As I mentioned a few days ago, I am in the process of making my first documentary film this summer, so I probably thought a good deal more about today’s prompt than I otherwise might have. There are so many different types of documentaries and the ones I like the most, I like for very different reasons. One of the things I’ve learned in studying (and now filming) documentaries is that, like all texts, the people who create them are authors, not merely scribes. Storytelling in documentary film is a practiced and incredibly nuanced skill. One doesn’t just stand there with a camera and record the story unfolding, after all.
For today’s pick, I’m selecting something a little non-obvious. I don’t think I would say this is the best documentary film I’ve ever seen, though it’s probably in the top 10, but it definitely influenced me quite a bit. On the whole, my favorite documentary filmmakers are Errol Morris and Wener Herzog, two certifiably idiosyncratic and quirky storytellers who make films that are very,, very different than my selection for today. The reason I didn’t pick a Morris or Herzog film is twofold: first, I just couldn’t choose among them and, second, the work I’ve been doing on my own film this summer has made me think a lot about how difficult it is to make a documentary about music.
My pick for today is Amandla! A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony (2002), which traces the role that music played in South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle. It’s part historical, part cultural, part biographical, part artistic. Given the sweeping breadth of its subject, filmmaker Lee Hirsch did an incredible job, telling the story with equal parts economy and care. The film came out in 2002, only ten years after the release of Nelson Mandela from jail and the transition of South Africa to democracy. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission was still in process and both apartheid and the democratic transition were still very recent memories.
The title of the film, amandla, is the Zulu and Xhosa word for “power.” During the height of the struggle, it was a word often shouted by anti-apartheid fighters along with awethu (“to us”). The power that music lends to people when they raise their voices together in song is the story of this film. That is an incredibly moving, incredibly inspiring and incredibly beautiful story. Hirsch does a masterful job of capturing all the beauty and all of the ugliness of this complicated story, and it remains the very first film that I recommend to people who want to learn something about South Africa’s apartheid years.