Gregory Crewdson carefully composes his next photograph in BRIEF ENCOUNTERS (courtesy Zeitgeist Films)
GREGORY CREWDSON: BRIEF ENCOUNTERS (Ben Shapiro, 2012)
IndieScreen
285 Kent Ave at South Second St.
January 26 & 29, $12, 7:00
212-727-8110
www.indiescreen.us
www.gregorycrewdsonmovie.com
From 2002 to 2008, Gregory Crewdson created a sensational body of work he called “Beneath the Roses,” consisting of intricately arranged large-scale photographs that capture the mysterious underside of small-town, middle-class America. Filmed primarily in the Western Massachusetts community where his family spent their summers while he was growing up, the photographs, all taken at twilight, are powerful, emotional still shots that look like they’re from a movie, usually involving solitary figures on the street or in a tense room, staring out, often with a car nearby, its door or trunk flung open, compelling viewers to come up with their own narrative of what they’re seeing. For ten years, Ben Shapiro followed Crewdson around as he worked on that series and others, and he details the Park Slope-born photographer’s unique creative process in the vastly entertaining and informative documentary Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters. Crewdson, who shoots only at twilight, is obsessive about the shot he gets, agonizing first over the setting itself, then going over every little detail, from the turn of a character’s head to the proper amount of leg to reveal, with a crew that includes a director of photography, a production designer, a casting director, and other jobs usually more associated with film. “My pictures are about a search for a moment — a perfect moment,” he explains. “To me the most powerful moment in the whole process is when everything comes together and there is that perfect, beautiful, still moment. And for that instant, my life makes sense.”
Gregory Crewdson, “Untitled (The Madison),” from “Beneath the Roses,” archival pigment print, 2007 (© Gregory Crewdson)
Crewdson also talks about his past as he drives around Pittsfield searching out locations or looks through a photo album, discussing how he was influenced by his psychologist father and a trip they made to see a Diane Arbus exhibition at MoMA in 1972, when Crewdson was ten. Among those who share their thoughts about Crewdson are writers Russell Banks and Rick Moody, photographer Laurie Simmons, Aperture editor in chief Melissa Harris, and Crewdson’s director of photography, Richard Sands. Shapiro also travels to Rome with Crewdson for his 2010 “Sanctuary” series, taken at the abandoned Cinecittà studio in Rome, furthering his interest in film. Just as it’s fascinating to spend time exploring Crewdson’s photographs, it’s equally fascinating spending time with the man himself, a complex, bigger-than-life character with an intriguing outlook on his medium as well as the world at large. Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters, which somehow wasn’t even shortlisted for an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature, is being shown at IndieScreen in Brooklyn on January 26 and 29.
In just the last few years, master German filmmaker Werner Herzog has ventured deep into space for Wild Blue Yonder, explored the mysteries of Antarctica in Encounters at the End of the World, went spelunking through a prehistoric French cave in the 3D 
Kirby Dick’s The Invisible War is one of the bravest, most explosive investigative documentaries you’re ever likely to see. Dick (This Film Is Not Yet Rated) busts open the military’s dirty little secret, revealing that episodes of horrific sexual abuse such as the Tailhook scandal are not an aberration but a prime example of a rape epidemic that seems to an accepted part of military culture. Dick speaks with many women and one man who share their incredible stories, describing in often graphic detail the sexual abuse they suffered, then faced further abuse when they reported what had happened. Their superiors, some of whom were the rapists themselves, either looked the other way, laughed off their allegations as no big deal, or threatened the victims’ careers. Dick includes remarkable Defense Department statistics — the government admits that approximately one out of every five female soldiers suffers sexual abuse and that there were nineteen thousand violent sex crimes in 2010 alone — even as such military officials as Dr. Kaye Whitley, Rear Admiral Anthony Kurta, and Brigadier General Mary Kay Hertog make absurd claims that they are satisfied with the way they are handling the alarming trend. The central figure in the film is Kori Cioca, a former member of the Coast Guard whose face was broken when she was raped by a superior and now keeps getting denied necessary medical services from the VA. Such courageous women as USAF Airman 1st Class Jessica Hinves, former Marine Officer Ariana Klay, USN veteran Trina McDonald, USMC Lieutenant Elle Helmer, USN Lieutenant Paula Coughlin, and even Special Agent Myla Haider of the Army Criminal Investigation Command also open up about the physical and psychological damage the abuse has left on their lives and careers. Inspired by Helen Benedict’s 2007 Salon.com article “The Private War of Women Soldiers,” Dick and producer Amy Ziering (The Memory Thief) have presented a searing indictment of an endemic military culture that has to come to an end, and fast. The Invisible War, which earned Dick and Ziering last year’s Nestor Almendros Award for courage in filmmaking at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival at Lincoln Center, is back at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center for a brief run through January 24, celebrating its Oscar nomination for Best Documentary Feature.
In 2004-5, Christopher Trumbo’s play Trumbo: Red, White, and Blacklisted, based on the writings of his father, jailed Hollywood Ten screenwriter and novelist Dalton Trumbo (1905-76), toured the country, a staged reading directed by Peter Askin and starring such actors as Nathan Lane, Joe Mantegna, Bill Irwin, Brian Dennehy, and F. Murray Abraham in the title role. Christopher and Askin turned the show into a documentary film, with decidedly mixed results. Although Trumbo’s letters are works of art on their own, funny and incisive, biting and cynical, with a wry, dry sense of humor that summarizes the social and political climate of the cold war era, they lose much of their power when read overdramatically onscreen by Dennehy, Josh Lucas, Paul Giamatti, and others. The camera will linger on Michael Douglas or David Strathairn as they contemplate what they have just read, adding an unnecessary sense of seriousness and importance. It is almost impossible to concentrate on Trumbo’s words as you wonder why Joan Allen was selected, whether Liam Neeson should have tried an American accent, how long and white Donald Sutherland’s hair is, or how many sly gestures Lane will make as he relates a riotous treatise on onanism. Interviews with such friends and colleagues as Manny Azenberg, Kate Lardner, Kirk Douglas, and Trumbo’s children, Christopher and Mitzi, dig deeper into the kind of man Trumbo was, along with archival footage of Trumbo on talk shows, in home movies, and telling the House Un-American Committee to go to hell. Askin tries so hard to focus on the actual words of the Oscar-winning screenwriter behind such classics as Johnny Got His Gun, Roman Holiday, Spartacus, Exodus, and Papillon that he ends up obscuring the portrait as a whole. But oh, what words they are. Trumbo will be screening January 22 at the IFC Center as part of the Tuesday-night series “Stranger than Fiction,” with Askin on hand to participate in a Q&A. The series continues through February 26 with such other documentaries as Neil Barsky’s Koch, Amy Nicholson’s Zipper: Coney Island’s Last Wild Ride, and Terence Nance’s An Oversimplification of Her Beauty.