Video Dispatches: MARWENCOL, WATERWORLD & Iranian Cinema

Video Dispatches is a regular digest of recent home video releases, usually from boutique and restorative labels.

Marwencol (2010) – Cinema Guild

In his book Representing Reality, seminal documentary film theorist Bill Nichols posits the medium builds heightened tensions and dramatic conflicts within parameters that promise closure — a beginning and an end. Documentaries “do all this with reference to a ‘reality’ that is a construct, the product of signifying systems, like the documentary film itself,” he continues.

This has long been internalized by documentary scholars, critics and makers, but it has a specific resonance with the film Marwencol, Jeff Malmberg’s 2010 documentary, which recently received boutique HD treatment from Cinema Guild, just in time for the theatrical opening of Robert Zemeckis’ fictional adaptation, Welcome to Marwen. Malmberg‘s film centers on a middle-aged man, Mark Hogancamp, recovering from a brutal beating and the 1/6-scale model world he’s built and takes photographs of.

Just as Hogancamp builds worlds — signifying constructs — to work through his trauma and generally parse his insular life, using Nichols, it’s certainly plausible to read Malmberg’s film as a metatextual statement on documentary as a salve, or just art’s generally soothing, therapeutic qualities. It’s a touching and often odd film and Hogancamp offers Malmberg a complicated figure — honest, horny, sad, self-aware and traumatized.

When Cinema Guild announced this release, I figured it would act as counterprogramming to Zemeckis’ adaptation, but fortunately, Welcome to Marwen wound up being touching in its own right. Zemeckis uses the documentary subject as launching pad to explore his very particular filmmaking obsessions, and thus making this new Blu-ray a useful companion.

Whether or not you have any interest or fondness for Zemeckis’ film, this release merits attention, both as a comprehensive release of the documentary and as a beautifully put together artifact — the new cover, alone, is a welcome facelift. The extras are primarily focused on supplementing the feature with unused footage, much of which appears jettisoned from the final film to avoid overstatement. And the booklet essay from Film Comment regular Eric Hynes, as well as Hogancamp’s reaction to the film, are lovely additions.

Waterworld (1995) – Arrow Films

Often referred to as “Fishtar” or “Kevin’s Gate,” Waterworld, the most expensive film ever made at the time of its production, has a reputation that belies its financial success. Made with a $175 million budget, the film grossed $264 million worldwide. Its $88 million domestic gross, however, is more indicative of a film critically panned and publicly shamed.

Arrow Films has taken upon themselves to right the ship with an exhaustive three-disc, three-version box release that begs for a critical reevaluation of this peculiar film. The included versions are the theatrical cut, the TV cut and the European cut — the last two appending an additional 40 minutes, which are supposed to reframe the film’s expansive scope with a story and pace to match.

I’m as game as anyone for reassessing a film with a reputation as bad as Waterworld, but after watching the TV cut, I cannot overstate how bankrupt I found this interminable experience to be — depleted of any enjoyment not specifically aimed at mocking this unwieldy, ugly, inarticulate, Mad Max-aping flat tire. I can’t help but be curious as to how the European cut, dubbed “Ulysses,” differs from the TV one, but I won’t be finding out firsthand in this lifetime.

Included in Arrow’s bevy of extras is a new full-length documentary on the film’s making — Maelstrom: The Odyssey of Waterworld. I had hopes of wringing enjoyment out of this as well — in search of an honest look at what a mess the production was — but instead was met with a bunch of bit players droning on about the minute details of the changes in script and the set’s logistics. Honestly, there’s more fun to be had scrolling through IMDb’s trivia page.

I did, however, love the other significant feature, “Global Warnings,” which has film critic Glenn Kenny delineating a canon of End of the World films, charting changes in attitudes, aesthetics and attributions over decades.

Trilogy on Iranian Cinema (2000-2013) – Kino Lorber

In January, Kino Lorber put out a two-DVD set titled “Trilogy on Iranian Cinema.” It’s a set that features three full-length documentaries on varying aspects of modern Iranian cinema and one 30-minute profile of perhaps the cinema’s most celebrated auteur, Abbas Kiarostami. The set could’ve also been accurately titled “The Complete Works of Jamsheed Akrami,” but considering the film and media professor is not exactly a titan of the medium, I think they made the right choice.

Friendly Persuasion, the first documentary in the set, centers primarily on three prominent Iranian filmmakers: Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf and Jafar Panahi. While all three have very valuable things to say when presented in archival footage, the films cripples its attempt to bolster Iranian cinema and its key attributes by returning ad nauseam to defining it virtuously as what Hollywood isn’t.

The Lost Cinema and A Cinema of Discontent fare much better — the former is a text-by-text analysis that charts the development of a politically-loaded visual language in Iranian cinema during the 1970s, and the latter a specific look at film censorship in Iran and how filmmakers navigate and negotiate power under such regulations.

This is a no-frills set, often sourced from VHS materials, and the filmmaking itself is not flashy nor gripping. It’s a release that seems like more of a repurposing for the sake of digital posterity, which certainly has its purpose and will delight those looking to become more informed on Iranian cinema. Additionally, though the short on Kiarostami was previously included in Criterion’s Close-Up disc, I was glad to see it included here.