WATERMARKS
It's really good to see that there is such an audience for documentary film. It used to be that the "D" word was the kiss o f death for any theatre daring to show a documentary film.
So it was with peasure that I found a full house in the screening room o f the Coolidge Corner Theatre yesterday afternoon for WATERMARKS, which had already been showing several weeks. Now it s true that the venue only seats 48 and that it was shown in video, and that it was Easter Sunday in a dominantly Jewish neighborhood, and that the film is a footnote to the Holocaust filmography, albeit a distinct one, and moving on its own terms and not because of its Holocaust setting. I, who am 65, was among the youngest in the audience, which is characteristic f audience for specialty films.
WATERMARKS, about a grup of Austrian Jewish women who reunite almost 70 years after their success as a swinning teamwhich was part of a larger sports club which was broken up when Hitler took over Austria. We get to know the women, spread all over the Western world and Middle East, and they have fascinating stories to tell. And, at the end, when they don their bathing suits forone last swim together, it is genuinely affecting.
But, as with many documentaries, it is more interesting fr its subject matter that as a film experience. It is heavily reliant on talking heads, and the narrative structure has a degree of predicibility, conveying little of the sense of discovery that, say, BORN INTO BROTHELS has.
For me, the most intriguing moment came, whe the octogenarians went to a Viennese club and heard a singer who loked right out of the Nazi youth corps, sing "The Buchenwald March." It was a genuinely disquiting moment in the narrative in a fim where less disquieting moments came from the felt, but not exceptional narratives of the women themseves.
So it was with peasure that I found a full house in the screening room o f the Coolidge Corner Theatre yesterday afternoon for WATERMARKS, which had already been showing several weeks. Now it s true that the venue only seats 48 and that it was shown in video, and that it was Easter Sunday in a dominantly Jewish neighborhood, and that the film is a footnote to the Holocaust filmography, albeit a distinct one, and moving on its own terms and not because of its Holocaust setting. I, who am 65, was among the youngest in the audience, which is characteristic f audience for specialty films.
WATERMARKS, about a grup of Austrian Jewish women who reunite almost 70 years after their success as a swinning teamwhich was part of a larger sports club which was broken up when Hitler took over Austria. We get to know the women, spread all over the Western world and Middle East, and they have fascinating stories to tell. And, at the end, when they don their bathing suits forone last swim together, it is genuinely affecting.
But, as with many documentaries, it is more interesting fr its subject matter that as a film experience. It is heavily reliant on talking heads, and the narrative structure has a degree of predicibility, conveying little of the sense of discovery that, say, BORN INTO BROTHELS has.
For me, the most intriguing moment came, whe the octogenarians went to a Viennese club and heard a singer who loked right out of the Nazi youth corps, sing "The Buchenwald March." It was a genuinely disquiting moment in the narrative in a fim where less disquieting moments came from the felt, but not exceptional narratives of the women themseves.
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