Over a month ago at the press conference kicking off SFIFF 49, Linda Blackaby announced the documentary line-up, adding that these selections were “often some of the most popular films in our festival.” The gifted director of programming for the San Francisco Film Society noted that a dozen of them would compete in the Golden Gate Awards, and 11 more filled the slate of nonfiction features representing 13 countries. There’s not an emperor penguin among them.

Blackaby singled out titles dealing with political subject matter, including Fernando E. Solanas’s THE DIGNITY OF THE NOBODIES/LA DIGNIDAD DE LOS NADIES and Chris Hegedus and Nick Doob’s AL FRANKEN: GOD SPOKE. Political activism may be the common thread linking them together, but these features unspool as two distinct approaches to documentary filmmaking.

No one embodies the notion of politically committed cinema more than Solanas, who co-authored the 1969 manifesto entitled “Towards a Third Cinema.” Through language, he and Octavio Getino drew an analogy between filmmaking and guerrilla combat, referring to the camera as “a rifle,” a film as “a detonator,” and a projector as “a gun that can shoot 24 frames per second.” With the incendiary THE HOUR OF THE FURNACES/LA HORA DE LOS HORNOS (1968), the Argentine filmmakers fired a blast heard throughout Latin America. The seminal film dissected the political, cultural and economic struggles of their homeland, while urging a call to arms.

Solanas returns to Argentina and the same ideological landscape with THE DIGNITY OF THE NOBODIES, a second installment in a four-documentary series. Armed with a DV minicam, he revisits many of the same factors that contributed to the chaos of the late 1960s: concern over Argentina’s leadership, dependence on foreign investments and corporate capital, the plundering of public assets, and the crushing poverty and unemployment of the working class.

In 10 stunning vignettes, Solanas wields his camera to witness the problems, protests, and other forms of organized resistance uniting a cross section of society in solidarity. Communal soup kitchens with scant resources feed the hungry. Public Hospital workers tirelessly toil to treat those dying from curable illnesses; the sick miss appointments because they have no money to take the bus or need to see a doctor before the average 6-month waiting period. Unarmed female farmers stop banks from auctioning off their small land holdings by belting out the national anthem, drowning out the judges and policeman trying to sell the property.

Solanas constructs a Marxist polemic with a punch line: Watch the defiant nobodies become empowered somebodies—and participate in this culture of hope and change.

Fly-on-the-wall cinema doesn’t get any better than Chris Hegedus and Nick Doob’s AL FRANKEN: GOD SPOKE. Introducing the filmmakers at a Castro Theatre screening, SFFS executive director Graham Leggat referred to them as “masters of their craft” and recalled, “What’s important is when they’re in a room, they’re not the most important thing in the room.”

Long-time collaborators of direct cinema legend D.A. Pennebaker, the co-directors entered the war room of Al Franken with their unobtrusive, candid cameras. The former Saturday Night Live performer-turned-activist author and Air America Radio host is a funny guy with a serious cause. The title of Franken’s 2003 bestseller, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right, sums up his mission to expose the distortions of the right-wing media and Bush administration with his “flaming sword of justice.”

“What I do isn’t propaganda,” states the colorful Franken. “What I do is jujitsu. They say something ridiculous, and then I subject them to scorn and ridicule. That’s my job.”

Franken’s much publicized dust-up with Bill O’Reilly of Fox News and his verbal sparring with conservative Ann Coulter make for great drama. Hegedus and Doob edit television and public-appearance footage of these confrontations to compare the opposing viewpoints, but always allow viewers to make up their own minds.

The show-and-tell documentary sketches a personal, as well as a political portrait of Franken. Family photographs, home movies, and Saturday Night Live skits are seamlessly woven into footage of the burly Minnesotan at home and on the road as the 2004 presidential campaign goes to the polls. Engrossing and uproariously entertaining, the film captures Franken’s dogged determination to make a difference.

In the Q&A following the screening, Nick Doob commented on the difficulty of distributing this film, noting, “It’s a little quirky and a little edgy.”

Whether presenting political activism in Argentina or America, these documentary films are two of the 23 real-life movies that matter, now playing at the San Francisco International Film Festival.

Susan Tavernetti
San Francisco Bay Area journalist and educator

Images of Fernando E. Solanas, protesting in THE DIGNITY OF THE NOBODIES/LA DIGNIDAD DE LOS NADIES, female farmers in THE DIGNITY OF THE NOBODIES/LA DIGNIDAD DE LOS NADIES, Chris Hegedus, and Al Franken in AL FRANKEN: GOD SPOKE