The latest screening at Central DOCS Club – where newly-released documentaries are shown at Picturehouse Central in association with FilmSoc – featured Mountain followed by a discussion.

Alexandra-Loredana Petrache reviews Jennifer Peedom’s symphonic doc.

A gorgeous piece of cinematography. An ode to the mountains. 

Beautiful imagery and score

Soothingly narrated by Willem Dafoe and bringing in the Australian Chamber Orchestra to perform pieces from the likes of Vivaldi, Mountain presents stunning, breath-taking imagery of people who aim for more: who test themselves, defy the norm and go in search of aventure. It also shows the modern reality of such sports, and of the people who try them in pursuit of not only the climb itself, but social media’s fame and adulation. The documentary scratches the surface of a whole universe of sports and sport-lovers, of madness and sanity, of will and strength, and shows the audience the thrills and perils that come with such ventures, without going too far into characterising the activities or associated risks. This is not meant to be an in-depth documentary about climbers, mountain-bikers or base-jumpers, but a serene piece of cinematography accompanied by good music. It will occasionally make you reach the edge of your seat but mostly it will induce a sense of wonder and worship towards the mountains. The music complements the footage perfectly – the beginning of the film comes into focus as a violin is being tuned. The sound weaves the metaphor of dizzying heights: we see climbers ascend over the crescendo of a violin, as a piano is subtly playing in the background, finishing off the metaphor of serene peace that accompanies the sport.

What Mountain succeeds at is showing both the exhilarating and the brutal: people smiling upon reaching their destination on the mountain, and euphoric spirits and cheers, but also bloody fingers, faces bitten by frost, tents filled with snow so cold it feels like a blade cutting the flesh down to the bone. Broken legs, twisted ankles, deep scratches, concussions, vertigo, pain, death. The price to pay for fleeting moments of sweet ecstasy.

Climbing a mountain: reward or plunder?

We keep talking of conquest when we speak of mountains and I’m not sure whether this comes from a sense of reward after the daunting experience that climbing can be or if it is sheer arrogance – do we really think we can outwit timeless (yet perpetually changing) rock giants? Is reaching a peak plunder or reward? Should we not talk of conquering ourselves, perhaps? Are mountains not just enablers for us to test our mental and physical strength?

The mountains can be a refuge for an ordinary living, an infusion of life, of raw, naked reality. It is a two-sided story: one of humility and one of hubris. On one side, we are glancing upon our condition and are reminded we are insignificant in this vast world. On the other, this sheer feeling of inferiority pushes us to overcome it, reach for the gods and prove that we are nothing less. And the fall will be all the more bittersweet knowing that, for a split moment, we were their equals and shared their world.

It is interesting how the film-makers decided to give the audience only a taste of the charm and seduction the mountains possess, instead of going for something with more substance and tackling concrete ideas about the sports presented or the more commercial aspect that now accompanies some of the sports presented. They focused on romanticising the antithesis between man and mountain, between ephemeral and long-lived.

Join us at the next Central DOCS Club screening on 8th January: see and discuss Walk With Me, a rare insight into the world of mindfulness and the Zen Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh, narrated by Benedict Cumberbatch! Check out the Facebook event HERE.

Mountain premiered at London Film Festival on October 9th. Watch the trailer below.

Our second co-hosted Central DOCS Club event at Picturehouse Central featured a screening of Jane Goodall doc Jane followed by a discussion. Get involved in the next DOC Club screenings with Mountain on Dec 18th and Walk With Me on Jan 8th.

Editor Chloe Woods continues the discussion with her review of the film.

Apparently I can’t assume everybody knows who Jane Goodall is. Born in 1934, the world’s most famous and most-revered expert on chimpanzees first set foot in Africa in her early twenties, and in 1960 established the (ongoing) field study of chimps in Gombe, Tanzania. Not long afterwards she shook both the scientific community and the wider world with her groundbreaking observations into chimpanzee behaviour – particularly the revelation that they used and made tools – and since the mid-1980s she has travelled the world to campaign for conservation and environmental responsibility. That’s Jane Goodall¹.

Brett Morgen’s documentary, Jane, expands on the bare bones of this biography via recent interviews with Goodall, narration from her 2001 autobiography and – most astonishingly – footage from the National Geographic archives, shot in the 1960s by Hugo van Lawick, and believed lost until 2014. Van Lawick, as the documentary notes, is considered one of the world’s greatest nature filmmakers, and it shows. He was also for a while Jane Goodall’s husband: that shows, too, despite the constraints of the assignment brief (Goodall was not, for example, best pleased to be informed the National Geographic wanted footage of her washing her hair when there were chimps to look at) and the objectivity a wildlife photographer must attempt to maintain between subject and camera. But in the early years at Gombe, where the largely untrained Goodall was free to work as she best pleased and did so according to her own values rather than the established ones of the scientific community – then rather colder and more dismissive towards viewing animals as individuals with personalities rather than automatic cogs in the grind-wheel of natural selection – Gombe was not a place of enforced objectivity, and likely better for it.

But it takes a while for Jane to get to that, and it has no inclination to hurry through its story. There are many shots, particularly in the opening minutes, of Goodall by herself in the African forest; then Goodall, and later others, interacting with the chimpanzees to whom she gave names. We learn a little about her childhood, about the part of her life spent (still with van Lawick) on the Serengeti, and about her subsequent campaigning work, and much of this is accompanied by Goodall’s own thoughts on the matter. She is hardly unaware of the startling position she occupied as a young woman doing work in Africa by herself, first feared-for and required to take her mother along as chaperone, then dismissed by her looks and her age when her research challenged prior belief. She muses also on the dangers of chimpanzees, not then known, but growing apparent through the years of research; the dangers to chimpanzees by close human contact, both accidentally and as deliberate harm; and, perhaps most intimately, on how she came by her own character and the single-minded confidence that would lead a person to watch the chimps for months upon end while making no apparent progress. She makes no apologies for having no interest in marriage until she met someone who shared her passion and, when it came to a choice between husband and that passion, no apologies for putting the passion and her ambition first. For though we learn about Jane’s relationships with her first husband², her son and her parents, it’s clear the defining relationship of her life has been that with chimpanzees, both in aggregate and singularly.

So, from the caterpillar crawling on the branch to the infant chimp playing on the tent, Goodall’s calm, classic English accent leads the viewer through the grainy images; and though relatively few of the clips might correlate to the moments referenced, since chimps will rarely perform for camera and the most important events can hardly be predicted – that’s of no consequence. If we don’t see it as it happened first we are, after all, used to the illusions of cinema, and being in the right place and the right time – Africa, the young Jane Goodall with her hair back in the loose ponytail she still wears today – they are truer than many, weaving a tale it is difficult not to be drawn into. (Though it does get a little didactic towards the end, which is no crime in itself but clumsily shoehorned here.)

The strange thing about this is it almost disguises the fact that Brett Morgen, as a filmmaker, has not done anything outstanding. The critical world has been full of praise for this documentary – well, yes. Van Lawick’s footage is universally gorgeous and Goodall’s strength of character and intelligence shine through: beyond this, the construction of the documentary is on the unoriginal side. It’s very much as if Morgen, handed these impressive starting blocks from which to construct the documentary, fitted them together competently enough (and I’ll admit, combing through the archive footage must have been a hell of a job), then floundered when asked to impress upon it his own interpretation. The points of focus feel as though they’ve been riffed from Goodall’s autobiography and, if so, she must take credit for the narrative structure of Jane, which races through emotional milestones without lingering long enough to let their impact sink in, repeats itself to the point of patronisation, and uses trite, overblown musical prompts to spell out the moment’s mood. And as a result it is merely very good when, given the materials and subject matter at hand, it could well have been brilliant.

Goodall is very media-savvy and this film as much as anything will show her as she wants the world to see, but you can be both astute and genuine. There can be little doubt her love of chimps, and of the natural world more broadly, has driven her for fifty years; little doubt too, though it receives passing mention in this up-close-and-personal work, of the impact she’s had upon both the scientific and environmentalist communities. Jane treats us to details in the life of a remarkable woman from a perspective once thought lost forever. Even if Morgen might have been less condescending in his musical motifs, it’s well worth the watch. Because that’s Jane Goodall – the first and grandest of the Trimates³, and perhaps the most important primatologist in history.

¹Some details which didn’t make it make it into the film but which this writer considers interesting: in 1962, after first developing her own ideas on chimp behaviour and marking herself out as an independent thinker, Goodall became a student of Newnham College, Cambridge as one of the few people to study for a PhD without first receiving a bachelor’s degree; she is vegetarian; and in 1987 or so Gary Larson referenced her in a comic which the staff at the Jane Goodall Institute described as an “atrocity” but Goodall herself was apparently quite entertained by.

²You wouldn’t know it from Jane, but Goodall has been married twice. Her second husband, Derek Bryceson, died of cancer in 1980 after about five years of marriage.

³There were three women who set out, via the encouragement of palaeoanthropologist Louis Leakey, to study then-unknown great ape species in the 1960s and ‘70s. The second, the bombastic Dian Fossey, was immortalised in the 1988 Gorillas in the Mist three years following her murder at still-unconfirmed hands; the third, Birute Galdikas, is less well-known but like Goodall campaigns for environmental conservation and primate protection, in addition to continuing her research on orangutans in Indonesia. The unfortunate alternative name for the group is “Leakey’s Angels”. So now you know.

The first of our co-hosted Central DOCS Club screenings with Picturehouse Central saw ’78/52′, the story of Hitchcock’s famous shower scene, screened and followed by a discussion.

Katie Jackson continues the discussion with her review of the documentary.

The most famous scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho’ (1960) is undoubtedly that shower scene: Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) enters the bathroom never to leave it again, only a third of a way through the film. The scene has transcended generations, with children growing up knowing it as a symbol of horror, even if they don’t know where it’s from. It has been re-done and reimagined time and time again in horror movies and spoofs alike.

It is this legacy that has led a trail of fanatics in its wake, re-watching this film over and over again. Alexandre O. Philippe’s ‘78/52’ is a tribute to all of those people, as well as Alfred Hitchcock and the team who created Psycho. It is a brilliant documentary, shot in black and white as a homage to the original film, which delves deep into the many layers of that scene.

It features detailed insights and fun anecdotes from a range of different people, including editors, horror directors, film historians and Marli Renfro, who played Janet Leigh’s body double. Hitchcock himself also makes a few appearances through old archive footage.

78/52 is a 90-minute-long documentary about a one-minute scene, which does at times feel like it’s being drawn out for the sake of it. However, it does meticulously unravel the many technical and contextual components that led up to and surround this scene, all given by a group of knowledgable people who clearly feel inspired by this movie moment, making it all the more compelling.

It is an almost undisputed fact in the world of cinema that Hitchcock was a (slightly crazy) filmmaking genius, who revolutionised cinema at the time. 78/52 perfectly demonstrates why this is true from every conceivable aspect, while putting its main focus on one of the most famous film scenes of all time, ending with an in-depth play-by-play.

One theme touched upon in the documentary is how voyeurism plays a central role throughout Psycho. Even this theme is brought into 78/52 itself as we sit and watch the likes of Eli Roth and Richard Stanley, enraptured by that iconic scene on the TV screens in front of them. It is small touches like these that make this a more sophisticated documentary than most.

Although 78/52 can seem a little pretentious and slow at times, and is another film in a long line of documentaries and movies about Psycho, it is definitely worth a watch for anyone interested in filmmaking or for those who love the genius of Alfred Hitchcock. Both Psycho fanatics and one-time watchers will definitely learn something from watching this film, leaving you with an undeniable urge to hold a Hitchcock movie marathon.

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Documentary Producer Nick Mastrini introduces the upcoming screenings of Central DOCS Club, an event at Picturehouse Central running in association with UCL Film & TV Society.

Ever since opening in 2015, Picturehouse Central has become the place to be for the best cinema experience in central London, just a short walk from UCL. Bringing documentaries to such a prime location at an affordable price, Picturehouse Docs lets you see the latest non-fiction films for as little as £5.

Central DOCS Club is the perfect chance to see the latest documentary releases and discuss them with a like-minded audience post-screening. The November line-up features 78/52, the definitive doc deconstructing Alfred Hitchcock’s famous Psycho shower scene, and Jane, which tells the story of renowned primatologist Jane Goodall.

78/52: Central DOCS Club  —  November 6th, 18:30: Tickets

Jane: Central DOCS Club  —  November 27th, 18:30: Tickets

Join FilmSoc members at the screenings to catch and discuss the docs. Perfect for cinephiles and horror fans alike, 78/52 takes apart the 78 setups and 52 cuts of one of the most iconic scenes of all time, featuring the analysis of industry talents like Guillermo del Toro and Walter Murch.

So on November 6th, see the ode to Hitchcock with fellow film fans! Tickets can be booked here. Stay after the screening for the discussion, moderated by Milana Vujkov from Picturehouse Central and with the contributions of FilmSoc.

And on November 27th, join us for the next Central DOCS Club, with Jane also starting at 18:30.

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