This year’s edition of the Sundance Film Festival was, like last year’s, online. The complete program was available to me at home, and the best movies that I saw have been heartening. The pandemic hasn’t inhibited independent filmmaking as grievously as I feared it might. The decline in theatrical viewing for most movies may have a negative effect on the profitability of independents—and therefore on the ability to release them (though, in truth, theatrical releases were already dwindling before the pandemic). But the art of independent filmmaking is thriving.
Over the course of a recent batch of short films and a featurette, the writer and director Ricky D’Ambrose has invented a personal, instantly recognizable method and style of cinematic drama. By building stories from documentary-like observational tableaux featuring authoritative voice-overs and faux documents (such as fictional newspaper and magazine articles), he turns fiction into a variety of nonfiction. In his new film, “The Cathedral,” he takes the approach to further extremes of intellect and emotion. He presents an autobiographical drama—a fictionalized version of his own childhood and adolescence, focussed on family conflicts—by way of stark, quasi-factual cinematic documentation that is also connected, via TV news accounts, to major events in modern history, from Operation Desert Storm and the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center to the Iraq War and the 2004 Presidential campaign.
D’Ambrose’s protagonist and stand-in, Jesse Damrosch, born in 1987 (like D’Ambrose), has a rich backstory—or, rather, a deep foundation—that precedes him. The story carries Jesse from preschool to his first year of college. (Jesse is played, at different ages, by about half a dozen different actors; his parents are played by Monica Barbaro and Brian d’Arcy James.) Yet the film launches Jesse’s inner life even before his birth: with his Uncle Joseph’s death, from AIDS, in 1985, and the family’s long-standing lies on the subject; with the money matters that trouble his parents even on their wedding day; and with his mother’s obscure estrangement from her sister, a fracture that ominously courses through the film like the San Andreas Fault.
Along with the fierce interpersonal battles that mark Jesse’s life—including his parents’ divorce, his mother’s remarriage, and the shuttling of his great-grandmother from relative to relative—D’Ambrose dramatizes, with a stunningly simple yet daring method, Jesse’s aesthetic education. The sharpening of the child’s perceptions and the refinement of his pleasures are developed by documentary-like methods, with an exquisite emphasis on the hidden sublimity of daily life in a nondescript suburb. Closeups on paper plates and leftover cake from a three-year-old’s birthday party, the electronic voice of a phonics tape, the red fire bell on a classroom wall, the sentimental tones of a TV commercial, the typeface on a road map, the dyeing of Easter eggs, his mother polishing her nails on a brightly-lit table—all contribute to Jesse’s precocious passion for photography, which is exemplified in his gaze out the window to houses and trees, his view of sunlight and shadow on floors and furniture. “The Cathedral” is a fervent memory piece, filled with haunting images of Jesse’s visions. Amazingly, these scenes don’t have the subjective feel of point-of-view shots; rather, they render memory as fact and present inner experience as an objective reality. This ardent view of a young man’s artistic education is reminiscent of Terence Davies’s autobiographical films “Distant Voices, Still Lives” and “The Long Day Closes.” D’Ambrose’s exceptional style and technique evoke his equally original concept of the very nature of personality and character—and of the cinema itself.
In “Framing Agnes,” Chase Joynt, the co-director of “No Ordinary Man” (one of the best films of 2021), goes even further with that movie’s mode of the constructed documentary. “Framing Agnes” is a film of quiet but decisive radicality that builds its own genesis and production into it. It’s a documentary based on archival footage that doesn’t exist and that Joynt therefore creates. In displaying the production of that substitute for the nonexistent footage, he also centers the gap in historical consciousness that its nonexistence suggests. “Framing Agnes” draws on a long-hidden U.C.L.A. archive of interviews with trans people, conducted half a century or more ago—and on a remarkable backstory, of the director’s research (with the sociologist Kristen Schilt) that brought those interviews to light. The title character (who is also dramatized) is a trans woman who, in the nineteen-fifties, went to the university seeking gender-confirmation surgery, taking part in a gender study under the false pretext that she was born intersex. Years later, Agnes admitted the ruse to a psychiatrist on the project, in the course of which interviews with at least eight other trans people were also recorded. Joynt found the unpublished transcripts of eight of those interviews and turned them into scripts that are performed by Joynt, as the interviewer, and trans actors, as the interviewees, in the period-apt format of a highbrow, bare-set talk show (in the style of David Susskind’s long-running broadcast series).
The performances of the transcripts bring vividly to the screen the burdens borne by trans people of even the modern past: the silences and the sacrifices, the obsessive stage-managing and taut performances of their lives—on which their safety depended. Joynt and the rest of the cast (Angelica Ross, Jen Richards, Zackary Drucker, Silas Howard, Max Wolf Valerio, and Stephen Ira) also appear as themselves, in authentic documentary sequences in which they reflect on the reënacted interviews both from the outside, as readers and viewers of them, and from the inside, on the basis of the emotional effect of performing them. The historian Jules Gill-Peterson also brings insightful and far-reaching attention to the details and implications of the filmed transcripts and the wider context in which the original interviews were conducted. The movie’s analysis of the experience of trans lives—set in the light of matters of race, class, and family dynamics—extends to the essence of self-presentation in social life, the psychological stakes of self-identification, and the existential implications of the very concept of identity.
The long-suppressed bearing of witness also gets a notable cinematic incarnation in Margaret Brown’s documentary “Descendant.” It’s centered on residents of the Africatown neighborhood in Mobile, Alabama, who are the descendants of Africans brought as captives on the Clotilda, in 1860, the last known ship to transport enslaved people to the United States. The importation of enslaved people had been outlawed in 1808. As a result, the captain of the Clotilda, after its human cargo was discharged, burned and sank the vessel; “Descendant” documents the effort to find its remnants. But the film does much more—indeed, it teems with effort, incident, and memory. Its core of testimony is that of Cudjo Lewis, an Africatown resident and one of the last survivors of the Clotilda, whose 1927 interviews with Zora Neale Hurston are the basis of her book “Barracoon,” which went unpublished until 2018.
Brown interviews current residents of Africatown, who describe and display their efforts to sustain the memories and legacies of the Clotilda’s survivors—which had been kept in silence enforced by the terror of the Jim Crow era, when white residents wanted to suppress knowledge of the crime. The film traces the economic oppressions and health injustices imposed on Africatown’s residents through the encroachment on its land by major business interests and the legalized pollution of its environment for the benefit of manufacturers, while the residents of Africatown have endured an extraordinarily high incidence of cancer. Moreover, it charts the ongoing ownership of much of the area by the white descendants of Timothy Meaher, who owned the Clotilda. Brown also films descendants’ meetings with the maritime archeologists who were searching for what remained of the Clotilda as well as with other documentarians, from National Geographic, who were intending to finance and film the expedition. (One of them informs the gathered residents of his desire to tell their story, with all the doubtless unintended ironies of appropriation that it entails.) With the anticipation of the Clotilda’s discovery, residents also consider the prospect of its remains becoming the centerpiece of a museum—which the town’s mayor and other officials appear eager to develop. One of the most moving moments in the film comes when one of the descendants, contemplating the development of such an institution, goes to Montgomery to visit the city’s monument to victims of lynchings, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice and, observing crowds of white visitors, expresses concern that the institution, far from being a spark to their action on behalf of racial justice, risks serving as mere “entertainment.”
The film’s form isn’t quite up to the high moment of its substance or to the devoted involvement of its participants from Africatown. “Descendant” is somewhat inhibited by its impersonal professionalism: Brown, a white filmmaker from Mobile, elides the personal element—her connection to the subject and the area’s residents, the relationships on which the film depends. Nonetheless, the overwhelming force of history and the pressure of ongoing injustices energize her filming; the movie delivers an emotionally jangled, collage-like rush of purpose and urgency.
