Jonathan Demme’s documentary about Haitian journalist/activist Jean Dominique gets a quick recommendation from me. It doesn’t reinvent the form, nor is it the one film to see about Haiti’s political struggles over the last 40 years. But–kind of like the doc on William Eggleston–this film emerges from a personal relationship between filmmaker and subject; its talking head footage of Dominique was collected over a few years, during his periods of exile in NYC, and after Dominique’s assassination Demme spliced it together, fleshed out the history, caught up with some others.
What I very much appreciated about the film was that it didn’t stop to provide tons of explication–it demands that you either inform yourself or pay close attention, rather than giving you Haiti 101 on a plate. I also loved Dominique, garrulous and theatrical and impassioned–the film hews to his personality as a vehicle for conveying the storm of Haiti’s history, but never in that too-pat bio-doc format that collapses personal and national histories into one shared story. Instead, we are learning about Dominique… and necessarily, with this committed social activist, we engage with Haiti.
The film also displays some of Demme’s trademark style. When speakers describe gunshots or crashes, the soundtrack echoes them; there are scattered quick-zooms and flash-cuts which energize without ever seeming sensational; at one point, Demme rewinds and replays Dominique’s description of an event, as if scratching and dubbing. (In other words, the film at moments plays like musical improvisation, a sensibility amplified by Wyclef Jean’s cool soundtrack.) It’d be interesting to stop and really examine Demme’s varied work in dialogue with itself–to think about how his use of the head-on shot, the speaker directly looking at the camera, conveys in both his fictions and his documentaries a clear social aesthetic, one grounded in a humanism that the apparatus of filmmaking can capture…. Recommended. A good film.
I also liked this. I even posted on it last July. This must be the first time I have seen a movie before Reynolds and he responds by ignoring my post. Well, it wasn’t much of a post.
Sorry, Howell! As apology, here’s his whole post:
“On the subject of documentaries, I just watched The Agronomist, directed by Jonathan Demme, about a Haitian journalist who he interviewed several times over more than a decade before he was assassinated in 2000 (the journalist, not Demme). It appears to have been made by Demme out of friendship or love rather than craft because it is a very basic, straightforward documentary. Lots of interviews interspersed with some stock newsreel footage.
What makes it enjoyable is the subject, Jean Dominique, who is an almost archetypal voluble Frenchman, constantly appearing to mug for the camera. And it is fascinating to hear him on his radio station in Haiti, speaking perfect middle class French, and then on the stump, speaking to farmers, when he uses a creole dialect “