Cenote

Complete first draft written for Screen Slate.

In the span of three features, Kaori Oda has established herself as one of the foremost practitioners of the kind of immersive documentary filmmaking pioneered, at least in part, by the Sensory Ethnography Lab with films like Sweetgrass and Leviathan. Her debut film, Aragane (2015), is one of the most compelling digitally-shot films of the past decade, unfolding mostly in the near-darkness of a Bosnian coal mine and transforming the setting, the workers, and the tools into a disconcerting, wondrous dance of shadows and headlamps. After 2017’s Toward a Common Tenderness, a more personal essay film, Oda’s Cenote (2019) returns to this experimental mode, albeit with significantly more accoutrements. The documentary plunges into the deep, intricate sinkholes in Mexico that give it its name; cenotes were water sources for the Mayans and believed to act as conduits between the world and the afterlife. Today, they still exert a pull on the tropical jungle communities, especially physically; since the pits possess strong, unexpected currents, many people have fallen in and drowned, accidentally or intentionally. That sense of intertwined culture and danger is central to the structure of Oda’s film. Eschewing the strictly observational stance of Aragane, Cenote moves fluidly between modes over the course of its 75 minutes. After an extended opening that features cacophonous, near-abstract flows of water, sunlight, and figures both amphibian and terrestrial, the film alternates between underwater iPhone footage, which glides through the dark channels of numerous different cenotes, and Super-8mm footage of the surrounding communities, observing festivities, cemeteries, and above all faces. Over all of this, voiceover fades in and out, freely mixing interviews with residents, recited lines from ancient Mayan poetry, and scripted lines written by Oda herself. It is well worth noting that Oda serves as cinematographer, editor, and sound designer on her films, and that goes some way in accounting for the immersiveness of her work above and beyond the purportedly minimal concept. For Cenote is in many ways a maximal film, in its sensory affect and evocation of the at-times otherworldly nature of the sinkholes. At the same time, Oda’s ultimate achievement is to situate them in a real, tangible place, in a conception of culture that still manages to accurately reflects the unique blend of happenstance, tradition, and myths that form human experience. Often eerie, sometimes placid, and always beautiful, Cenote never fails to convey the unclassifiable, ever-shifting definitions and meanings that its subject can hold, often immeasurably influenced by a camera and light pointed there, a story told there.

Life in a Day 2021 First Draft

Complete first draft written for In Review Online.

Documentaries like Life in a Day 2020 almost inherently cling with desperation to a conception of the universal. Such works insist that there is always substantial common ground that humanity shares, which is almost exclusively laudable, casting our faults as small obstacles to overcome, nothing that a little peace, love, and understanding can’t solve. In this respect, such thinking feels very much from a more optimistic time, like early 2011, when the first Life in a Day was released. The 2020 flavor is, like its predecessor, directed by Kevin Macdonald and compiled from hundreds of thousands of videos commissioned by YouTube and filmed by people around the world on the same day, July 25, 2020 (ten years and a day after the first documentary’s day of filming). Of course, much has changed in the past decade, not to mention the past year or the days and weeks leading up to July 25. But in what seems like a concerted effort by Macdonald and his editors that is at best coddling, at worst actively pernicious, the tumult of the year 2020 and the extraordinary effects of COVID-19 are minimized, only present in sporadic bursts and existing more as a momentary irritancy than as the shadow of doom that continues to hang over much of the world. Of course, some locales and nations have only been slightly hampered by the virus, but the fact remains that most of the footage, in public or otherwise, looks as if it could have been shot at any time in the last fifteen years, with only occasional masks to mark the specific moment in time that is supposed to be so paramount to this project. Even more troubling and abject is Life in a Day 2020’s construction. Aside from a few structuring threads, Macdonald is content to organize the film, like its predecessor, according to topics, often conveyed in rapid-fire montages. While these skew universal, like (the head-slappingly obvious choice to open the film with) births or graduations — side note: with the many crowded, unmasked gatherings on display, one wonders how many people must have contracted coronavirus as a direct result of the filming of this documentary — the film moves into genuinely risible territory when it tries to tackle the issues of today. Abandoned spaces and compromised methods of communication due to COVID are contained in a single montage, and the treatment of Black Lives Matter is even worse. All protest footage is relegated to a two-minute sequence, less time than what’s given to both a proud MAGA anti-mask veteran, who gloats over the lack of protests in his suburban neighborhood and pridefully shows a letter of commendation signed by former President Trump, and a gleefully vindictive traffic officer handing out tickets on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The whole notion of institutional racism is just another topic to Macdonald, something to be neatly catalogued, unexamined, and forgotten alongside food preparation or, unbelievably, a compilation of oh-so-sick drone shots. This isn’t to say that it’s impossible for Life in a Day 2020’s concept to be affecting or surprising: in one of two follow-ups from the first film, a mother plays footage of her young son before moving the camera to show his urn, him having died five months before from coronavirus; a Japanese couple breaks up on camera, with the man only belatedly realizing that it wasn’t just an act for the film. But such moments are few and far between, and the effect of the montages is to flatten each individual story, subsuming almost any conception of the particulars of individuals or cultures into a banal treacle, leaving the most damning moments as soon as possible and otherwise applying its bland inspirational tone without discretion. Naturally, the film ends with a boy speculating about a future humanity where every person’s brain is connected. At this moment when we are more divided than ever, such a wholehearted endorsement of unthinking unity feels like a slap in the face.