Thinking about how popular documentary can adapt to the festival film – or vice versa.
Brimstone & Glory
dir. Viktor Jakovleski, 2017, Mexico/Germany/US
genre: poetic/observational/character-driven
I’ve had some mixed feelings about the popularity of the general strain of poetic documentary, because I don’t see it as requiring extended rapport with its subjects. The makers of Brimstone and Glory – direcotr Viktor Jakovleski and cinematographer Tobias van dem Borne – spent three successive years in the Mexican town of Tultepec, which is famous for its annual Dionysian fireworks celebration.
While a shorter shooting schedule could have produced a locked-down-camera, pictorialist poetic doc of the fireworks display, I believe that the extended time on the ground led to a different, and better, film.
First, there’s an immersive quality to the film – not quite Sensory Ethnography but a similar evocation of subjectivity through camerawork and a stylistic bricolage. It is a pictorialist film, particularly in its capturing of the fireworks displays with high-frame-rate digital cameras.
But it also alternates its focus. I could sense 4 separate lines of documentary development:
1) The awe-inspiring beauty of the fireworks
2) The dangers involved for the pyrotechnic designers (not working with fully scientific or safe protocols) an
3) The longstanding cultural role the celebration has for the townspeople
4) The economic hardship for rural Mexico, that forms the background here
Obviously these are related and overlap in some respects. But the documentary does emphasize them in succession, and the styles often change between them (more interview here, more aerial and Go Pro photography there). It’s something less formalized than an outright expository structure (which one could outline) and bigger in scale than a structural “beat.” I wrote about contrapuntal form in relation to No Data Plan, and something similar is at play here, though less disjunctive. Maybe more alternating than contrapuntal.
In all, it’s a sign at the way festival documentary style works in dialogue with more popular documentary and with the material itself.