The proliferation of documentaries on streaming services makes it difficult to choose what to watch. Each month, we’ll choose three nonfiction films — classics, overlooked recent docs and more — that will reward your time.
‘Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974’ (1974)
Stream it on the Criterion Channel.
Kazuo Hara is best-known for “The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On” (1987), a study of madness that counts Errol Morris and Werner Herzog among its adherents. But “Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974,” an eyebrow-raising exercise in oversharing that Hara made the previous decade, warrants a look of its own. When Miyuki Takeda, the woman with whom Hara had lived for three years and had a baby son with, decamped for Okinawa, the documentarian decided that the only way to stay connected to her was to make a film. From what we see in the resulting feature, she was happy to oblige. Among other things, Takeda says she needs the courage to have another child on her own. And she wants Hara to film the birth.
“Extreme Private Eros” is the sort of documentary that cannot help but take her up on that offer, although Hara expresses regret, in voice-over, that an eight-minute take during the delivery sequence is out of focus. (It’s still the film’s pièce de résistance.) That’s just scratching the surface of things you won’t believe you’re seeing in a documentary. When Hara arrives in Okinawa, he finds Takeda living with a woman and quickly realizes that his presence in their apartment is causing them to argue. The prospect of sex with a woman, Takeda explains to him, is different from sex with him, with whom it was “a nice way to finish a fight.” Sachiko Kobayashi, who records sound for Hara, is revealed to be pregnant by him, which causes tension with Takeda. When Takeda tires of Okinawa, she distributes pamphlets expressing her feelings about the place, which, we understand, are less than complimentary. And the birth sequence turns out to be the first of two.
You might question what everyone involved was thinking when they made “Extreme Private Eros,” but their lack of inhibitions has yielded a film like no other.
‘The Missing Picture’ (2014)
Stream it on the Criterion Channel and Kanopy. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play and Vudu.
“I know the Khmer Rouge photographed executions,” says the narrator of “The Missing Picture,” reciting the words of the writer-director, Rithy Panh. “Why? For proof? To complete a report? What man having photographed this scene would not want it to go missing?”
Part of the central notion in “The Missing Picture” is that much of Cambodians’ suffering under the Khmer Rouge in fact went unphotographed — but images of Panh’s parents, who both died during that period, remain vivid in the filmmaker’s mind. To show what has gone missing, Panh depicts his memories using clay figurines. The figurines are not, for the most part, made to move with stop-motion animation. Instead, they are hauntingly still, or perhaps gently set in place or turned, as if Panh wanted to keep the tableaus frozen in time. The camera pans and tracks around the figures, which are painted and carved in highly expressive ways. When hunger becomes a weapon of the regime, you can see it in the dolls’ faces.
Panh, whose voice-over is read by Jean-Baptiste Phou in the English-language version, shares his memories of developing a love for movies before the Khmer Rouge took power, thanks in part to a neighbor who was a director. After he and his family are exiled from Phnom Penh, he recalls the horrors of the regime: drinking mud (“The buffalo watch us: How odd these humans are to drink our water”) and eating rats and insects; seeing a 9-year-old denounce his mother for picking mangos; living for weeks in a Khmer Rouge hospital, where medicine was stored in Coca-Cola bottles (conventional medicine having been banned by the authorities). Somehow, the Khmer Rouge leaders never seemed to starve with them, despite their promise of equality. When there is a rainstorm, the clay figures themselves are drenched in water. The haunting unreality of the figures somehow makes Panh’s recollections more heightened and present; their lifelessness, paradoxically, brings history to life.
‘17 Blocks’ (2019)
Stream it on Paramount+.
This documentary from Davy Rothbart follows 20 years in the life of a struggling family in Washington, D.C., who collaborated with the director to make the film and shot much of the footage themselves. The matriarch, Cheryl Sanford, largely raised her two sons, Akil and Emmanuel, and daughter, Denice, as a single mother. Viewed one way, “17 Blocks” — which was shown at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival — is about the downstream effects of parents’ and siblings’ choices for their loved ones.
Cheryl is open about her experiences with addiction. (She says drugs caused her to miss Emmanuel’s high school graduation.) Akil, known as Smurf, likewise discusses his own experiences with drugs and with dealing; the movie builds to a suspenseful climax in which a judge will decide how leniently to treat him during a period when he seems to be getting his life in order. Emmanuel’s girlfriend, Carmen, becomes an important part of the family’s world. There are also scenes that can’t be described without unfairly revealing what happened to the family over the years — but they are heartbreaking. In one, a family member scrubs splattered blood from a hallway while a cat meows on the bloodstained floor and a Beyoncé song plays in the background. Was there really no one else who could assist with this grim task?
This documentary is yet another illustration of how showing the passing of time is a task to which cinema is well-tailored. We get to watch as these subjects grow older and see their decisions reverberate over the years. And whether it’s through Akil’s getting clean or Denice’s training for a special public-safety job, “17 Blocks” has a hopeful trajectory. Part of its message is that, no matter what tragedies they have lived through, the Sanford-Durants have never lost the capacity to reinvent themselves.
