- One of the animated images from Watchers of the Sky
One must tread carefully when critiquing a documentary like Watchers of the Sky, which concludes its weeklong run at the Music Box tonight. The film nobly raises awareness of genocidal campaigns and the humanitarian efforts to stop them, but offers little in the way of visual interest or rhetorical finesse. Too often critics respond to the challenge of writing about films like these—call them content-driven docs—by focusing almost exclusively on the subject matter and issuing judgment based on whether the information is interesting or newsworthy. I’m skeptical of this practice. Movies are my beat, and as Roger Ebert liked to say, a movie is not what it is about, but how it is about. If one disregards the how of a film, then it’s debatable as to whether his or her writing still functions as film criticism. And if formal matters are deemed irrelevant in the discussion of a film, then why have film critics write about it at all?
By contrast Watchers of the Sky goes down all too smoothly. The profiles are fairly straightforward, summarizing the subjects’ careers and keeping personal information to a minimum. The imagery Belzberg uses to illustrate these stories is generally mundane—talking heads in front of bookshelves, old newsreel footage of refugees, exterior shots of the UN and the Hague—which has the adverse effect of creating a sense of familiarity with the material. As with so many content-driven documentaries, one gets the impression that the filmmakers discovered little in shooting that they hadn’t already intended to present in the finished film. (One might say that these films don’t actually document anything, but merely illustrate a report that could have been transmitted in prose and still images.)
- Shoah
