Forget BABYLON, Watch These Docs Instead
Get actual Hollywood history, not Damien Chazelle's fantasies.
Happy Boxing Day! (I once thought this meant the sport of boxing.) Whether you’re in recovery mode or coasting off the good times, hope everyone is having a nice day.
I’m admittedly a bit depressed by how little there is to see out in theaters while at home in Houston — this is usually the week for platform releases to start breaking wide or for earlier releases to show they really have the gas in them. In 2022, it’s pretty much only The Fabelmans, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, and December releases to choose from.
One such film I would not recommend seeing is Damien Chazelle’s Babylon, a three-hour proof that the filmmaker has in fact seen Singin’ in the Rain. I find Hollywood history fascinating, particularly the early years when the industry was only just blooming, and yet this epic tribute film is a bloated bore. (Early box office numbers show that, perhaps, no one needs my warning.)
If you do insist on seeing Babylon, I would recommend reading stories like these in Vanity Fair, IndieWire, or Vulture that give additional context to the lives Chazelle fictionalizes here. And if you want to supplement your understanding with even more knowledge, here are ten documentaries that will provide you with better insight into cinematic history than Chazelle’s orgiastic bore.
The Story of Film: An Odyssey, free with ads on Tubi
If you want the whole scope of film history that Damien Chazelle tries to cram into a few minutes (no further spoilers for the most bonkers sequence I’ve seen in 2022), actually take the time to sit with Mark Cousins’ textbook-quality The Story of Film: An Odyssey. My film history pre-1945 college seminar assigned the relevant chapters of this comprehensive tome; I just went ahead and finished the whole thing. Mark Cousins’ survey of the medium’s history is comprehensive and expansive in equal measure. He both tells us what we need to know and expands our ideas of canon beyond the obviously established greats. This is absolutely worth the massive investment — so much so that it really demands a special call-out up top.
De Palma, HBO Max
Brian De Palma had among the most eclectic careers of the Movie Brats that emerged in “New Hollywood,” directing everything from acclaimed horror (Sisters, Carrie) to blockbusters (Scarface, Mission: Impossible) to sexually provocative thrillers (Dressed to Kill, Body Double) and countless other unclassifiable personal projects. He gets to tell his own story for the record in De Palma, a documentary record somewhat bafflingly co-directed by none other than Noah Baumbach. It’s a blast to hear De Palma speak so frankly about artistry and industry alike, tying together what seem like disparate threads from a varied filmography that has seen real highs and lows.
From Caligari to Hitler, Kino Now
It’s worth seeking out the Kino Now platform if you don’t know it to stream From Caligari to Hitler, especially if you’re a history buff. This documentary draws the line between the dark fantasies conjured by German Expressionist masters in the 1920s Weimar Republic and the looming specter of Nazism in the country. It’s a tough case to make, but director Rüdiger Suchsland does an excellent job illistrating the the sociological theories of Segfried Kracauer to make a persuasive argument that film felt the tremors of a restless nation reeling from the Great War ahead of the fascist earthquake.
The Great Buster: A Celebration, MUBI (and free with ads on Tubi)
The late director Peter Bogdanovich, a peer of the aforementioned De Palma, is his generation’s closest link between the old studio system and the iconoclastic mavericks who rebuilt the town in their own image. Long before film was treated as something worthy of academic study and directors were worth treating as artists, Bogdanovich would sit down with reliable studio hands like Howard Hawks to learn their craft. The Great Buster: A Celebration is two parts biographical documentary, one part cinema studies breakdown of the great silent comedian Buster Keaton. The structure of the work is a little odd, but the insights and knowledge gained outshine the strange construction.
Hitchcock/Truffaut, free with ads on Tubi
Your favorite contemporary filmmakers idolize Master of Suspense Alfred Hitchcock and French New Wave vanguard figure François Truffaut. The two titans of cinema met in the 1960s for a series of converstaions about their work that then became a legendary tome, with Truffaut the young disciple engaging with his then-underappreciated director around the art of cinema. Kent Jones, then-director of the New York Film Festival, provides both an account of those conversations in Hitchcock/Truffaut as well as their importance to those who came in both men’s wake. It’s a skeleton key to both of their filmmographies and, by extesnino, the last fifty years of film.
Is That Black Enough for You?!?, Netflix
The most recently released entry on this list just dropped on Netflix! Elvis Mitchell, formerly a critic for The New York Times, takes a journey both historical and personal back into the golden age of Blaxploitation cinema with Is That Black Enough for You?!? Mitchell contextualizes this brief flame of possibility for Black representation behind and in front of the camera, elevating the successes to their proper pedestal while also leaving space to lament the careers that dwindled without achieving their full potential. My only regret is that I couldn’t immediately gobble up all the titles Mitchell references in his documentary.
Jodorowsky’s Dune, Starz (and rental)
Before Denis Villeneuve successfully wrangled Frank Herbert’s Dune into submission, David Lynch tried in his own misbegotten adaptation. And before that, surrealist master Alejandro Jodorowsky tried … but never got his version off the ground. Jodorowsky’s Dune is the story of the greatest movie never made. Or, at the very least, it’s the most influential movie never made given the way his storyboards and concepts dispersed throughout the industry and influenced countless sci-fi epics that did make it to the silver screen.
Los Angeles Plays Itself, MUBI (and rental)
For many years, Thom Andersen’s Los Angeles Plays Itself was a kind of elusive grail for cinephiles — this nearly three-hour video essay faced challenges for exhibition due to rights issues clearing the countless clips featured within its sprawling expanses. If you think you’re ready for something like a graduate seminar on the interplay between image and reality, this will challenge and compel you greatly. Andersen foils the cinematic fantasy of “Hollywood” with the actuality of “Los Angeles,” showing the strange patina that befalls a town that’s been conjured as a magical city of angels … and yet a stand-in for just about every other place in America. It’s at once a star tour of the city’s illustrious history in imagery and an undermining of celluloid’s claims to faithfully transmit what the camera-eye observes.
Spielberg, HBO Max
If you’d rather not filter fact from fable in Steven Spielberg’s auto-fictional The Fabelmans, kick back and let the documentary Spielberg spoon-feed you the history. Susan Lacy is not doing anything of note within the auspices of the Wikipedia-style biodoc, but she’s a master of the format all the same and makes this journey one worth devouring. You’ll hear from Spielberg himself as well as his distinguished collaborators, plus get a tour back through the movies themselves. It’s two-and-a-half-hours well-spent for anyone ever touched by a Spielberg film.
They'll Love Me When I'm Dead, Netflix
How did Orson Welles, director of canonical classic Citizen Kane, end up struggling to put together a film in the last decades of his life? The wunderkind-to-wasteland tale is an all-too-familiar Hollywood arc, yet documentarian Morgan Neville makes it feel fresh and exciting in They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead. Because Netflix at the height of its powers in 2018 could, they wrote a happy ending for Welles’ otherwise depressing end. Thanks to some industry devotees, Kickstarter backers, and their own corporate coffers, the company pushed Welles’ unfinished The Other Side of the Wind over the finish line and put it on their platform.
You can always keep up with my film-watching in real-time on the app Letterboxd. I’ve also compiled every movie I’ve ever recommended through this newsletter via a list on the platform as well.
Assuming you’ve watched Glass Onion on Netflix, here are some great listens with writer/director Rian Johnson:
I also found this reflection on the role of the critic from The New York Times’ food writer Pete Wells a very worthwhile use of time. A few years ago, I got the advice to read criticism in different disciplines, and it’s been invaluable:
The sociology student in me loves a good longitudinal study, and this year-long profile of director James Gray for GQ is a really great case for stories that capture the progression of time rather than just a moment of it.
Ahead of my top 10 films of 2022, subscribers got five suggested double features pairing unlikely bedfellows of the year’s new releases.
For The Playlist, I reviewed the late-breaking 2022 release The Pale Blue Eye. This sturdy mystery is now out in theaters and will hit Netflix on January 6.
My Darren Aronofsky rankings for /Film got a polishing with the addition of The Whale. Spoiler alert: it did not change the upper echelons of the list.
For Decider, I said stream it to Lena Dunham’s Sharp Stick and skip it to the absolute worst movie I saw in 2022, Collide (both are on Hulu).
Back to you on December 31 for — gasp — my top 10 movies of 2022.
Yours in service and cinema,
Marshall