Searching for Sugar Man, and Five Broken Cameras

  

I'm almost through the long list of movies I wanted to see before the February 24th Oscars. All that's left to be seen of the Best Picture nominations are: Les Miserables, Zero Dark Thirty and  Amour. Of the other movies I wanted to see, only The Master, Hyde Park on Hudson, and the documentaries remain, which brings me to Searching for Sugar Man. 

This South African documentary is the story of the search for an obscure sixties Detroit singer-songwriter named Sixto Rodriguez, who is credited (in the documentary) as being a catalyst for the anti-apartheid movement within the Afrikaner population. Rodriguez' voice is clear like Jose Feliciano's, melodious like John Denver's, with a vocal quality something like Bob Dylan's. The film itself employs a mix of old footage and creative camera work. It builds effectively from an air of mystery to revelation that still leaves a lot unexplained if not unexplored.
In short, it succeeded in revealing something without destroying the air of mystique surrounding this person - since he proved to be every bit as ineffable as the original myth about him had suggested.
Rodriguez was immensely popular in Apartheid South Africa, though this fact was not known outside of South Africa, not even to him. He passed his whole life after the recording of his two unsuccessful albums doing hard construction work in Detroit. Meanwhile, the South Africans had either invented or passed on the  myth of his suicide in front of a live concert audience by self-immolation in one story, by gunshot in another. That this myth survived until it was debunked by his eventual appearance on a South African stage was a testament to the complete isolation of Rodriguez from his fan base and indeed from the mainstream music scene of the day.

Five Broken Cameras is a documentary which follows the life of a Palestinian West Bank resident (Emad Burnat) and his five cameras (each of which was destroyed by gunfire and replaced by another) as he documents his community's non-violent attempts to hold on to their land in the face of increasing Israeli occupation. Beatings, arrests and even the deaths of his family members and friends are caught on camera - while he dispassionately narrates the action, albeit in voice-overs. I don't understand how he was able to remain at his station behind the camera as these things took place. Did the filming become more important than the events being captured? Or did this simply underline the desperation of the Palestinians for an unimpeachable witness? One of the most striking scenes for me was one in which the men returned to the battleground area to find that all the olive trees had been set on fire, presumably by the Israelis. The onscreen protests by one of the men about the olive trees' "innocence" was not necessary to convey the cruelty of the action, but instead raised an awkward question - didn't the Palestinians also consider themselves likewise "innocent"?  Documentaries are thought to put forward events as they happen -even if those events have elements of artifice in them. In this way artifice and truth can intersect. In one scene, Emad captures the death of his good friend as he falls into the frame after being shot at from a position presumably at Emad's side. After this,the action is followed by another cameraman who was also on the scene. Emad glances over to the live camera and then resumes his grieving over his friend's body. It is telling that even at this event, he is unable to give himself over to the moment until he has reassured himself that he will not be lost in it. Maybe this is how he survives.

Photo: Sixto Rodriguez, Searching for Sugar Man