Doc Corner: Maite Alberdi’s 'The Eternal Memory'

By Glenn Charlie Dunks

After garnering a (somewhat surprising?) Oscar nomination for The Mole Agent in 2020, Chilean director Maite Alberdi’s next feature was always going to be on people’s radar. With The Eternal Memory she has yet again returned to stories of the elderly in society. Unlike Mole, which had a comedic touch (I’m surprised Diane Keaton hasn’t optioned the film rights), The Eternal Memory is strictly dramatic in its telling of the ravages of Alzheimer’s Disease to one of her home country’s most celebrated journalists and authors, Augusto Góngora.

As you might expect, this isn’t an easy watch. Anybody who has seen what dementia does to a person will recognise many of its subject’s hardest moments. It’s probably a hardened soul who wouldn’t shed a tear by its end.

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Doc Corner: Claire Simon's 'Our Body'

By Glenn Charlie Dunks

It isn’t too common for subjects in observational documentaries to turn to the camera and say, “I love cinema.” It’s even less common for this to happen as the subject in question lays on a medical table ready to be pulled under by anaesthesia and be operated on. None of the many, many subjects filmed by director and cinematographer Claire Simon in her new film Our Body (Notre corps) seem to mind all that much that a camera is gazed upon them in trying times. Filming through the gynaecological ward of a hospital in her home of France, her subjects often bare their souls as well as their flesh in the pursuit of landing upon something remarkably humane.

This is why I love cinema, and especially documentaries.

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Doc Corner: 'Barbie Nation' and 'Black Barbie'

By Glenn Charlie Dunks

If the box office is anything to go by, there is a very solid chance that most of The Film Experience’s readers have seen Greta Gerwig’s Barbie by now. You probably haven’t seen Barbie Nation: An Unauthorized Tour, a documentary from the time of VHS in 1998 that made comparatively far less noise but which is returning for its 25^th anniversary with a new so called “director’s cut” (I’ve never seen the original so can’t vouch for how different it is) and a digital release. It bares all of the hallmarks of an independent work of documentary from the ‘90s, from its video aesthetics to its barely-an-hour-long runtime. But that’s partly why it is so entertaining.

The other part is because it takes a remarkably similar tone to Gerwig’s film. Reverent, but critical and with interesting narrative avenues that are there because they, presumably, tickled its directors fancy.

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Doc Corner: 'Lakota Nation Vs. United States'

By Glenn Charlie Dunks

If you ask me (and if you’re here, I would hope you hold my opinion in some sort of esteem), the best work of documentary so far this decade has been Raoul Peck’s four-part Exterminate All The Brutes from 2021. An epic feat of production, it brought a cinematic lens to a HBO doc-series that unflinchingly charted a history of white possession and genocide. I am hardly surprised it won a Peabody Award, but couldn’t make traction with mainstream awards bodies. Its content was tough, not made any easier as a viewing experience by the blunt-force storytelling of Peck that, maybe, people didn't expect from a multi-part doc series.

I bring this up to introduce Lakota Nation Vs. United States for a few reasons. For starters, they share an interest (if you can call it that) in the atrocities committed against Indigenous populations. It’s also very well made; beautifully shot and carefully edited with keen precision. A history book slicing a papercut into the viewer’s fingertip.

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Doc Corner: 'Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed' and 'Wham!'

By Glenn Charlie Dunks

Rock Hudson’s story has been told many times either through his films, or more broadly, alongside Old Hollywood tales. Other times, it’s been shared through the stories of his collaborators and closefriends such as Doris Day or Elizabeth Taylor. Most prominently to modern audiences, the story of Rock Hudson has been told through the larger stories of AIDS and the inadvertent role that Hudson would play there as the first famous person to openly reveal they had acquired it in the mid 1980s. It is nice then to see him get the story all to himself, this time, in a film that celebrates rather than mourns...

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