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Matinee Madness at DOC NYC!

Published on November 17, 2010

By Ariana Costakes

The penultimate day of DOC NYC at the IFC Center yielded a considerable crowd for a Monday afternoon. Matinees though they were, the two featured films were decidedly not for the kiddies (though one dad did inexplicably bring his young child).

An injured Danish soldier

The intensely graphic Armadillo brings back to attention the forgotten Afghan war, from the perspective of Danish “peacekeeping” troops at the Armadillo army base in Helmand Province. Spanning the young soldiers’ six-month tours of duty, the film is alternately long and grueling, then bloody and chaotic during sparse moments of actual combat.

While embedded with the Danish platoon, director Janus Metz is privy to a combat incident that is leaked to the Danish press, provoking outrage throughout Europe. After a firefight with Taliban militia, the Danish soldiers are shown prying weapons from the grisly dead. Back home, rumors soon circulate that soldiers executed the wounded, piled up the bodies and posed with them for photographs. Faced with criminal charges, the troops now deny the things they boasted of having done.

Metz’s film neither confirms nor denies the accusations, nor does it have a necessarily pro or anti war stance. It certainly disproves the assumption that Danish troops merely “keep the peace” in Afghanistan. During their homecoming parade back in Denmark, many troops are pushed along in wheelchairs. Still others carry framed photos of the dead.

In a question-and-answer session after the screening (throughout which the afore-mentioned child whined, possibly traumatized), Metz said it was difficult to distance himself from the soldiers in order to achieve an observational perspective. He certainly neither glorifies nor vilifies his subjects, leaving the combat incident—as well as the Danish presence in Afghanistan in general—open to interpretation. After the premiere the previous Thursday, Metz defended the film’s ambiguity with respect to the controversial tactics of the Danish platoon.

“Obviously I feel that my meeting with that situation was very real and I have tried […] to get as close to that reality as possible but I think reality is an extremely complicated issue,” he said. “I don’t think it’s just something objectively out there that we can point a camera to. […] I think there’s more to it than that.”

Foreman at work

Speaking of controversy and abstract interpretations of reality, the second Monday matinee profiled playwright and director Richard Foreman. How does one describe the theatrical works of this chronically misunderstood iconoclast? Can mere words do justice to the mind-bending experience of his visceral, outlandish performance pieces? Audience members—if they make it through his shows—exit his Ontological-Hysteric Theater speechless and with rapt expressions. Maybe it’s best to leave the narrative to the director himself, his contemporaries and his former and current protégés.

Ryan Kerrison’s mindFLUX is an endearing portrait of the renegade playwright in a series of interviews, animation and performance footage from the director’s own vault.

Scenes from Foreman’s “Idiot Savant”

Foreman was controversial even among the avant-garde of the 1960s SoHo arts movement. In the film, theater pioneers like James Cromwell and F. Murray Abraham express their initial frustration with Foreman’s seemingly fickle direction but later admit they knew they were part of something seminal. Actor T. Ryder Smith speaks of his anxiety leading up to his first audition with the director in the kitchen of his fabled Wooster Street apartment. Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks discusses Foreman’s influence on the early stages of her art. Witnesses describe how the nightmarish sets, disjointed dialog, booming voiceovers and manic scores came together into what was not just a new genre of theater, but a new kind of sensory experience.

mindFLUX is a lighthearted and hilarious celebration of Richard Foreman’s life and works. The consensus among its subjects is that a Foreman play is much like a first psychotropic experience; whether disturbing or elating, it heightens the senses and dispels the fog of monotony. The film ends with a message to contemporary artists struggling to produce in an information-age somewhat inhospitable to creative expression: “The world, in fact, waits and is hungry for your uniqueness. The ‘you’ that is like no one else in the world.”

DOC NYC’s lineup was indeed an homage to the power of the creative process, with a vast range of subjects, formats and styles. Its content was as diverse as New York City itself and provided the chance for lesser-known filmmakers to make their debut in the city that never sleeps. It was a privilege to attend this fun and eclectic documentary festival.

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