Doc Corner: 'Rewind' and 'On the Record'

by Glenn Dunks

To put one’s own story to film often takes some form of personal courage. To not allow any sort of emotional distance between the traumas and the pains of life and the audience will always be a tough line for many to cross. It is why documentaries are so often labelled as merely grim or depressing and placed in a metaphorical too-hard basket. It’s true that many are indeed an emotional trial of sorts, but to watch survivors speak directly to us is one of the things I most cherish about non-fiction filmmaking.

As I watched and listened to the stories of Sasha Joseph Neulinger, Drew Dixon and others unfold in two new documentaries, Rewind and On the Record, I found myself captivated and angry. Angry that this happened in the first place and angry that these films aren’t being spoken about as important works of film...

Particularly the former, directed by Neulinger himself, which is its own form of heroic self-analysis that unfolds with a knowing glance towards cinema’s own habits of disguising the truth behind the flash of the camera’s happy filter.

Not that this makes it easy to watch, of course, but it does make it worthy of closer attention and patience than perhaps words like harrowing or horrific might suggest to some. It’s a precisely told story of abuse that unravels like a nesting doll under the first-person direction of its subject. Told predominantly through Neulinger’s adult search for answers and the home movies that show his story as one hidden in plain sight. Filmed predominantly by his father (himself a regional Emmy-winning documentarian), this footage charts Sasha’s journey as a child of gifted potential to suicidal within a matter of years, evolving throughout his early teen years as he sought to have his abusers held accountable.

Potent, powerful stuff as it is, but it is what Neulinger manages to say about the role of the camera that elevates it as the best documentary of 2020 so far. The way people are so often performative in front of the lens, masking whatever it is they ache to say. And then later how that very same camera can be a tool to be open about the truth. The way that anybody could watch this video footage and be completely none-the-wiser, but which with just a few specs of the truth we can decipher them with greater ease. A look here, a gesture there. I marvelled at the way Neulinger and his editor Avela Grenier (also a co-producer) were able to unveil its story with care, each new revelation a thudding shock to make us and its subjects re-assess what we saw before. That filmmaking isn’t his profession—Rewind is a debut feature and its closing segments suggest this was the one film he wanted to make—is startling considering the wells of emotion he was able to excavate and smartly critical eye he able to lend to well-worn storytelling devices.

On the Record is the more polished of the two, a trilogy-capping entry in Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering’s series of documentaries about sexual abuse. This one follows the Oscar-nominated pair of The Invisible War in 2012 and The Hunting Ground in 2015. Notably, On the Record is their first on these themes since the explosion of the #MeToo movement (and the first that Ziering is a credited co-director on rather than just as a producer). They have smartly swerved from the more expected centre of the story and focused on a part that intersects with race. It’s here that On the Record is at its best and allows for some of its most memorably incisive moments.

At its core is Drew Dixon, a music industry executive and A&R wunderkind who left the music industry after being raped by her Def Jam boss and mentor Russell Simmons (which he has denied) only to return and find more abusive behaviour at the hands of L.A. Reid at Arista Records. Her face, her voice, even just the way she speaks are all so mesmerizing that when she tells her story she becomes more of a authorial voice to the film than Dick and Ziering—which is probably for the better since Dick and Ziering are both white filmmakers and On the Record’s other subjects are highly critical of the predominate white face of #MeToo, while the film itself has been more broadly targeted for criticism by the likes of Ava DuVernay following the departure of Oprah Winfrey as a producer.

I could do without unnecessary and distracting cutaways to empty beds and shower drains as she and her co-accusers (including Sil Lai Abrams and Jenny Lumet most prominently) tell the details of their encounters with Simmons (something it frustratingly shares with many documentaries on similar subjects including last year’s Harvey Weinstein doc Untouchable). On the Record nevertheless comes together as a evisceration of the man and the sexualisation in music that he helped market. Nothing is more powerful here than hearing these black women detail how a variety of societal norms failed them, and how they navigate the world through different shades of skin colour and where men have lorded a particular brand of power over a generation of black women.

Release: Rewind is streaming on PBS, and On the Record is streaming on the newly-launched HBO Max.

Oscar chances: I can see Rewind appealing to the documentary branch and they have shown admiration for Dick and Ziering's work before. Depending on eligibility they could make headway to the longlist at least.