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328 21 family films You’re wasting our time! I was in the army. Got married. I raised a family, worked hard, had my own business, that’s all. That’s nothing to make a picture about! It’s ridiculous !—Oscar Berliner to Alan Berliner, Nobody’s Business Personal memoirs are always difficult. After all, if there is honest revelation someone always gets hurt.—Lilly Rivlin, commenting on Gimme a Kiss In 1996 an unknown middle-aged schoolteacher called Frank McCourt published his autobiography. The book told of Frank’s povertystricken childhood in Limerick, in western Ireland. Though many of the related incidents were extremely tragic, McCourt recounted them in an ironic, humor-filled prose that quickly took Angela’s Ashes to the top of the best-seller list, where it remained for 117 weeks. The message , not a new one, was clear to the publishers. The drama of family relations, if well told and if able to touch some universal chord in the reader, could well find a very broad audience. Unfortunately, this message has been absorbed to a much lesser extent in film. Today the family feature film in Hollywood has been relegated to the sidelines, allowing the action comic book to handle Family Films 329 the main plays. Nevertheless, here and there, the absolutely intriguing family drama creeps through to the main screen in films such as Ordinary People, Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage, The Celebration from Denmark, and Mike Leigh’s Secrets and Lies. In contrast to feature films, the drama of family relations—the film that resurrects, analyzes, dissects, and probes family history and interaction—has become one of the main strands of documentary film. But then family film itself is just one example of the growing attention to what one can call the new personal film. This emphasis on the personal in documentary is a comparatively recent phenomenon, dating from the seventies onward. It’s a revolution due to many causes, not the least being the influence of new film schools, the popularity of cinema verité, the cheapening of film and video equipment, and a deeper social probing by young independent filmmakers. The personal documentary in fact reaches out much wider than family and embraces films on women, the Holocaust, gay and lesbian relationships, problems of minorities, and the AIDS phenomenon. Obviously the categories intermingle and overlap. For the purpose of this book, however, and because of limitations of space, I thought I would merely note down a few observations about the making of family films. For simplicity’s sake, family films can be divided into two groups. First come the family films made by third-party observers. Here I am thinking of films like Allan King’s A Married Couple, Fahimeh’s Story by Faramarz K-Rahber, series like Craig Gilbert’s An American Family, and Bill Jersey’s Six American Families. Most of these films are done or have been done in cinema verité style, and I discussed their genre problems earlier. The second group of films is what I would call insider films. They are revelation documentaries, often concerned with roots and origins, and their creative problems, for a variety of reasons, tend to be more complex than those in films made by outsiders. The insider projects can themselves be seen to split in two—the diary film and the history-cum-analysis film. Examples of the first include Ed Pincus’s Diaries, Alfred Guzzetti’s Family Portrait Sitting, and Jonas Mekas’s Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania. What characterizes them is again the use of verité to follow ongoing action and an accumulation of detail over time, which is presented but not usually analyzed, though Guzzetti’s film is an exception. In short you go, you shoot, you question, and you edit. And hopefully meaning emerges. The second and larger group of insider films includes classics like Amalie Rothschild’s Nana, Mom and Me, Martha Coolidge’s An Old Special Cases 330 Fashioned Woman, Maxi Cohen’s Joe and Maxi, Ira Wohl’s Best Boy, Marlon Riggs’s Tongues Untied, Su Friedrich’s The Ties That Bind, Michelle Citron’s Daughter Rite, and Martin Scorsese’s Italian American. Among the newer films in this group and quite outstanding are Sami Saif’s Family, Nathaniel Kahn’s My Architect, Lilly Rivlin’s Gimme a Kiss, Steve Thomas’s Least Said Soonest Mended, Alan Berliner’s Nobody’s Business, Deann Borshay Liem’s First Person Plural, and Jan Krawitz’s...

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