Tell Them Who You Are

Haskell Wexler is one of the all-time-great American cinematographers, a living legend who is mentioned in every essay on American lens work. His son Mark is a reasonably respectable documentary filmmaker. When Mark decides to make a film about Haskell’s life, he winds up making a film about his relationship to the un-self-consciously difficult and self-consciously brilliant man who abandoned his mother and alienated hundreds of people. It’s amazing to watch a documentary where the subject yells at the documentarian for doing everything wrong. Eventually, Mark gives Haskell a camera, and the two of them wind up shooting each other while they yell and argue and examine Haskell’s amazing and horrifying life. This film takes “direct cinema” to a new level. It not only manages to tell Haskell’s story; it also manages to find a plotline in telling the story of its own creation. Truly interesting.