AN UNSUNG LEGEND: ETHAN HAWKE'S "BLAZE"

 

If you have the chance to see Ethan Hawkes’ beautiful new film “Blaze” in the theater, make the effort. The story recounts the life of Texas singer/songwriter Blaze Foley, based on his wife Sybil Rosen’s memoir “Living in the Woods in a Tree: Remembering Blaze.” Blaze (born Michael David Fuller) grew up in San Antonio, Texas, and was a country singer of the Texas outlaw music movement, made familiar by the better-known singer/songwriters Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard – and Kris Kristofferson, who features here as Blaze’s father, now reduced by age to a shell of his former, abusive self.

Sybil was Blaze’s lover, muse, and financial and emotional support, and she is embodied in a profoundly poignant performance by actress Alia Shawkat. Indeed, every performance in “Blaze” quivers with internal light, doubly informed by sadness and joy. (This film makes one despair that the Academy Awards are an exercise in Hollywood brand names, an exercise that will not even consider deeply felt performances like these.) “Blaze,” in addition to being driven by the narrative lyricism of Blaze Foley’s songs, is a celebration of cinematic poeticism realized by cinematographer Steve Cosens.

“Blaze” weaves its story by circling back on itself, around and around – from past to present to future and back again: in a treehouse with Sybil; on the musicians’ friend’s ramshackle country porch, where Blaze will die; in the radio studio, where an interviewer (Ethan Hawke) talks with fellow musicians Townes Van Zandt and Zee about Blaze’s life; in The Outhouse bar, heavy with the scent of stale beer and cigarette smoke, where Blaze performs for an afternoon before heading back to that porch one last time. The characters are like the singers in a round, and the singers are raconteurs, telling stories of various stripes – tall tale to shaggy dog to testament.

In the interview passages in the radio studio, Townes weaves wild tales (fantastically spun by singer/songwriter Charlie Sexton), which Blaze’s long-time friend and associate Zee attempts to temper with corrective interjections. (Zee may be based on singer/songwriter Guy Schwartz – or on an amalgam of other musicians Blaze worked with – and is played with the patience of a long-suffering friend by Josh Hamilton.) The film tells Blaze’s story through others’ eyes. Townes limns the myth; Zee rights the record; but at its core, “Blaze” is Sybil’s deeply personal love story, about which Townes and Zee seem scarcely aware.

This circling back and around is present in other ways in the film. Ben Dickey, who plays the title role, is not a trained actor but a Louisiana-based singer/songwriter. (Though the story is predominately set in Texas, filming primarily took place in East Feliciana, Louisiana.) In the Q&A after San Antonio’s opening showing of the film, Dickey and Hawke talked about the centrality of the music to the story. As a non-actor, Dickey explained that he worked into the role through Blaze’s songs, learning them all. Hawke observed that “It’s like doing Shakespeare. If you say the words right, you’ll be good. It’s like an incantation. Ben was doing something like the same with Blaze’s words and his songs.” Hawke went on to emphasize why he wanted to use musicians to play musicians: “because they could smell out the phoniness.”

When Sybil and Blaze move to Austin to further Blaze’s career, they meet Marsha, Blaze’s sister, at their father’s nursing home. Kris Kristofferson, as Blaze’s father, is a revelation, and, Dickey noted, having Kristofferson on the set was for him “a history lesson.” Kristofferson has only two lines: the father asks each visitor in turn, “Got any cigarettes?” Then, after Blaze and Marsha sing one of the gospel songs they grew up performing as The Singing Fuller Family, their father softly rasps, “Beautiful.” Alynda Lee Segarra (who formed the Indie rock band Hurray for the Riff Raff in New Orleans in 2007) infuses Marsha with sympathy and a quiet – we sense hard-earned – inner strength. This little interlude, this brief but affecting reunion, tells us volumes about the family dynamic – and ends on a wonderfully, blackly comic twist.

As we meet Blaze’s family, so we meet Sybil’s Jewish parents, in a, to say the least, awkward visit meant to introduce them to Blaze. In addition to adapting her memoir to the screen with Hawke, Sybil Rosen herself plays her mother in the film. Both Hawke and Dickey could not emphasize enough the value of her presence on the set. “What she wanted,” said Dickey, “was for us to take care of the music,” and she, as a professional actress, wisely told Dickey, “You don’t need to imitate Blaze. You just have to be Blaze.”

The film is also graced by the appearance of Steve Zahn, Sam Rockwell, and . . . Richard Linklater (speaking of circling and weaving). They play a trio of wildcatters looking for a way to spend their money, so take a bet on the musicians to record a hit record on the label they’ve called Zephyr Records. It is not a spoiler in the context of these self-destructive musicians to say it is an opportunity they squander. Yet this is part of philosophy according to myth. The record label cowboys walk into the ballroom where the musicians have drunk the night away and failed to show up at the recording session. Townes mocks their money and their methods. “You drill holes in the ground and hope to get lucky? See all this. These are our experts. We have this down to a science.” At one point he tells the radio interviewer, “If you’re going to write a song, everyone’s going to tell you, you have to live that. That’s wrong. You have to die a little.”

In their treehouse days – before the road, before Austin, before Chicago, before New York – Sybil, talking about her struggles learning the craft of acting, asks Blaze, “Where do you think confidence comes from?” “I think confidence is the consolation prize for knowing that you’re here. Knowing that you’re here is kind of a rarity for a human being.” And yet, reflecting on where all those songs come from, Blaze wonders, “Maybe from not living up to what I’m supposed to be.”

Throughout “Blaze,” I couldn’t help but think of Tim O’Brien’s brilliant Vietnam War novel, “The Things They Carried,” particularly the section entitled “How to Tell a True War Story.” The narrator explains:

“In a true war story, if there's a moral at all, it's like the thread that makes the cloth. You can't tease it out. You can't extract the meaning without unraveling the deeper meaning. And in the end, really, there's nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe ‘Oh.’ True war stories do not generalize. They do not indulge in abstraction or analysis.

“For example: War is hell. As a moral declaration the old truism seems perfectly true, and yet because it abstracts, because it generalizes, I can't believe it with my stomach. Nothing turns inside.

“It comes down to gut instinct. A true war story, if truly told, makes the stomach believe.”

Throughout all of their stories, Blaze and Sybil and Townes and Zee all understand that the stomach has to believe. Theirs (Blaze and Sybil’s, Blaze and Zee’s, Blaze and Townes’s) are love stories and, in their own way, war stories – war stories in which the battles are with inner demons, between that shining confidence Blaze intuits and its lack. Circling back to the radio interview again and again, Townes, the fabulist, tells one more outrageous fish story than the last, while Zee, the realist, looks on with growing exasperation. Remarking on the human fact of multiple points of view (think the three blind men and the elephant, or Orson Welles’s “Citizen Kane”), Hawke noted, “Zee is interested in the truth, and Townes is interested in the legend. They’re both true.” As Blaze tells Sybil, “I don’t want to be a star. I wants to be a legend.” “What’s the difference?” she asks. “Stars burn up. A legend lasts forever.” One might say, a legend evolves from gut instinct and it can’t be unraveled.

“Blaze” had a limited release in August, and an expanded release in September. DVD, Blu-ray and streaming dates are TBA.

Rob Robbins on Summer Movies' Inflection Point: A Guest Essay

 
My dear friend Rob Robbins and I watched these movies together. His commentary on them is far superior to what mine would have been (and more succinct). Here are his insights:

Clearly, we are all living in a distinct moment in American history. We are at an inflection point for everything from the devolution of the “American Dream” to the undermining of our constitutional democracy. As we suffer the daily blows of such heavy headlines, it is easy to miss the fact that we are also at a distinct moment in American film.

Film serves as a vehicle for everything from accurate self-reflection to dangerous self-delusion. But this summer we went from Oscar So White to a trio of unapologetically black films so powerful, audiences cannot contain their emotions. If you haven’t seen “Sorry to Bother You,” “BlacKkKlansman,” and “Blindspotting,” consider doing so a mandatory form of civic duty.

In doing so, you will hear the n-word more times than you thought possible. It comes in three different forms. In “Sorry to Bother You,” it arrives mostly as a cultural trope used to reduce people to a one-dimensional caricature.

In “BlacKkKlansman,” it is used mostly as a cultural artifact of an era in which its use was more casual than the modern-day use of the word “fuck.” But in “Blindspotting” it takes on a complex tangle of identity, crossing even skin color.

“Sorry to Bother You” blows your mind by simply becoming something you never expected. As it takes a severe turn into “Naked Lunch” mugwump territory, it shows how eerily close we are to stripping fellow Americans of their literal humanity.

“BlacKkKlansman” is a hard look in the mirror that forces you to see the nation’s failure to adequately mature as it relates to race relations. At the end, you feel as if we are only millimeters ahead of where we were in the 1970s. The movie tugs at your heart metaphorically through your tear ducts.

“Blindspotting” doesn’t tug at your heart in any sort of metaphorical way. Rather, it tangibly forces your heart to race. By the end of the movie, you should just count on literal heart palpitations.The movie is physically hard to watch. Although the simplest in plot, "Blindspotting" is by far the most complex emotionally. Despite taking years to get to screen, the events of the movie seem as if they could have happened yesterday.

"Sorry to Bother You" DVD and Blu-ray release date is set for October 23, 2018 and available on Digital HD from Amazon Video and iTunes on October 9, 2018.

"Blindspotting" DVD and Blu-ray release date is estimated for November 2018 and available on Digital HD from Amazon Video and iTunes is estimated for November 2018.

"BlacKkKlansman" DVD and Blu-ray release date is set for November 6, 2018 and available on Digital HD from Amazon Video and iTunes on October 23, 2018.

EXISTENTIALIST HORSERADISH: Paul Schrader’s World and “First Reformed”

“Faith is in its essence simply a matter of will…, to believe is to wish to believe, and to believe in God is, before and above all, to wish that there may be a God.” 

~~Miguel de Unamuno, “The Tragic Sense of Life,” 1912

“Let no one hope to find in contemplation an escape from conflict, from anguish or from doubt. On the contrary, the deep, inexpressible certitude of the contemplative experience awakens a tragic anguish and opens many questions in the depths of the heart like wounds that cannot stop bleeding. For every gain in deep certitude there is a corresponding growth of superficial ‘doubt.’ This doubt is by no means opposed to genuine faith, but it mercilessly examines and questions the spurious ‘faith’ of everyday life, the human faith which is nothing but the passive acceptance of conventional opinion. This false ‘faith’ which is what we often live by and which we even come to confuse with our ‘religion’ is subjected to inexorable questioning…. Hence, is it clear that genuine contemplation is incompatible with complacency and with smug acceptance of prejudiced opinions. It is not mere passive acquiescence in the status quo, as some would like to believe – for this would reduce it to the level of spiritual anesthesia.”

~~Thomas Merton, “New Seeds of Contemplation,” 1962

“And the nations were angry, and thy wrath is come…; that thou…shouldest destroy them which destroy the earth.” 

~~Revelation 11:18

In Paul Schrader’s 1976 interview included in George Stevens, Jr.’s “The Great Movie Makers: The Next Generation from the 1950s to Hollywood Today,” Schrader says, “One of the great things about being a movie critic [in the 1960s] was that criticism was part of the counterculture movement. …. That’s all gone now, and criticism has … been relegated to … a form of consumer guidance.”

The 1960s counterculture movement. A movement that rested on moral imperative. Is there any such overarching moral commitment today more than 50 years hence? No matter our political or sociological orientation, we all seem immersed in a monoculture, a monoculture of self-serving, self-righteous indignation with little sense of the common weal, a monoculture willing to sacrifice earthly, let alone spiritual, salvation for short-term gain — or just mindless escape.

“First Reformed” is writer/director Schrader’s fearless new film in which Schrader’s directorial authority and Ethan Hawke’s bold performance prove both artists are, in their collaboration, fundamentally confronting our times. “First Reformed” is the film of our moment. 

The relationship of “First Reformed" to “Taxi Driver,” Martin Scorsese’s 1976 film for which Schrader wrote the screenplay, has been much discussed and is, indeed, incontrovertible. "First Reformed" is a continuation of that narrative. The insomniac taxi driver Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) is a 26-year-old Vietnam vet who feels mired in the sordid mean streets of New York City. The Reverend Ernst Toller (Hawke) of “First Reformed” is a 46-year-old Calvinist minister who has lost his only child, a son, and is mired in an existentialist crisis of faith — a personal guilt that accrues over the course of the film into a sense of collective guilt for the rape of the planet.

Yet the comparison is limiting. First, as Schrader himself pointed out in an interview with Terry Gross for “Fresh Air,” “…Travis being a juvenile…is experiencing loneliness in a very narcissistic way, whereas Reverend Toller, as an older man, is feeling [loneliness] in an existential way. And so the expression [in each film] is different.” Schrader said in 1976, “[Travis] has very few convictions about anything except immorality. …. [H]e doesn’t have any real beliefs or strong theories….” By contrast, the Rev. Toller does nothing if not wrestle with belief. The comparison also fails to acknowledge the debt of “First Reformed” to Schrader’s screen adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis’s 1955 novel for Scorsese’s 1988 “The Last Temptation of Christ.”

Second, “First Reformed,” a magnum opus in the context of Schrader’s oeuvre, posits on some levels a rejection of the Calvinist Reformed tradition central to Schrader’s background, so it is important to understand the core Calvinist doctrines of predestination and election: i.e., though human beings have free agency to act in sin or in virtue, and have the capacity for goodness, they are, in Reformed theology, in bondage to sin. From eternity, God has chosen (elected) those sinners to whom he will grant mercy, and we cannot know the mind of God. This concept, that one cannot know the mind of God, becomes a leitmotif throughout “First Reformed,” an existentialist challenge for Toller and a toss-off excuse for everyone else, a way to shrug off responsibility for the most profound questions facing our present environmental crisis.

Schrader first explores Calvinist theology in “Hardcore” (1979), the five points of Calvinism being: 1) “total depravity” as a consequence of Adam and Eve’s fall into sin; 2) “unconditional election”; 3) “limited atonement,” in that atonement is intended for some, yet not all; 4) “irresistible grace,” an inward call which, when directed toward the elect, cannot be denied; and 5) “perseverance of the saints,” that those whom God elects will continue in faith into eternity. In later films, Schrader will confront this theology through a process that will upend Calvinism for, I contend, a position of philosophical existentialism. In an interview with Randall Colburn of consequencesofsound.net, Schrader says, “…I left Calvin in the way a bullet leaves a gun, because if you don’t leave with that much force, it’s going to bring you right back.” Yet eventually, “the circle is completed.”

Schrader’s influences for "First Reformed" are deep. He tells Colburn, “[Y]ou have the character from [Robert Bresson’s 1951] ‘Diary of a Country Priest,’ and you have a premise from [Ingmar Bergman’s 1963] ‘Winter Light,’ you have the [Andrei] Tarkovsky element, you have the [Carl Theodore] Dreyer element, and you have other films that are all involved, and then I didn’t realize I was working out in my head…the enormous way in which ‘Taxi Driver’ was filtering into here, that craziness.”

Schrader, like the iconic director for whom he has written a quartet of films, Martin Scorsese, is concerned with nothing less than salvation from a profoundly existentialist point of view. What is necessary to forge meaning in a conscientious human life? What is the requisite existentialist act we either undertake or renounce with consequences for existential meaning?

In “First Reformed,” Hawke’s Calvinist, the Reverend Ernst Toller, could not be more earnest nor could life have taken a greater toll. He comes from a line of military chaplains who have served out of twin commitments to church and country. He wrestles with the reality that he has lost his only son, whom he encouraged to serve in the Iraq war, a war he now believes “had no moral justification.” Subsequently, he has lost his marriage as well as his chaplaincy, and now finds himself shepherding a stagnating congregation of an historic parish that is little more than a tourist attraction now owned by a New Age mega-church, Abundant Life. The youth at Abundant Life make fun of First Reformed as the “souvenir shop.”

Like many Schrader protagonists, Toller will narrate his story in voice-over, in this instance, through the words he commits to a journal. Travis Bickle keeps a diary in “Taxi Driver,” as does John LeTour (Willem Dafoe) in “Light Sleeper,” a drug dealer who wants to get out.

Toller, in the crosshairs of twin personal crises, both physical and spiritual, has vowed to keep the journal for a year’s time, then destroy it. The journal “is a form of prayer,” he writes, a way to speak to a God from whom his crisis of faith has walled him off. Toller feels a deep affinity to Thomas Merton, the Catalan Trappist monk and author, and keeps one of Merton’s books at his bedside.

When Mary (Amanda Seyfried), whose husband is a reluctant member of Toller’s mere handful of parishioners, approaches Toller regarding concerns about her husband Michael’s (Philip Ettinger) estrangement, Toller’s initial response is to refer her to Abundant Life with its team of counselors, but she counters, “He feels it’s more a company than a church.”

Mary is pregnant, and Michael is an eco-warrior who believes it would be wrong to bring a child into the world of 2017, when most scientists long ago agreed global collapse will reach its apotheosis around 2050. Michael bemoans the fact that scientists warned us that significant action would have to be undertaken by 2015. “I thought things could change,” he laments. “I thought people would listen.” Michael confronts Toller: “How do you sanction bringing a little girl into the world, a child full of hopes and naive ideas, who grows up to be a young woman, who looks you in the eyes and asks, ‘How did you let this happen?’ ”

Toller answers, we must hold hope and despair in our minds simultaneously. “Courage,” says Toller, “is the answer to despair, not reason.” Michael persists, “Can God forgive us for what we’ve done to this world?” Toller, the Calvinist, continues, “We can’t know the mind of God.” This is the excuse everyone else will use in “First Reformed.” Only Toller imposes the existentialist qualification: “But we can choose a righteous life.” We can choose righteousness over selfishness and destruction, and if we cannot know the mind of God, we can at least ask for forgiveness and grace.

The preeminent existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, like other atheistic existentialists, did not affirm God’s existence. Yet Sartre posits that even if God were to exist, his existence would not change the fact that mankind is free and has a human responsibility to choose. The responsibility is not God’s, it is man’s, and this fact places us in a condition of anguish. Later in “First Reformed,” Toller will write, “Discernment intersects with the Christian life at every moment.” Discernment is a word that implies both the necessity of choice and responsibility — the cornerstones of the existentialist position.

Toller’s personal crisis of faith converges with his sincere concern for his flock. What is he — what are we — to do in the face of a ruination of which we are knowingly the cause? The question Michael has posed to Toller, “Will God forgive us?” ultimately becomes Toller’s.

The conversation takes place in a study of sorts adjacent to Mary and Michael’s living room. On the right side of the couch in the living room sits a prop one must bow to the set dressers for finding or to Schrader for inventing: a 1960s/‘70s-esque floor lamp, the lighting source of which is shaped as the one-dollar bill’s Eye of Providence, the all-seeing eye of God. (Michael was granted compassionate release from Fort Providence in Canada, because of Mary’s pregnancy, where he was serving for eco-protests.) The lamp also brings to mind the giant, disembodied eyes of T. J. Eckleburg’s billboard in the valley of ashes in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby,” which look down on the novel’s characters’ moral failures and represent America’s loss of spiritual values. How quaint that sounds today.

Toller’s benefactor and kindly nemesis is Joel Jeffers (Cedric Kyles, better known as Cedric the Entertainer), pastor of Abundant Life Church — which owns the historic First Reformed — who has reached out to provide Toller with employment out of pity. Names matter in this film and one cannot help but sense the affinity between Joel Jeffers and the ideology of a Joel Osteen-like prosperity ministry. Substitute “abundance” for “prosperity.” And yet, Jeffers seems to harbor genuine concern for Toller and counsels, “Even a pastor needs a pastor.”

At Jeffer’s suggestion, Toller attends a youth support group where a young woman takes her turn: “No one loves the Lord more than my father.” Her father has lost his job and has been unable to find another. She wants to know how this can be in the eyes of the Lord. When Toller tries to explain that Christ’s teachings make no correlation between godliness and prosperity, he is met with a young man’s offense at political correctness. “So Christians shouldn’t succeed. Christianity is for losers,” the young man angrily shoots back, along with a list of other grievances, including Muslim xenophobia.

To soothe Toller’s frustration about the young people, Jeffers commiserates: “They’re just frightened. They want certainty.” They are facing global warming, economic threats; they live in isolation, communicating on social media; they are fearful for their future. Jeffers goes on that as such, they will turn to a closed, even jihadist, mindset as a mode of self-preservation. “All we can do is guide by example.” To Toller’s ears, this is a guileless observation, as it is to Schrader.

In Colburn’s interview Schrader says, “When I was growing up on the west side of Grand Rapids [Michigan], I think we had six or seven churches. Now we have two, and then there’s Hillsong. One of the churches that I grew up going to now has lyrics on a flat screen, and it’s an evolution. It’s really become an entertainment-based religion, and I have a problem with that, because seeing a whole mass of people repeating the same actions, to me, is not that different from a football game or a political rally. It’s not about that quiet place where the holy resides; it’s about that buzz we get from being in a group and group logic and group think, which of course can be very dangerous.” Schrader makes the important distinction: the holy is meditative, not performative.

In his 1962 “An Introduction to Existentialism,” Robert G. Olson explains [emphasis mine]:
“The ordinary man believes he is most free when he is not obliged to choose or when circumstances clearly dictate which choice is best. The existentialist believes that man is most free when he recognizes he is obliged to choose. The ordinary man says that freedom is valuable because it leads to happiness, security, contentment. The existentialist says that freedom is valuable because through it man may realize his own dignity, and triumph over the unhappiness to which he is irrevocably condemned. The ordinary man tries to ignore the unpleasant facts of life, and if he is exposed to an ‘impossible situation’ where no choice would conceivably be a choice of happiness, he is without recourse. The existentialist refuses to ignore the unpleasant facts of life, and spends most [of his] time trying to find some technique by which to triumph over them.”

Schrader makes a number of fascinating directorial choices in “First Reformed.” One involves the cinematography (Alexander Dynan). The film is composed almost entirely of stationary shots. Movement is achieved through actors moving in and out of shots and through editing. The exceptions are few — the long opening shot as the camera dollies toward the church, the short dolly to the right at a crucial point in front of Mary and Michael’s house, and a zoom on Toller's glass of whiskey and Pepto-Bismol. (We’ve seen this concoction before, poured by detectives in noir films where it carries a wee bit of levity. Here it is dead serious.)

There are, in addition, a minimum of dolly shots: the bare boughs of trees as Mary and Toller bicycle through a park; the levitation scene; the daytime and nighttime streetscapes to and from the factory owned by the Koch-like industrialist Edward Balq (Michael Gaston) — should we balk at his corporate power? — whose largesse, ironically, has kept First Reformed from becoming a parking lot; and the final scene. Even these lyrical moments give the impression that the camera sits still as what it is positioned to record moves by, as if ordained.

Another is the structure of the score, which initially seems will consist exclusively of the hymns performed by the Abundant Life choristers (hymns whose naïve words betray their beauty), until, well into the film, Lustmord’s synthesizer, with its dark ambient vibrations, starts to seep in as a reflection of the maelstrom building in Toller’s psyche.

Additionally, the geography of the bare little parsonage where Toller lives is more central to the narrative than the church structure itself. Its main or living room is used only twice in the film, for the levitation scene and the final sequence — in both instances, for spiritual, one might even say, transcendent moments.

After “First Reformed” begins with, as noted above, Toller’s voice-over diary, which is intercut with one of Toller’s soliloquist sermons, the first words of actual dialogue in the first full scene of the film involve First Reformed’s Elder (Bill Hoag) asking Toller about a leak in one of the church’s toilets. As in “The Last Temptation of Christ,” the fact of the flesh is crucial. Just as the plumbing at First Reformed is failing, so we will discover, Toller’s mortal plumbing is breaking down as well.

Toller’s contemplative (and drinking) processes take place in the sparse bedroom, situated between the kitchen and the toilet. The number of scenes that take place in the toilet is striking. With its peeling plaster and single stark light, the room speaks to Toller’s somatic being. Toller wrestles with soul in the bedroom; he wrestles with viscera in the toilet — and, by extension, mortality, literally with his blood and guts. He pisses blood; plunges the clogged plumbing; vomits into the bowl; and only a few scenes on, looks into a mirror reflection of his bleeding gums. The toilet is the metaphor, not only for Toller’s clogged corporeal body, but for his clogged spirituality.

Finally, from a dramatic point of view, Schrader establishes something of a counterpoise between Toller’s scenes of spiritual crisis and scenes of banal everydayness. Whether it be the logistics of seating plans for First Reformed’s 250th reconsecration celebration, the guided tours of the historic church, the repair of the historic organ — in the interspersed scenes of day-to-day-ness, Toller is at his most awkward. He is a misfit in what we call the “real” world.

Circling back to the levitation scene that takes place in the living room of the parsonage, about which some critics have complained, it is reminiscent of Terrence Malick’s 2011 cosmic sequence in “The Tree of Life.” In Schrader’s abbreviated cinematic language, it begins in similar cosmic grandeur, then devolves into a series of nightmare images of environmental degradation.

Like “The Tree of Life,” “First Reformed” is a visual, aural and narrative masterpiece. And like “The Tree of Life,” “First Reformed” addresses profound questions of the human relationships to human community and to earth. Both are audacious films that speak against the Hollywood status quo, but "First Reformed" moves beyond Malick's romanticism to take up the desperate reality of the general refusal to recognize the threats of climate and geographic disintegration.

The trajectory of the theme of environmental collapse gains momentum as “First Reformed” progresses. Few public figures take on the existential fact, even obliquely, of the Malthusian reality of our impact on the environment. In this monumental cinematic achievement, Schrader has taken on global catastrophe within the context of the true meaning of individual sacrifice and redemption in the Christian context of grace.

Sartre’s pared down, albeit atheistic, existentialist dictum — existence precedes essence — means nothing less than that the actions one takes, moment by moment, create meaning in the face of a meaningless, indifferent universe. Man is condemned to freedom; freedom demands choice; and choice demands responsibility for the creation of existentialist meaning.

Before viewing “First Reformed,” I tried to view Schrader’s oeuvre. Of the 29 films he has written and directed, or written or directed, I was able to screen 21. I had seen many before, but the intensity of the concentrated experience distilled my encounter with “First Reformed” in ways I otherwise would have missed.

For those familiar with Schrader’s output, his is the manifestation of the desperate struggle of redemption. It is the factory worker screwed by management and the union alike in “Blue Collar” (Harvey Keitel, Richard Pryor, and Yaphet Kotto); the self-righteous Calvinist father who unwittingly drives his daughter into prostitution in “Hardcore” (George C. Scott); the gigolo who devotes himself to what he sees as a transcendent challenge in servicing older women in “American Gigolo” (Richard Gere); the commitment to the samurai code in the masterful first screenplay (co-written with his brother Leonard Schrader and Robert Towne) “The Yakuza” (Robert Mitchum and Ken Takakura) that emerges again in the amazingly original, experimental achievement that is the biographical exploration of “Mashima: A Life in Four Chapters” (Ken Ogata); a Christ (Willem Dafoe) who persists in persuading Judas (Harvey Keitel) that his betrayal is necessary to the redemption of mankind; the abused son trying to navigate his way through adult life, family, and continued abuse in “Affliction” (Nick Nolte); the holocaust survivor Adam (Jeff Goldblum) of “Adam Resurrected,” based on Yoram Kaniuk’s novel, who, in seeking his own redemption, grants it to his fellow Israeli psychiatric asylum dwellers; the mayor John Pappas (Al Pacino) of “City Hall” and the CIA agent Evan Lake (Nicolas Cage) of “The Dying of the Light,” who try to worm their way out of the rot of political manipulation and corruption.

That, early in Schrader’s career, two such radically different characters as Jake Van Dorn of “Hardcore” and Travis Bickle of “Taxi Driver” take upon themselves an essentially identical quest, to save an adolescent girl from the sex trade, tells us much about the thematic concerns that will occupy Schrader’s work for almost a half century. And then there are Schrader’s characters who succumb to a naïve belief that they can trust one axiological system to subvert another in the attempt to find their way out of the sucking quicksand of an unjust world.

A Yiddish saying has it that “For a worm in horseradish, the world is … horseradish.” Schrader’s characters are mired in their worlds. Much as they try to transcend the horseradish, they find themselves deeper in the quagmire. The more they strive for higher ground, a way out, the more entrenched they become, as though caught in a cruel cosmic joke. Wittingly or unwittingly they self-destruct or are destroyed by others. And yet, whatever their final fate, they find, if not salvation, at the very least, benediction.

In a formal existentialist perspective, for both Sartre and Martin Heidegger, no Eden from which we were expelled ever existed, yet the fallen state exists, what Heidegger calls inauthenticity and Sartre calls being-in-the-midst-of-the-word. From this fallen state there is yet a transcendence to which we must aspire. Being-in-the-world is for Sartre to be fully aware of the world. By contrast, being-in-the-midst-of-the-world is the state of fallenness, inauthenticity. To cite Olson again, it is “a state in which the individual constantly obeys commands and prohibitions whose source is unknown and unidentifiable and whose justification he does not bother to inquire into.”

Our goal is to escape from this condition of fallenness — to, at the very least, inquire — to see, if you will, beyond the horseradish. As annoying and self-absorbed as Toller's behavior is (and in Colburn’s interview Schrader says, “…this guy is using his suffering to make himself, in a selfish way, more important”), transcending the horseradish is precisely what Toller is trying to do. He is attempting to engage in the supreme existentialist act of getting beyond the being-in-the-midst-of-the-word — the horseradish — to the requisite being-in-the-world.

The arc of “First Reformed” takes place over the eight weeks leading to the 250th anniversary reconsecration ceremony of the historic First Reformed church. As the ceremony gets underway, with Toller absent, Abundant Life’s Jeffers enlists choir leader Esther (Victoria Hill) to fill the vacuum. (Esther and Toller have consummated a brief affair, but Toller in turn has spurned her as an obstacle to his spiritual path.) The final scene of “First Reformed” moves between Toller and Esther, as Esther sings the hymn “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms,” her coif and her eye glasses conjuring something like an amalgam of the two figures in Grant Wood’s 1930 painting “American Gothic.”

Leaning, leaning,
Safe and secure from all alarms;
Leaning, leaning,
Leaning on the everlasting arms.

The sentiment of the hymn goes against everything in Toller’s conception of Christ’s passion in the garden of Gethsemane. Jeffers has chided Toller for being “always in the garden. Even Jesus went to the mountaintop; he was in the temple, in the marketplace.” Jeffers goes on, “Jesus doesn’t want our suffering. Jesus suffered for us. He wants our commitment and our obedience.”

Toller will have none of it, because the idea that even the son of God could vicariously spare one’s suffering is anathema to Toller’s faith. Olson recapitulates his overview of existentialism and the existentialists' attitude toward death thus: “Even the militant atheist who vigorously denies God fares better at the hands of the Christian existentialists than the ‘serene believer’; for the energy of his despair is more akin to faith than the calm of the man who recites a creed by rote, and he is more honest than the faint who has allowed the energy of his hope to blind him to the tragic contradictions of the human condition. In sum, the Christian existentialist does not regard faith in the afterlife as a comforting illusion born of bad faith, but he does regard as illusory and morally valueless a faith which is not perpetually sharpened and daily recreated in and through despair.”

As noted at the opening of this essay, Schrader began his career in film as a critic. He published “Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer” in 1972. It seems synchronous that the Anthology of Film Archives in New York City would screen a revival of Robert Bresson’s 1959 “Pickpocket” this June, about which Richard Brody wrote for "The New Yorker" that Bresson modeled “Pickpocket” on “Crime and Punishment,” and the film “evokes Dostoyevskian emotional extremes: torment and exaltation, nihilistic fury and religious passion. But the movie, above all, affirms the miracle of redemptive love and its price in humility and unconditional surrender.” Brody’s would be an accurate description of “First Reformed.”

Taken together, Schrader’s body of work suggests the path to salvation is fraught. Deliverance does not come to us. It can only be attained through acts of renunciation and sacrifice. Within the First Reformed doctrine, none of us can know who among us are the elect, but we should all act as though we are deserving of God’s mercy. A belief in God is not necessary to this world view. We each carry the burden of responsibility to act as though deserving of forgiveness and grace, whether it be of God, of Gaia, of the Hicks Boson particle, of a doe-eyed cow in the pasture, a homeless man on the street, a young woman with child— in other words, deserving of the mystery.

“Nana” and “Hitler versus Picasso and the Others”: Two Timely World War II Documentaries

Two recent documentaries, both directorial feature film debuts, approach the memory of World War II from distinctly different perspectives.

Serena Dykman’s “Nana” is a eulogy, not only for her grandmother, Maryla Michalowski-Dyamant, a survivor of Auschwitz who died when Serena was 11, but for all victims of the Holocaust. “I remember a lot of people attending her funeral,” Dykman recalls. “I remember that she was a very important person, a public person.” And she remembers hearing the vocabulary of her grandmother’s mission – words like “Auschwitz,” “Birkenau,” “ghetto,” “Mengele,” “gas chambers” – “and not understanding them, but knowing they were bad words.”

Claudio Poli’s “Hitler versus Picasso and the Others” (a misleading title about which more later) takes us through the World War II labyrinthine fate of European art, meticulously walking us through events leading up to the 1937 Degenerate Art Exhibition all the way through post World War II attempts at repatriation. Poli’s film is narrated by Toni Servillo, who starred in Paolo Sorrentino’s 2013 Oscar winner “The Great Beauty,” and his narrative monologue is derived almost entirely from primary sources.

Dykman’s “Nana” is an infinitely personal story, yet universally political. A film of three generations of women, the dynamic between Dykman and her mother Alice Michalowski, Maryla’s daughter, does much to propel the arc of the documentary narrative and imbue it with love and hope.


Dykman tells us that as more and more people became aware she was making a documentary about her grandmother, they began to send film footage until, in the end, she had almost 100 hours to mine. From home movies, extended excerpts from archival interviews with Maryla, stills, paper documentation, and extensive contemporary interviews Dykman conducted with Maryla’s many still living erudite friends and colleagues – emerges a documentary that is both a remembrance of her grandmother and a powerful addition to the literature of the Holocaust.

Maryla was born 6 November 1919 in Bedzin, Poland, two miles from the German border, with a population of about 60,000 that was equally Jewish and non-Jewish. It was a non-religious family, as comfortable celebrating Catholic holidays as Jewish ones.

In her late teens, Maryla was an aspiring opera singer who auditioned at the Krakow Opera House, one of three to get a callback. It wasn’t until about this time that anti-Semitism began to seep into the community. What happens in Bedzin in 1939 – and the ensuing events – is a story that, on the one hand, we know all too well, and on the other – perilously – we seem not to know well enough. This is the dilemma at the heart of Dykman’s project: that we not sigh at yet another Holocaust story and instead see that story afresh, through the eyes of a remarkable, intelligent and insightful individual – its tragic impact on the one who lived it and the imperative for the subsequent generational telling through daughter and granddaughter.

Dykman asks each of her interviewees: What was Maryla’s goal in making it her life’s purpose to keep her story alive? “[T]he importance of remembering what happened so we don’t forget,” says one. Maryla understood that “…blind hatred can hit anyone, anywhere, any time,” says another. And another warns, “Malevolent politicians still exist. …. And even in the most democratic countries, we’re never shielded from a bad election.”

When Dykman follows up with the question as to what Maryla would think of the political upheavals of today, her subjects are in agreement that Maryla would be dismayed. One sadly notes, “She would have been appalled with the realization that their experience wasn’t enough to show people that peace is the only objective we should have.”

Throughout “Nana,” the horror of Maryla’s historic story accrues. It is a tragic, moving story to be sure, yet the strength of her testament is equaled by the quiet alarm sounded by those who praise her tenacity, while making the case for the imperative to stay ever vigilant, for it can, indeed, happen here.

Dykman’s mother Alice insists that, as the daughter of a survivor, she has an obligation to keep her mother’s story alive. She, like her mother, knows she must forego naiveté, for what happened in the past is always a possibility for the future. Dykman, the documentarian, has internalized this understanding and takes upon herself an inheritance laden with the responsibility to “perpetuate the memory.”

“Hitler versus Picasso and the Others” takes pains to emphasize the direct parallel between a culture’s artistic production and its understanding of itself as a culture, thereby arguing that Hitler was keenly aware that, for an entire culture to be usurped and erased, its art must be erased – or at the very least, hidden. Then, perhaps ironically, as both the war progressed and with it the looting, Hitler (the failed artist) and Hermann Goring (the swaggering aristocrat) – such steadfast allies – became rivals as collectors of some of Europe’s most important masterpieces.

The documentary touches on every aspect of the circuitous story of the Reich’s rape of Europa, using as a focal point the 1937 Degenerate Art Exhibition of 650 works by 112 modern (mostly German) artists – among them Klee, Emil Nolde, Otto Dix, Picasso, Mondrian, Chagal, Kandinsky – staged concurrently with the Great German Art Exhibition, which featured mediocre artists who derivatively modeled their work after realist genre paintings of the previous century, work more appropriate to propaganda posters than 20th century galleries.

On the one hand, we learn of the myriad dealers, curators and scholars who abetted the theft and, on the other, the collectors who fell victim to the Nazi regime, the protectors like the American so-called Monuments Men, and the dealers, curators and scholars who have devoted their lives to locating artworks and unmasking the people responsible for one of the saddest chapters in art history.

Toward the end of “Hitler versus Picasso,” one scholar notes his research has revealed just how much like ourselves were the regular citizens who made the Reich’s astonishingly vast pillaging possible. Where we wish to find a distinction, people to point to as reprehensible and different from us, we find people who are not that different at all.

It is hard not to see many current films, dramatic and documentary, through the lens of our current political moment and its reliance on scapegoating for its success. One of Dykman’s subjects observes, “Genocide is not just any kind of crime. It’s a crime where one is killed because of who he is, not because he does something or occupies a territory. Simply because he exists.”

“Nana” and “Hitler versus Picasso and the Others” remind us that the personal is political. Tino Servillo leaves us with a remark Picasso made in an interview long after the war (which finally gives us reason to understand the documentary’s title): “What do you think an artist is? An imbecile who only has eyes, if he is a painter, or ears if he is a musician, or a lyre in every chamber of his heart if he is a poet, or even, if he is a boxer, just his muscles? Far from it: at the same time he is also a political being, constantly aware of the heartbreaking, passionate, or delightful things that happen in the world, shaping himself completely in their image. How could it be possible to feel no interest in other people, and with a cool indifference to detach yourself from the very life which they bring to you so abundantly? No, painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.”

Serge Noel, who co-wrote Dykman’s grandmother Maryla’s 2000 memoir “Memorial des morts sans tombeau” with her, leaves us with this: “Within the deepest, blackest hole, humanity still exists; it can’t be destroyed. And we’ll never be able to destroy it. I think that was her message.” Let us hope Maryla was right.

“Nana” and “Hitler versus Picasso and the Others” were released in extremely limited markets. “Nana” and “Hitler versus Picasso and the Others” ware scheduled for DVD released on DVD in September. 

AND THE OSCAR DOCUMENTARY SHORTLIST IS...

If there were one word to characterize this year’s selection of possible documentary Oscar nominees, it would have to be nihilism. From attacks on civilians in Raqqa and Aleppo to the greatest displacement of human populations across the globe in history to the abuse of justice in the Great Recession to the mendacity that plagues the once noble world of athletics to the biases of the health care system to that other monumentally entrenched injustice that is race in America to the ultimate and absolute nihilism that is global warming – documentaries sounded the clarion call. But if a documentary rattles the alarm and no one hears it, does it make a sound?

As much as Hollywood has embraced films based-on-a-true-story, much documentary film making has been relegated to cable and streaming services. In its preliminary round of voting, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences selected 15 films of the 170 submissions for Best Documentary Academy Award, many produced by Amazon Studios, Netflix, HBO, et al. I do not know to what extent these 15 documentaries (much less the other 155) were accessible, even to coastal audiences, but the only one to have appeared in my theaters in 2017 was Al Gore’s climate change follow-up, “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power.”

On January 23, the Academy will announce the five that will contend for the Best Documentary Oscar. If you are interested in watching the 15 shortlisted films, here is a guide to where you can stream (most of) them.

Endurance: “City of Ghosts,” “Last Men in Aleppo,” “Human Flow” and “One of Us”

Two Syrian war-related films made the Academy’s shortlist. “City of Ghosts,” a production of A & E/Amazon Studios, is directed by Matthew Heinmann, whose 2015 “Cartel Land” earned an Oscar nomination in 2016. “City of Ghosts” follows media activist group RBSS, Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently. One of the few reliable sources of news information from the region, RBSS started in 2014 with 17 citizen journalists. They are ISIL targets, yet persist in getting their stories to fellow Syrian RBSS activists housed in undisclosed locations in Germany so that they might inform the world. (Available for streaming on Amazon Prime Video.)

The 2016 British short documentary “The White Helmets,” directed by Orlando von Einsiedel, was awarded the Best Documentary (Short Subject) at the 2017 Academy Awards. The film follows the Syrian Civil Defense, a group of volunteer rescue workers who triangulate the targets of air strikes in order to get to victims trapped in the rubble as quickly as possible. The White Helmets are again the subject, here in Feras Fayyad’s “Last Men in Aleppo,” which premiered on PBS’s series POV. This time the focus is narrowed, primarily to a man we know only as Khaled, and it is heartbreaking to see his despair even in his role as a loving, gentle father. Writing in the New York Times, Glenn Kenny says, “this is an essential film, but it is also a terribly dispiriting one. … ‘Last Men in Aleppo’ is likely to make you almost ashamed of your comforts and leave you with a feeling of impotence.” All the more reason to make every effort to see it. (Available for streaming on Netflix.)

The Amazon Original Movie “Human Flow” is Chinese dissident and artist Ai Weiwei’s sweeping examination of the human consequences of globalization. We are living through an unprecedented global refugee and migrant crisis. Ai takes us to the wandering lives of people in Israel and Jordan, Kenya, Malaysia, Pakistan, Turkey, as well as destinations in Europe and North America. In her review for the New York Times, Manohla Dargis writes that Ai “wants to give you a sense of the scale of the crisis, its terrifying, world-swallowing immensity.” (Available soon for streaming on Amazon Prime Video.)

Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady’s “One of Us” is a Netflix Original documentary that follows three Hasidic Jews whose decision to leave their ultra-Orthodox Brooklyn community means stepping out from under a world of comprehensive control and into an alien world of isolation. Etty, who is trying to protect herself and her children from an abusive husband, finds that her husband’s attorneys can manipulate the law to his advantage and separate her from her children. She finds some solace in the support group Footsteps, which offers help and encouragement to individuals seeking to escape the suffocation of codified Orthodox constraints. A teenager, who has begun to realize he has been taught next to nothing in his Orthodox schools, cuts his hair and tentatively ventures into the world beyond his neighborhood. When he discovers Wikipedia, he describes it as “a gift from God.” Luzer, a struggling actor, has made it all the way to LA, but among the consequences of his departure have been a complete rupture with his family and estrangement from his children. We leave the three with the sense each will find a way to come to terms with independence. (Available for streaming on Netflix.)

Injustice: “Abacus: Small Enough to Jail,” “Icarus” and “Unrest”
Steve James’s “Abacus: Small Enough to Jail” which originally aired as part of PBS’s Frontline series, chronicles the gross injustice Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance, Jr. brought against the Sung family in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. For decades, Abacus, the Song’s federal savings bank in New York’s Chinatown, has served an immigrant community other financial institutions routinely turn away. James’s award-winning documentary work spans 30 years and includes titles familiar to documentary viewers. 1994’s “Hoop Dreams” looks at two Chicago high schoolers who dream of becoming pro players; 2002’s “Stevie” explores James’s own reunion with a boy he mentored through the Advocate Big Brother program; 2004’s seven-hour PBS series “The New Americans,” surveys the lives of several immigrants over the course of four years; 2006’s “The War Tapes” investigates the invasion of Iraq, filmed by the soldiers themselves; 2011’s “The Interrupters” follows individuals who try to stave off violence in Chicago communities; 2012’s “Head Games” delves into the devastating consequences of sports concussions; and 2014’s “Life Itself” presents a biographical homage to the late film critic Roger Ebert. “Abacus” brings the same sense of humanity and community that James shines on stories too often buried beneath the headlines. (Available for streaming on Amazon Prime.)

If you doubt Russia interfered in the 2016 election, you will learn that such meddling may have been small potatoes compared to its intricately designed athletic doping cover-up in the 2014 Sochi Olympics. Bryan Fogel is a playwright who also happens to be an avid amateur cyclist. His first run at the Haute Route, the Tour de France of the amateur cycling world, coincided with the breaking story of the Lance Armstrong doping scandal. With “Icarus,” Fogel chronicles his decision to investigate doping using himself as his subject. What starts as a fairly routine Morgan Spurlock-esque immersion story takes a cloak and dagger turn when Fogel is put in contact with Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov, a Russian chemist who ran his country’s accredited anti-doping operation. Rodchenkov, a charmingly charismatic fellow, and Fogel forge an abiding friendship, and in the process, Rodchenkov risks everything to blow the lid off Russia’s comprehensive, state-sanctioned conspiracy. The epitaph that opens “Icarus” is attributed to George Orwell: “During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.” Once Rodchenkov arrives in the United States, with a well-worn copy of “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” the film’s structure takes on an eerie Orwellian progression. (Available for streaming on Netflix.)

In 2011, after a high fever, Jennifer Brea fell victim to myalgic encephalomyelitis, more commonly referred to as chronic fatigue syndrome. The disease is characterized by, among other symptoms, joint and muscle pain, digestive issues, extreme light and noise sensitivity and cognitive problems. “Unrest” is Brea’s video diary of her ensuing battle with the disease and of the struggles of other sufferers she has met online. Yet a subtext emerges, as the narrative unfolds, about the biases that inform medical practice. In part its unfortunate nomenclature (chronic fatigue) has made it too easy for the general public and the medical community alike to write patients off as delusional, lazy or both. Though the disease afflicts almost twice as many people as multiple sclerosis, dollars devoted to research are a tiny fraction of those spent on MS and on other chronic afflictions. Anyone touched by this maddeningly elusive disease should be gladdened by Brea’s courage in telling her unvarnished story. (Available for streaming through purchase only on Amazon Prime Video.)

Race: “LA 92” and “Strong Island”

If you are of a certain age, middle-aged at least, you can probably remember the events of the spring of 1992. An all-white jury found two of the four officers indicted for use of excessive force in the beating of Rodney King guilty. They both were sentenced to 30 months in prison. The other two officers were exonerated. The day the verdicts were handed down, April 29, rioting began in the streets of Los Angeles. Daniel Lindsay and T.J. Martin’s “LA 92,” which premiered on the National Geographic Channel, bookends its narrative with the 1965 Watts riots, and tells the story of the events of 1992 through archival footage, as raw today as it was 25 years ago. (Available for streaming on Amazon Prime Video.)

Another story from 1992, and one with which you are likely unfamiliar, is more personal. That same spring, on April 7, 24-year-old William Ford Jr., an unarmed black man, was killed by 19-year-old Mark Reilly, a white auto mechanic. Allegedly, in the course of a dispute over Ford’s car’s repair, Reilly insulted Ford’s mother. When confronted, Reilly pulled out a shot gun. The grand jury handed over a “No True Bill,” a legal procedure to dismiss charges against a defendant when the panelists believe there is insufficient evidence to bring charges. Yance Ford, now a transgender man, was William’s younger sister, and “Strong Island,” 10 years in the making, is his meditation on what happened that night and the repercussions the event has had on the family dynamic in the ensuing years. “Strong Island” relates an intensely personal story that examines what is known of objective facts while mining the emotional currents that shape those facts, and bravely confronts complex questions of guilt and innocence. (Available for streaming on Netflix.)

Climate: “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power” and “Chasing Coral”

If Al Gore sounds frustrated in “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power,” can you blame him? The documentary, directed by Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk, is, as its title spells out, a sequel to 2016’s “An Inconvenient Truth,” which was a rather wonkish approach to laying out the threat of global warming. That is a statement, not a criticism, because if in-your-face activism, time-lapse photography, or Werner Herzog’s suicidal penguin (“Encounters at the End of the World,” 2007) can’t make you get it, maybe a wonky method will. There are moments in “Sequel” when Gore loses his wonkish cool. Again, can you blame him? (Available for streaming on Amazon Prime Video.)

In 2012, documentarian Jeff Orlowski released “Chasing Ice.” The film follows James Balog’s Extreme Ice Survey project, which, in 2007, began monitoring 24 of the world’s largest glaciers as they melted before the team’s very eyes. In “Chasing Coral,” a Netflix Original documentary, Orlowski teams up with Richard Vevers, CEO of The Ocean Agency, which the former advertising professional founded after something of a midlife crisis. He reasoned that the fact that most of us do not see below the ocean’s surface is one of its liabilities, and that mediating on its behalf would be a superior life purpose to advocating for 3-ply toilet paper. Every player in this riveting film is passionate, from Ruth Gates, Director of the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology; to Dr. C. Mark Eakin of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who directs Coral Reef Watch; to Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, Director of the Global Change Institute and Professor of Marine Science at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia; among many others. But the most magnetic is Zackery Rago, a long-time aquarist and scuba diver with View Into the Blue, a tech company that manufactures underwater camera systems and monitoring instruments. Zack’s love for coral is palpable on the screen, and when he mourns its loss, you would have to be made of stone not to mourn it, too. (Available for streaming on Netflix.)

On a Happier Note: “Long Strange Trip,” “Ex Libris: The New York Public Library,” “Faces Places” and “Jane”

The six-part documentary about the Grateful Dead, “Long Strange Trip,” is, indeed, long. It feels as though director Amir Bar-Lev has ferreted out every reel, every snippet, every snap ever taken of the band, which, if you are a diehard dead-head might interest you. For this viewer, however, a big fan of rock documentaries and concert films, it was a long slog. Use your streaming services to take a more fruitful trip down memory lane with some of the masterworks of the genre – D. A. Pennebaker (“Don’t Look Back,” “Monterey Pop” and “Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars”); Jim Jarmusch (“Year of the Horse”); Michael Wadleigh (“Woodstock”); or Martin Scorsese ("The Last Waltz”); among many other great rock documentaries. (Available for streaming on Amazon Prime Video.)

These last three I was unable to screen:

“Ex Libris: The New York Public Library” sounds like a documentary dream come true. For starters, it is directed by the great Frederick Wiseman, who has worked in the form since the 1960s, covering scores of subjects. Writing about Wiseman’s 2014 “National Gallery” for rogerebert.com, Glenn Kenny remarks, “It simply won’t do to call [him] a documentarian. Even film critics and film lovers who normally aren’t all that actively/avidly enthusiastic about the documentary feature as a form…have to give it up for Wiseman.” What Wiseman documents in “Ex Libris” is an institution invented for books at a time when the book may be destined, if not to obsolescence, at least to obscurity. (Unavailable at this time.)

Agnes Varda, now 89 years old and one of the leading figures of the French New Wave, and 33-year-old French photographer and muralist JR co-directed “Faces Places.” Varda and JR hit the road in JR’s photo truck. Tooling through the French countryside, they encounter locals and listen to their stories. JR produces larger-than-life portraits that he displays on houses, barns, storefronts and trains, while Varda documents their adventure. (Unavailable at this time.)

When Jane Goodall, at age 26, first ventured into the forest to study chimpanzees, I was seven, and by the time National Geographic’s 1965 documentary “Jane Goodall and the Wild Chimpanzees,” narrated by Orson Welles, came out, I was 12, so I feel I have grown up knowing Goodall most of my life. That film came from footage shot by wildlife photographer Hugo van Lawick, who would later become Goodall’s first husband. According to Ben Kenigsberg’s review for the New York Times, National Geographic Studios’ new film “Jane,” directed by Brett Morgen, “draws on more than 100 rediscovered hours from National Geographic’s archives. The abundant raw material allows Mr. Morgen to construct the impression of a complete narrative arc,” Kenigsberg continues, “and to show the tedious work of gaining the trust of the chimps and collecting data in fast forward, conveying the excitement of scientific discovery with adventure-movie momentum.” (Available for Amazon Prime Video purchase on January 23, 2018, and available now for streaming on Amazon Prime Video, but only with Fire TV or Fire TV Stick.)