Documentaries

For anyone eager to understand Russia’s depressing 20-year slide from one version of cynical totalitarianism into another, with a brief stop-off in between for giddy, wide-open, largely dysfunctional democracy, “Putin’s Kiss” is required viewing. Of course Pedersen can’t explain all the conundrums of contemporary Russia in 85 minutes, but in profiling two singularly important young Russians — pro-Putin youth activist Masha Drokova and leading opposition journalist Oleg Kashin — she captures some essential drama in the nation’s recent political life. (If you read Russian, Kashin’s site is here.)

Born at the tail end of the Soviet era, Drokova was a fresh-faced teenage girl from suburban Moscow when she suddenly became famous in the mid-2000s after giving Putin a worshipful smooch on national TV. She assured interviewers that she could tell he was a strong, charismatic and kind man, and that whomever she spent her life with would have to follow his example. Poised and pleasant, pretty without being drop-dead Natasha gorgeous, Drokova rapidly became a major public face of Nashi, the “anti-fascist and democratic” youth organization founded by prominent Putin supporters to channel adolescent energy and quell dissent.

As opposition leader Ilya Yashin tells Pedersen, Putin’s regime grew increasingly restless and paranoid after the 2005 “Orange Revolution” threw the post-Soviet autocrats out of power in neighboring Ukraine. (Arguably, the Orange Revolution has itself been largely undone by current Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, but that’s another story.) Nashi was initially led by shadowy Putin lieutenant Vasily Yakemenko, perhaps operating at the behest of Vladislav Surkov, a guy who seems like a boring, puffy-faced Kremlin apparatchik but is widely described as the “gray cardinal” or ideological puppet-master behind Putin’s regime. (At the risk of derailing this whole review, the more you read about Surkov the weirder he gets. He may have written or co-written a satirical novel making fun of the system he helped create, and reportedly has portraits of Che Guevara and Tupac Shakur, alongside Putin, in his Kremlin office.)

As we see from Pedersen’s often chilling footage inside Nashi rallies and summer camps, Surkov and Yakemenko created a two-faced organization on a familiar and unfortunate 20th-century model, one part calisthenics and canoeing classes and ritualized teen romance, one part ultra-nationalist ideology. Older Russians of course liken it to the Soviet-era Komsomol, by all accounts one of the communist state’s more successful endeavors. Other people have simply started calling it the “Putinjugend” (a reference to the German name of the Hitler Youth). At any rate, saying that the group is pro-democratic and anti-fascist doesn’t make it so; Nashi has frequently been used to humiliate and harass opposition politicians, journalists and human-rights activists, and is at least circumstantially connected to racist violence against Chechens, Georgians, Armenians, Azeris and other minority groups.

Nobody knows for sure — or nobody who’s talking — whether it was Nashi activists who beat Oleg Kashin into a coma in the fall of 2010, breaking both his legs and both his jaws, after he wrote a series of investigative pieces critical of Putin’s business dealings. And nobody knows exactly who the two guys were who took a crap on top of Ilya Yashin’s car, right on a Moscow street. (We see both incidents, via grainy surveillance footage. Russia is just that kind of place.) The ingenuity of the political system engineered by Surkov lies precisely in the fact that orders to quash the opposition often don’t have to come from the top, and the people in power can pay lip service to freedom and democracy and wring their hands over violent incidents. Unlike in Soviet times, dissent is not illegal, and it’s tolerated as long as it stays limited to marginal political parties and elite Moscow publications. But it isn’t good for your health or your public reputation.

Nobody suggests that Masha Drokova had anything to do with the dirty side of Nashi. She was the organization’s happy face, giving speeches against official corruption, hosting a pro-Putin talk show and leading demonstrations against supermarkets that sold expired meat. But as her mentor-protégé relationship with Nashi founder Yakemenko becomes more troubled and she gets to know Kashin and other liberal journalists, this naive but likable young woman visibly begins to struggle with the cognitive dissonance of contemporary Russian political life. No one could accuse “Putin’s Kiss” of painting an encouraging portrait of Russia, but there are some signs that the opposition has been revitalized, and Drokova’s story of apostasy is one small part of that. Ilya Yashin laments the way that Nashi has turned an entire generation toward conformity and cynicism, but it was idealism that made Masha kiss Putin in the first place, and that same idealism made her walk away from him.

“Putin’s Kiss” opens this week at Cinema Village in New York, with more cities and home-video release to follow.

In fact, there are reportedly 157 members in the Academy’s documentary branch, which is about 2.5 percent of the total membership. Until recently that tiny group was seen as a bunch of hidebound conservatives, notoriously resistant to new aesthetic and narrative approaches to documentary film. There’s really no way to exaggerate the strangeness of this category over the years, or the number of important films that have been completely overlooked. The most famous non-nominees include “The Thin Blue Line,” “Roger & Me,” “28 Up,” “Hoop Dreams” and “Grizzly Man,” and it’s absolutely not coincidental that I’ve just cited films by Moore, Werner Herzog, Steve James and Errol Morris, all of them controversial figures whose work flies in the face of long-standing cinéma-vérité convention.

On the other side of the ledger, the list of winning and nominated features over the decades of the award’s history have an irresistibly random quality; as filmmaker and blogger AJ Schnack recently told me, the winners have included Jacques Cousteau, Walt Disney (twice apiece) and the Department of the Navy. Trying to pick the single most bizarre Oscar-winning documentary, one faces an embarrassment of riches. Is it “The Hellstrom Chronicle” (1971), which combines bogus science and genuine stop-motion photography to suggest that we’ll all be eaten by bugs? Is it Peter Watkins’ terrifying “The War Game” (1966), which depicts the effects of a hypothetical Soviet nuclear attack on Britain and can only be considered a documentary by stretching the term beyond all recognition? I’m going with “Design for Death,” an anti-Japanese agitprop film from 1947 that reportedly featured faked archival footage and was mostly written by Theodore Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss).

You can definitely discern streams or currents in the documentary category; most famously, between 1995 and 2000, five of the six Oscar-winning films were about Jewish and/or Holocaust-related topics. (Spike Lee got in trouble for observing that his 1997 film “4 Little Girls” had no chance up against “The Long Way Home,” a film about Jewish emigration to Israel. He was right.) In 1994, the year the Academy spurned “Hoop Dreams,” it awarded the Oscar to “Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision,” a little-seen film made by Freida Lee Mock, who happened to be governor of the Academy’s documentary branch at the time.

In recent years, the documentary branch has veered from righteous political anger to a desire to reward films that reach out to broad, general audiences. So we get Oscars for Alex Gibney’s “Taxi to the Dark Side” (2007) and Jean-Xavier de Lestrade’s “Murder on a Sunday Morning” (2001) — terrific films, both with very little box-office appeal — and also for “March of the Penguins,” “An Inconvenient Truth” and “Man on Wire.” One-time renegades Moore and Morris have come in from the cold, although arguably neither guy won for his best movie: Moore’s “Bowling for Columbine” and Morris’ “The Fog of War.” One can definitely continue to kvetch about the omissions. I don’t know whose dog Steve James ran over, but it’s absolutely disgraceful that “The Interrupters,” his moving and dramatic film about ex-gang members trying to stop Chicago street violence, was left out this year. As for Asif Kapadia’s “Senna,” I guess it wasn’t groundbreaking in any way, but it’s still an exciting film that put a lot of ordinary people’s butts in the seats.

However, if the Academy’s documentary branch wants to reach across the partisan divide into red-state America, it has the perfect candidate this year in Daniel Lindsay and T.J. Martin’s “Undefeated,” a “Hoop Dreams”-style story about sports and society that inspired me and made me mad in about equal portions. (I’ll discuss the other nominees on another occasion, but here they are: Danfung Dennis’ war-veteran saga “Hell and Back Again,” Marshall Curry’s “If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front,” Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s “Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory,” and Wim Wenders’ 3-D dance documentary, “Pina.”)

“Undefeated” is a tale of the 99 percent for sure, except that the young men who play for coach Bill Courtney’s Manassas High School Tigers, on the north side of Memphis, are a lot closer to the bottom 1 percent than the top. They live in a physically derelict and economically devastated neighborhood, where few households have two parents and few of those parents have full-time jobs. Before Courtney, a local businessman who lives in a luxurious suburban home, volunteered to coach the Manassas football team for no pay, they were a bedraggled program who’d gone almost 14 years without winning a single game. As he explains it, the school kept the team going by essentially renting it out as a sacrificial goat to suburban schools on a pay-for-play basis. The Manassas players would be bused out to some white neighborhood, take a whipping from some better-coached and better-organized team, and go home with a pizza and a check for a few thousand dollars. Courtney’s mission at Manassas is evangelical, in several senses of the word. He wants to create a winning football team, he wants to teach these boys self-respect and encourage them to pull themselves out of their dismal circumstances, and he wants to serve as surrogate father and mentor to young men with very few constructive role models.

If Courtney doesn’t officially want to serve as a spiritual guide, or spread the gospel of Jesus Christ, it’s probably fair to say that in the context of Southern high school football, that stuff just comes with the territory. This is an old-school, you-are-there documentary, completely free of judgment or extraneous commentary, and the pervasive quality of religious faith in the lives of Courtney and his team — along with the sense that team sports, and especially football, is itself a sort of spiritual quest — is just a given. Courtney stops just short of praying to God for victory before a big game, but when Manassas goes on an unlikely winning streak during the 2009 season, he doesn’t discourage the view that their comeback victories over bigger, richer and whiter schools might just be the will of the Big Guy.

I’ve already mentioned race more in this article than anyone does in the film, maybe because the racial dynamics of Manassas, and of Memphis and Tennessee and the United States, are so obvious to everyone involved. When Courtney tries to get his troubled defensive star, Chavis Daniels, to get in his car for a chat, he jokes, “You don’t like to ride with white people, Chavis? Is that it?” That might be the only time in “Undefeated” that anyone officially notices that Courtney has a different skin color than all the players on his team, and from virtually everyone on the Manassas campus.

To be honest, the whole idea that high school football is this almost mythological test of masculine character is profoundly alien to me. Still, there’s no disputing that Bill Courtney has touched and transformed his players’ lives, at absolutely no tangible benefit to himself. His brand of hyper-Christian caring and tough love — after one practice, he tells the team he must go home and pray for forgiveness for cursing so much — is hungrily embraced by these young men who’ve hardly ever had anyone treat them with dignity, let alone a wealthy white man who didn’t have to. Manassas’ unlikely 2009 run makes for great drama, as do the heartbreaking tales of the team’s three stars: Daniels, academic standout and undersized lineman Montrail “Money” Brown and O.C. Brown, a massive offensive lineman and genuine NCAA prospect.

But if O.C. and Money are getting out of north Memphis, partly through their own skill sets and partly because Courtney gave them a leg up at the right moment, what the hell is going to happen to the rest of the kids at Manassas? Should you have to be a football star — and one with a rich, white, well-connected coach — to have any shot of escaping from crime and poverty and a dismal, half-abandoned neighborhood? “Undefeated” is a genuine crowd-pleaser, a rousing and inspirational flowers-in-the-junkyard fable of hope and possibility in grim circumstances. But I can’t help thinking that if you step back from the immensely likable Bill Courtney and his football team, the bigger picture is of a screwed-up society that can offer no hope to millions, and is throwing away entire generations of young people.

“Undefeated” opens this week in Los Angeles and New York, with wider release to follow.

Viewed through a long lens, “Windfall” is about much more than the hidden costs and unexpected side effects of wind-power generation, or about a citizens’ uprising in the tiny town of Meredith, N.Y., in the Catskill region 150 or so miles northwest of Manhattan. (Mind you, both are gripping stories.) It’s about the American tendency — and very likely the human tendency — to look for magic-bullet solutions to complicated social and economic problems, where none are available. It’s a microcosmic version of the political divisions — between left and right, environmentalists and free-marketers, corporations and citizens — that have virtually paralyzed our republic. It’s a reminder that whenever a virtually unregulated industry (as in this case) offers capitalists a chance to defraud the little guy and make a bundle, they’ll do it. It’s a tantalizing case study that suggests ordinary people still have the power to steer a course between faceless bureaucracies and greedy capitalists, but only just — and only if they can find a way to overcome their differences and work together.

In the abstract, wind power sounds like a good thing to nearly everybody. It relies on an essentially infinite resource, carries little or none of the obvious environmental downside of coal or oil, and presents no Fukushima-style doomsday scenario. Wind generation has become a major focus of venture capital; Israel includes video of a hearing a few years ago at which T. Boone Pickens told a congressional committee that he could imagine, in the relatively short term, 20 to 25 percent of the country’s electricity demand being fulfilled by wind and other renewables. I have no way to evaluate that claim, but the experts Israel consults in the film think it’s hokum. Given the inherently inconstant nature of wind, they argue, it’s not a stable or permanent solution to our energy crisis, and is unlikely ever to amount to more than a drop in the bucket.

Setting aside the discussion of whether it’s worthwhile to pursue wind power in the first place — and we shouldn’t really set that aside — there might be locations in the Great Plains states, the Southwest and the high western deserts where wind farms, even on the enormous scale imagined by Pickens, would do no great harm. But as people in Meredith and numerous other communities in the wind-friendly rural Northeast and Great Lakes region have discovered, living anywhere near those gargantuan wind-harnessing engines is quite a different matter. These days, the typical industrial wind turbine is around 400 feet high — the height of a 40-story building, or twice the length of a jumbo jet. The blades alone can weigh upward of 35 tons, and the entire assembly anywhere from 150 to 400 tons (resting on a platform of concrete and rebar, which itself may be 30 feet deep and weigh several hundred tons). It’s an enormous construction site, culminating in a high-voltage electrical device, that emits a 24/7 whoppa-whoppa-whoppa noise and incessant low-frequency vibration, and is topped with a brilliant flashing light. By daylight, there’s the nightmarish strobe effect — the vast rotating shadow that falls across an entire neighborhood when the turbine is between you and the sun. (While the question of whether it’s actually unhealthful to live near a turbine is unresolved, it’s definitely unpleasant.) If your neighbor put one up in her backyard without asking permission, how would you feel?

As it happens, I have a personal interest in the events and location of “Windfall,” because I spend summers in a town just a few miles from Meredith. But nothing about the town or its surrounding area (in Delaware County, N.Y., one of the poorest and least populated counties in the Northeast) is untypical of rural America. Meredith has a mix of longtime residents and big-city emigrants, and its longtime dairy-farm economy has largely collapsed in recent years, partly replaced by an unstable mixture of tourist-oriented businesses, craft initiatives and boutique organic farming. These social tensions came to the fore, predictably, during the wind-power debate, with the major landowners and dairy farmers on one side — hoping for the rather skimpy royalties paid by the corporate investors in wind — and many “recent” New York City arrivals, convinced that the region’s economic future depends on its unspoiled landscapes, on the other. (I use the scare quotes because anyone who’s lived in Delaware County less than 30 years is often viewed as a newcomer.)

People on both sides of the issue in Meredith assumed at first that the anti-turbine forces were an elitist minority, partly because the town board had always been dominated by the same landowning families, and partly because wind-power companies had signed people up to secret agreements that forbade them from discussing anything about the relationship. What ensued was a fascinating lesson in democracy (and a version of the same lesson the Tea Party and its supporters may learn later this year). After 826 people — more than half of Meredith’s total population — signed a petition opposing the town board’s pro-development policy on wind turbines, it turned out that the people who thought of themselves as the “real” residents were in the minority, and the jig was up for the wind industry in this one tiny corner of America. Yet as one newly elected board member reflects at the end of the film, nobody came out of this fight feeling good. A formerly harmonious community is now bitterly divided, and the Mitt Romney-style venture capitalists of wind power will just move on to the next town and sell their pseudo-green poisoned chalice to somebody else.

“Windfall” opens this week at the Quad Cinema in New York and the Facets Cinémathèque in Chicago. It opens Feb. 9 at the Art House Cinema 502 in Ogden, Utah, Feb. 24 at the Clinton Street Theater in Portland, Ore., and March 2 at the Northwest Film Forum in Seattle, with other cities and festival screenings to follow. It’s also available on-demand from cable, satellite and online providers, including Amazon, iTunes and VUDU.