Full Frame 2021: Part 2

It’s a few days into the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, now in its 24^th year, and I’m continuing to make my way through a plethora of non-fiction offerings. As this is an online-only event, I sorely miss spending time at the Carolina Theater, and the Marriot Convention Center in Durham where I could hobnob with other film fans, and watch these brand spanking new docs on the big screen. Due to the pandemic, the Carolina will be closed until later this month so right now, the main cinema, Fletcher Hall, looks like it does above (except for the lights probably being off):

Without further ado, here’s the last few docs that I’ve watched.

TRUMAN & TENNESSEE: AN INTIMATE CONVERSATION (Dir. Lisa Immordino Vreeland, 2020)

The relationship between two of the most famous American writers of their time, novelist Truman Capote and playwright Tennessee Williams, is lovingly explored in this beautifully bitchy biodoc.

Director Vreeland, whose film about her fashion icon mother, DIANA VREELAND: THE EYE HAS TO TRAVEL, was shown at Full Frame in 2012, weaves together a narrative anchored by excerpts of Capote and Williams’ separate appearances on The David Frost Show in 1969, ’70, and ’72. In between these load-bearing clips, are hundreds of photos (some never seen before), archival footage, scratchy audio recordings, and sequences that feature voice-over work by Jim Parsons (you know, Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory) reciting Capote’s words, while Zachary Quinto (uh, oh yeah - Spock!), recites William’s.

After meeting in 1940, when Capote was 16 and Williams was 29, both writers burst onto the literary scene in the ‘40s. Their paths crossed over the next few decades as they each had their runs of successes, including Capote’s In Cold Blood, and Breakfast at Tiffany’s (both books were adapted into popular movies), and William’s theatrical productions, A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. The question keeps coming up – were they best friends or best enemies?

I’ll make a case for the latter as the juiciest material here involves the wordsmiths mercilessly mocking the other’s work. Most deliciously, Williams sums up Capote saying “I don’t think bitchery is the most attractive element in human character, but bitchery is beginning to be a very strong selling commodity in writing.” There is a wealth of wit in TRUMAN & TENNESSEE, Vreeland’s often poetic portrait of these two troubled artists, which as a conversation is as intimate as it is brutal.  

And finally for today, a couple of doc shorts (short docs?):

THE RIFLEMAN (Dir. Sierra Pettengill, 2021)

This nearly 20-minute film is the story of Harlan Carter, who went from being a Laredo, Texas Border Patrol Agent to a leader in the National Rifle Association. But before his ascension in the NRA, a 17-year old Carter shot and killed Ramón Casiano, a 15 year-old Mexican, with a shotgun in 1931. Carter only served two years in jail for the racist murder as the conviction was overturned, but the incident was largely unknown until 1981 when it was uncovered by journalists.

Like Director Pettengill’s only feature-length doc, 2017’s THE REAGAN SHOW, the short relies mostly on archival footage, but also contains shots of relevant newspaper and magazine clippings. The narrative is effective, but the film goes by too fast. It might have been better as a longer study of the man who coined the NRA’s slogan, “Guns don’t kill people, people do,” but it does timely touch on the debate over gun control that obviously still rages strongly today.

WE WERE THERE TO BE THERE (Dirs. Mike Plante & Jason Willis, 2021)

The American bands, the Cramps and the Mutants, are punk legends, but the gig that this film details may be just as legendary. In 1978, both bands performed a show at a California mental institution that was shot with a black-and-white video camera, and a single microphone, by an outfit named Target Video. The short, whose title comes from the words of one of the concert’s 100+ attendees of the event at Napa State Mental Hospital, features the patients losing their inhibitions to the loud, raw, in-your-face tunage. It’s an entertaining, and punchy punk short, that runs over 25-minutes, but the existence of another film, The Cramps: Live at Napa State Mental Hospital, makes me think that the footage may not be as rare as it’s billed here.

Stay tuned for the third and final installment in my coverage of Full Frame 2021, and if you haven't already, check out Part 1.

More later...