It’s the Earth, not the Moon – Gonçalo Tocha

It’s the Earth, not the Moon (É na Terra, não é na Lua) (Gonçalo Tocha – Portugal) 185 minutes

Gonçalo Tocha and his sound engineer Didio Pestana arrive in Corvo, the smallest island of the Azores, 6 km by 4, population 440, with the intention of filming ‘everything we can, we will try to be everywhere at the same time and not miss a thing…we will try to meet everyone, to film every face, every service, every house, every street, every workplace, every corner of the island, every tree, every rock, every bird.’ The French sailor who takes them to the island says ‘the Azores are crazy and on Corvo, they’re even crazier’ (someone else says during the film that other Azoreans consider Corvo to be backward), but there is little evidence of any egregious eccentricity. If anything, Tocha’s film presents the island as such an ordinary society cast in extraordinary surroundings that at times you begin to question his motivation for making a documentary in such minute detail. We should be glad he did as It’s the Earth, not the Moon is one of the finest observational documentaries in recent years, an absorbing portrait of everyday life. Its punishing length and austere style (there are no captions and few recourses to voiceover) has led some to call it a ‘micro-epic’; there will be some for whom it is the hardest of films to watch, others will find it the easiest.

Tocha eschews anything that might give a noticeable timeline to proceedings and it is not always obvious the filming takes place over several visits over the course of a few years from 2007 to 2011. The film’s 14 chapters are interspersed with scenes of an elderly islander Inês Inêz knitting Tocha an old-fashioned whaler’s bonnet. This is one of several instances of manual labour documented in the film – and one that Inêz regrets is about to die out as the younger generation have no interest in it – others include fishing, slaughtering pigs, cattle-herding, Inêz’s husband crafting wooden bolt locks. Some of these crafts are more or less obsolete, now being processed on an industrial scale. It’s a wry avowal of artifice that carries (possibly unintentional) echoes of Robert Flaherty reintroducing the defunct basking-shark fishing to the Aran Islands to include in Man of Aran.

It’s the Earth, not the Moon has this wryness throughout. Tocha is almost always off-screen but is regularly addressed by the islanders, and his presence informs the action. The lightness of tone reminds you of Miguel Gomes’ wonderful Our Beloved Month of August. We meet members of a theatre troupe set up by Americans that has for some reason stopped off in Corvo, a German music teacher who wanted to get as far from home as possible without leaving Europe, the Portuguese Monarchist Party – marginal nationwide but a local force on Corvo – and, finally, a group of British birdwatchers. Tocha quickly gives up on his encyclopaedic intent but there is still an obsessive attention to the details of life on this tiny island. It is as if Tocha is providing his own canon for Corvo, which has little or no written documentation existing from its five centuries of human habitation. Until the last thirty years, the island was cut off even from other islands in the archipelago and it was only the arrival of an airstrip in 1983 that opened it up to the outside world. One of the few documents Tocha finds is shown him by a local archivist – a report from the Lisbon press in the early 1970s, which carried the headline ‘It’s the Earth, not the Moon’. It’s a suitably oblique title for a film that is gently exhaustive and which makes a small remote community a subject of the greatest importance. If Tocha’s film were a person, you would go out of your way to become its friend. A brilliant, mesmerising and lovingly warm film.

Once I Entered a Garden – Avi Mograbi

Once I Entered a Garden (Nichnasti Pa’am Lagan) (Avi Mograbi – Israel/France/Germany) 97 minutes

Avi Mograbi’s 2005 film Avenge But One of My Two Eyes was not seen by many people outside of Israel or France but it is, in my opinion, the greatest documentary of the past decade. It was several films in one – a ruminative video diary, a reportage on the suicide-valorising Samson and Massada cults prevalent in Israel, a journey into the weirdness of the settler far-right (the title comes from a song by a Hasidic punk band), and a polemical testimony to the humiliating treatment visited upon Palestinians at IDF checkpoints. Mograbi, a long-time leftist who went to prison for refusing to serve in Lebanon in the 1980s (something his son has since emulated), is like Michael Moore crossed with Chris Marker, with a dash of WG Sebald thrown in for good measure. He is angry without being hectoring, persistently inquisitive and his films breathe discursive ideas.

After 2009’s Z32, in which Mograbi got a former Israeli conscript to re-enact the abuse of Palestinian civilians he was party to, he returns with a film that is more reflective and personal. Again, we have a film of protean form – Mograbi initially intended making a movie about a cousin of his father who lived in Beirut and who was bemused to be caught up in the new reality of Jewish-Arab relations post-1948. Much of that remains in the film, with letters written by the cousin read in French by the Palestinian actress Hiam Abbass overlaid on contemporary footage of his Beirut home shot to look like old Super-8. But the bulk of the film is recorded conversations between Mograbi and his friend and Arabic teacher, the Palestinian academic Ali Al-Azhari.

The pair search through old documents looking for traces of Mograbi’s ancestors and riff on everything from the Nakba, the relative freedom of movement of Israelis and Palestinians to hummus, olives and the Arab Spring. They visit Al-Azhari’s childhood home, from which his family was expelled in 1948, and which now bears a sign saying ‘forbidden to foreigners’. There is barbed humour: when Mograbi says his Arabic lessons are making Al-Azhari a rich man, the Palestinian replies ‘that’s payback for the Nakba’. The dialogue is in both Hebrew and Arabic (with the subtitles colour-coded to help the uninitiated distinguish them) with Mograbi clearly less confident in the latter, stopping from time to time to ask Al-Azhari how to say certain words. It’s a visible humbling of the big bearish man seen in Avenge But One of My Two Eyes (though, to be fair, Mograbi has always engaged in self-deprecation in his films) and his newly-grown moustache gives him an avuncular Mitteleuropean air. It is rare that you see the process of language-learning on screen and the resonance of the exchanges in Arabic might be lost on anyone who has not turned that significant corner in learning a language when the words finally start to flow.

Though Mograbi and Al-Azhari are clearly not terribly representative of their respective communities – Mograbi is well to the left and more conscious of his Arab heritage than the vast majority of Israelis and Al-Azhari, despite being dispossessed as a child, has a prestigious job and lives relatively comfortably by Palestinian standards – there is a real sense that we are witnessing a dialogue between nations. It is a languid dialogue, one in which Al-Azhari’s sprightly and smart eight-year-old daughter intervenes with perorations on racism at her Tel Aviv school, and it is reminiscent of a Middle Eastern My Dinner With André. You wonder if Mograbi has given up on the more confrontational demotic documentaries of his earlier career, but Once I Entered a Garden is a wonderfully rich work that traces a shared history in a region that too often seems irrevocably divided.

Ain't Misbehavin' - Marcel Ophuls

Ain't Misbehavin' (Un voyageur) (Marcel Ophuls - France/Switzerland) 106 minutes

Marcel Ophuls’ first film in 19 years could well be his last and it may only owe its existence to the veteran documentary maker’s difficulties writing. Having promised François Truffaut many decades ago that he would write his memoirs at the end of his career, Ophuls admitted to clamming up in front of a blank page and instead decided to make a film of it. The result is a confessional documentary similar to Raymond Depardon’s Carnets de France from last year and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Dance of Reality, which also screened during Director’s Fortnight at Cannes this year.

Despite being a great filmmaker in his own right, Ophuls has always lived in the shadow of his father Max, director of La Ronde, Lola Montès and Letter from an Unknown Woman, among other classics of the cinema. It is something he has always been able to accept but it has caused some self-doubt – at one point in the film he wonders if his early positive reviews were because he was his father’s son, and his father was someone who could do no wrong with the critics. The younger Ophuls (his family changed his name from Oppenheimer) had a strained relationship with his father, who was stern and neurotic and also an incorrigible womaniser (not doing too bad for a short, balding middle-aged man with a thick German accent). Marcel was also closer to his mother, presumably out of solidarity with her long-suffering married existence.

The family moved  from Berlin on the coming to power of the Nazis when Marcel was just five years old and then set up shop in Paris, where Max Ophuls directed a number of features to pay the bills. When war broke out, they went to Switzerland but promptly returned to France when Max, fearful of being thought of as a deserter, enlisted in the French Army. In 1940 however, the Ophuls’ had to once again flee the Nazis, making it to Hollywood. Max was a bit too late to the game though with most of the big directorial jobs being taken by fellow Jewish émigrés such as Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, Michael Curtiz and Robert Siodmark, who had all moved over several years earlier. He ended up having to hustle for whatever work he could get, yet still managing to produce a clutch of masterpieces such as Letter from an Unknown Woman and Caught.

This peripatetic childhood made Marcel equally fluent in German, French and English, and it also exposed him to some legendary figures from a young age. We hear of Bertolt Brecht advising him that ‘there is no such thing as plagiarism’, Preston Sturges inviting the family over for an umpteenth screening of The Great McGinty and Marlene Dietrich dragging him out to a lesbian night club in Paris. Despite his father’s connections, it was François Truffaut who would open the door to filmmaking for Marcel. After a couple of minor fiction films on the margins of the New Wave, he switched to documentaries, making The Sorrow and the Pity, a monumental four-and-a-half-hour documentary on wartime collaboration and resistance in the French city of Clermont-Ferrand. The film set the tone for the rest of Ophuls’ career, a masterly probing interrogation, skewering the ad hoc moralisms of  post-war France. It was a huge success and was banned from French television until 1981. Woody Allen referenced it in Annie Hall – Ophuls shows us the letter of thanks he gets from Woody. It is an example of the self-indulgence we often see on screen in Ain’t Misbehavin’ but given Ophuls’ general conviviality, not to mention the splendour of his work, it is forgivable.

The film is as much an essay as it is a memoir, with some enjoyable riffs on memory and preferences for remembering in a certain way. Ophuls also treats his failures as readily as he does his successes. Often they were indistinguishable – where he had a torrid time working on the Nuremberg trials film Memory of Justice and which he walked away from, it was equally popular with the critics as his Klaus Barbie documentary Hotel Terminus, which won him an Oscar for Best Documentary in 1989. He also revisits many of the places from his past (the French title of the film is Un voyageur) which gives an extra dimension to something that might have otherwise remained a flat documentary. Peppered throughout are extracts from Ophuls’ true love, the Hollywood films of his youth and contemporary jazz greats, such as the Fats Waller tune of the title. It is a film that Ophuls could easily have made in his sleep but, for all its lightness, it puts to shame the dull eulogistic documentaries that do so well at the box office these days. One of the most enjoyable films of the year.