Doc Fortnight, the Museum of Modern Art’s annual festival of documentary film, is dominated this year by works that look to the past and scrutinize how it is dealt with in the present. There’s an urgency of reclamation in many of the global views on display, an insistence on reexamining history and exploring obfuscated narratives and voices that are being pushed to extinction.In “Wake (Subic),” the documentarian, archivist, and journalist John Gianvito returns to the Philippines in the second part of a massive project concerning the dangerous and unresolved effects of United States occupation. Over an extremely emotional 277 minutes — with a 10-minute intermission — Gianvito details the environmental damage left behind in Subic Bay, the former site of an American military base, and the effects on the local population. The film offers a close examination of the country’s twisted history with the United States and includes interviews with people who have been physically and emotionally affected by destructive colonialism, as well as activists who have been tirelessly working to make sure this story does not disappear.Sergei Loznitsa’s “Maidan” (2014), about the protests in Kiev that led to the ouster of former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, is one of the best political films made in the past decade. In his latest work, “The Event,” the filmmaker returns for a reexamination of revolutionary change. Using footage shot in the streets of Saint Petersburg (formerly Leningrad) in 1991 during the months before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Loznitsa reconstructs the optimistic feeling of political upheaval. People flood the streets, some unsure about what is happening, but with the feeling that things are heading in a different direction. Like “Maidan,” there is a clear preoccupation with the people who make up protest movements, and the beauty in organizing. But at the same time, the optimism is also undercut by the audience’s knowledge of the future. “The Event” is a reminder and a call to action, a bridge between the optimism of the past and the ongoing struggles of the present.A similar tug-of-war between the past and the present is evident in “The Great Wall,” Tadhg O’Sullivan’s film that places voiceover narration reading from Franz Kafka’s “The Building of the Great Wall of China” with footage of the different literal and figurative borders that are used throughout Europe. Sweeping images offer a critique of the way countries exert power over people, looking beyond walls and wire fences into the control rooms of modern surveillance teams and the corridors of capital. Division is key here, and O’Sullivan, through poetic rewriting, is linking historical narratives of exclusion with the under-acknowledged ways in which Europe is advancing the migrant crisis.A more personal form of rewriting history can be found in Adam and Zack Khalil’s “INAATE/SE/ [it shines
a certain way. to a certain place./it flies. falls./],” which makes an attempt, through a variety of different formal strategies, to reclaim the narratives of the Ojibway of Sault Ste. Marie, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Using an ancient Ojibway parable called the Seven Fires Prophecy, the brothers remove the area’s history from the local museums, which codify and promote a narrative that is far removed from experience, and reframe it as a transgressive and often hilarious critique of storytelling and colonialism. Incorporating scripted scenes, interviews, and documentary footage pasted together through agile editing, it offers different ways to think about its subject and how the medium of film can be used to present new avenues to see and feel.Doc Fortnight runs February 19-29 at MoMA.
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