Reel Time: The Texas Documentary
Documentary film-making in Texas.
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Perhaps the most chronicled and studied president of the 20th century, LBJ is as fascinating and complicated a character as you’d hope to find in the White House—or in all of Texas for that matter. But one can’t help but imagine how miserably LBJ would fare in the current climate, where we expect the power-hungry egomaniacs who actually make it all the way to the White House to also project a lily-white and pure image.
Plutonium Circus
George Ratliff, 1994
Plutonium Circus
George Ratliff’s look at the West Texas town of Amarillo’s relationship with its biggest employer, the Pantex Plant, is a humorous slice of Texana mixed with a case of nuclear fear. Pantex, one of the biggest producers of nuclear weapons (now the primary disassembler of weapons in the post-Cold War era) looms over Amarillo like a boisterous brother-in-law.
Kids used to grow up with a sense of pride that Amarillo was one of the targets the Russians would take out if they ever pushed the proverbial button (take that, Lubbock!) but now many have come to question the benefits of Pantex. Specifically, they wonder what effect having so much plutonium lying around their town is having on their health. The usual argument of providing jobs for the town is tossed around, while the threats to the ecosystem and the inhabitants—seen most recently in Texas in the debate over the proposed Sierra Blanca waste dumpsite—are presented as valuable counterpoints.
In a style reminiscent of director Errol Morris, Plutonium Circus cuts back and forth among a set of characters without labeling them with titles or narrative introductions. Instead, the audience is left to discern identities from context and from the subjects’ own words. We follow an erstwhile country singer with a smile as bright as an oncoming night train who has become the Pantex mouthpiece, an elderly couple tracking cancer deaths in the area around the plant with straight pins and a homemade map, and Amarillo celebrity Stanley Marsh, opinionated proprietor of the Cadillac Ranch. Although the character we spend the most time with seems like an Amarillo inside joke, Plutonium Circus nonetheless amuses and informs, providing an extremely human face to the still very salient debate over how much a town should remain in debt to its biggest industry, and vice versa.
Texas Blues Guitar
Vestapol Productions, 1998
A brief look at four famous Texas bluesmen, Texas Blues Guitar features performances by Albert Collins, Freddie King, Lightnin’ Hopkins, and Mance Lipscomb. Comprised wholly of performance footage, the documentary provides examples of four very different styles of playing, while doubling as a time line spanning over 30 years of music history.
The video opens with four pieces of the Chicago-esque bombast of Albert Collins, captured at Austin City Limits in 1991. Next up is the gritty John Lee Hooker-style bump and grind of Freddie King (1972), where one can almost imagine ZZ Top and George Thorogood in the audience taking notes. But the highlight of the video is easily the 1960 performance by seminal Houston bluesman Lightnin’ Hopkins. The premiere acoustic bluesman and one of the fathers of Texas’ own flavor of blues, Hopkins strums, mumbles and taps his foot through the grainy black and white footage, salvaged from some television station archive. As for the 1968 performance of Mance Lipscomb, well, he’s playing in someone’s living room from the looks of it. Still, he gives a stellar performance despite the lack of an audience.
A must-see for blues aficionados, Texas Blues Guitar is a bit like a time capsule unearthed from behind the walls of contemporary rock and roll.
The Thin Blue Line
Errol Morris, 1988
Perhaps the most heralded of the Texas documentaries on my list, The Thin Blue Line is Errol Morris’ look at a good old fashioned Texas railroading: the case of convicted murderer Randall Adams. Adams was sentenced to life in prison for the 1976 shooting of a Dallas police officer at point blank range in the course of a routine traffic stop. The only problem was that all evidence in the case pointed not to Adams but to David Harris, who had met Adams the day of the killing. But Harris, being a juvenile at the time, was not the most appealing perpetrator to the investigators of the case, so they settled on Adams (with a little persuasion from Harris, of course). Harris’ admission of guilt is a powerful moment in the film, and eventually led to Adams’ release.
Filmed while Adams was still behind bars, The Thin Blue Line is mesmerizing. Featuring a score by Phillip Glass and composed without the use of narration or titles, Morris lovingly studies the stuff of crime, his camera caressing the evidence, the paperwork, the photographs and the newspaper headlines. Morris also makes extensive use of the re-enactment, showing the crime from the point of view of every one of the witnesses and participants. But The Thin Blue Line is no television crime show, its meandering style allows the interviewees to talk about things outside the case and includes long sequences without talking: techniques that have never caught on in television.
Waco: The Rules of Engagement
William Gazecki, 1997
Waco: The Rules of Engagement
Recounting the 1993 tragedy at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco with painstaking detail, Waco: The Rules of Engagement is as haunting a documentary as you’ll see. If the film is to be regarded as truth, the fact that the gross miscarriage of justice unfolded here at home while most of us sat back and took the government’s word for it only makes it that much more disturbing.
The documentary cuts back and forth between footage of the Senate trials on Waco, footage the Davidians shot with cameras provided by the FBI during the standoff, and news footage that aired throughout the saga. The directors give the FBI and the ATF a chance to voice their side of the matter, but an overwhelming amount of the evidence presented suggests the raid was botched from the get-go and only got worse from there. Regardless of personal perceptions of the Davidians (and they don’t come off too badly here), it’s apparent that they might not have been the blood thirsty fringe element portrayed by the media.
Watching the testimony of the survivors mixed with the explanations of independent experts, one feels a building sense of nausea waiting for the final outcome. Unlike the events of that fateful day when the standoff came to a fiery and quick end, the recounting of the tragic climax is carried off slowly and deliberately. The filmmakers spend a good 30 minutes making a very convincing case that the FBI lied in reporting the fire was set by the Davidians.
The militant religious group is one of the more recent Texas stereotypes, but in this case, they seemed like the sane ones.
Texcentric Cinema
Feature films with a Texas twist.
Featured titles available on VHS or DVD from Amazon.com
Beyond JFK—VHS
Chasing the Dream—VHS
Texas Blues Guitar—VHS
Image of an Assassination: Zapruder Film (1998)—VHS or DVD
LBJ: The American Experience (1991)—VHS
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My Library
