Documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman has arguably perfected the fly-on-the-wall realist mode of documentary filmmaking where documentarian voice becomes little to nil as the camera sits back and observes the action with as detached and objective a position as possible. It is naive to believe that such a mode of documentary is completely without bias or manipulation since the editing and framing of the film itself draws our attention to what the documentarian is wanting us to see and guiding us through the observations in a specific way. However, the effect is largely ambiguous and allows the audience room to come to their own conclusions without the aide of a voice saying, "This is what I'm trying to show you." Wiseman is very good at this approach.
He has two fictional films. This, 2002's The Last Letter, is one of them. Here, the maverick of fly-on-the-wall documentary does pretty much the exact opposite of everything he's known for, on the topic he's arguably one of the best directors to take on: the Holocaust. The Last Letter is a monologue by actress Catherine Samie, from an adapted play from the novel Life and Fate by Vasili Grossman. In his novel, Grossman wrote a fictionalized representation of what he imagined his mother would have written to him the day before her death, and in the play that letter is adapted into a monologue applied to the Holocaust, which then Wiseman separated from the rest of the text and staged in a very limited area using only Samie, some lighting and shadow effects, and camera movement in a dark and void-like space. The camera work is free-flowing and intricate, the lighting incredibly effective and creating a sense of loneliness, sorry, and despair, Sami is a powerful actress and with controlled and choreographed movements describes both hope and despair, a passion to live and the understanding of death.
So what's the problem? Wiseman seeks in this movie to tell the story of a victim, not in the documentary mode of citing the numbers (one death is a tragedy, thousands of deaths a statistic), but through the personal thoughts of one of those victims. There's an issue he's confronting, and that is that he's trying to describe the personal experiences of one of the ultimate victims, one who died and did not live on to tell us the story. The issue with that is that this isn't the story of someone who died in the Holocaust, in fact, it is quite far removed. This is an adaptation of a monologue of an adaptation of a novel written by a man imagining what his mother maybe would have said in an event that wasn't the Holocaust. As a result, it is one man's interpretation of an event interpreted into a performance interpreted onto screen and, in those processes of interpretation, increasingly stylized from the pain and grief the original author felt for the loss of his mother, turned in the text into a defiant call for the importance and freedom of continuing to live, then choreographed into performative space to create an abstract emotive dialog with the audience, further aestheticized by being set upon a plane of space with shadows and camera movements that inform the mood of the choreography that informs the mood of the writing that at one point was supposed to inform the audience of the real tragedy in a writer's life, which ironically was a different tragedy than the one being presented.
A better way of stating this is yes, all of the formal elements of this movie are very well done: the cinematography is great, the performance is great, the writing is great. However, all of these things are fictionalized and could have been great in application to any idea, event, or storytelling, based on a true story or otherwise. Sami's virtuoso performance is so obviously choreographed, with such obviously structured camera movements, over obviously poetic and politic writing, that these same things could have been done and had the exact same effect and not been about the Holocaust at all--which, ironically, it wasn't about in the first place! The same could be said of stuff like Schindler's List or Life is Beautiful (possibly the most vilified Holocaust movies in existence, since everyone wants to be smarter than the sentimentality they portray), but movies like those at least try to tell the story from the specific historical perspective of the true event set with context as to what the director is (possibly unsuccessfully, but still) struggling with. All Holocaust movies are a struggle between understanding and representation, as the event is so traumatic it feels impossible to really sum up the cause, course, and effect of it. Thus, all directors taking on the topic make choices on how to work with it (Kubrick gave up entirely), and those choices may or may not be all that successful in the reckoning. I do not believe Wiseman's approach was that successful, because of the severely abstracted space he set every level of the production in. However, other people affected by the performance may disagree simply because the performance works on an emotional level, which is fair, I just question the approach. This in particular becomes an issue when, yet again, we take into account the director we're talking about and the fact that he should know better than push performative aspects onto such important social conscienceness.
--PolarisDiB
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