series "The Staircase"—about the legal process of her father Michael Peterson and the death of his second wife. It was originally an independent production out of France, but once Netflix bought the rights to the original series and two follow-up movies, the project gained new life and brought much more attention, scrutiny, and judgment to her own.

Ratliff is a key player in this film, and her story—of having to be reminded over and over again of the gruesome death of her stepmother, the allegations and trials of her father, and the sheer pressure of having her experiences be captured by a film crew—is the most damning one here. Yes, Ratliff says, she agreed to be a part of the documentary project, but is consent made under such unthinkable circumstances really the right kind to obtain? How could her younger self know that this little foreign production would become a worldwide phenomenon years later, with the non-fiction series even becoming the inspiration for a television miniseries dramatization after that?

Some slightly or much more positive stories, though, exist within this film, too, but even those bring about a series of thoughts and questions about the impact having one's life on full public display can have on a person. Some of those are obvious, such as the case of Ahmed Hassan, a cinematographer and key figure of The Square, an in-the-moment account of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. Hassan wanted to be there, wanted to capture what was happening, and wanted the world to see it, both as a matter of capturing history and as a way to inspire others to protest oppressive governments.

The results are apparent, including inspiring the protests and revolt in Ukraine a couple years later—as well as, in a case of art imitating life imitating art, director Evgeny Afineevsky to make a similar non-fiction account of the unrest and uprising. The Square may have been a vital film and an industry success, but what has it and its widespread notability done for and to his life?

Because of social media, the Egyptian government now knows of him and his activities, leading him to indefinite self-exile. As for his own filmmaking career, the fame of the film which he helped to make certainly hasn't transferred to his own professional ambitions.

Even the most positive case studies here—Arthur Agee from Hoop Dreams, Makunda Angulo from The Wolfpack, and Jesse Friedman from Capturing the Friedmans, with the last one resulting in the man being released from prison because of the documentary's popularity—come with some caveats. Should subjects be paid, as Agee was after the film became an unexpected sensation, or does a financial benefit alter the veracity of a documentary?

Angulo may have become a bit of a celebrity, while his mother was able to see herself as a strong survivor of abuse after watching the movie, but how defined by that documentary have their lives become? That's the central question for Friedman, who seems to have his life in order after a lengthy and complex series of legal proceedings (If there's a shortcoming here, it's that the filmmakers seem to expect a thorough knowledge of the sometimes decades-old documentaries being examined). Some last-minute revelations let us know that's not the case.

It may never be so for some of these people, not only because of what they experienced, but also because those experiences have become public knowledge, colored by the perspective of a filmmaker, and, in some ways, a form of voyeuristic entertainment. On a very personal level, Subject encourages us to consider, re-consider, and constantly interrogate how and why documentaries are made.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products