Subject
Directed by Camilla Hall and Jennifer Tiexiera
Written by Camilla Hall, Jennifer Tiexiera and Lauren Saffa
Unrated
Runtime: 93 minutes
Opens in New York and Los Angeles Nov 3, On Demand Dec 5

by Alex Rudolph, Staff Writer

Sometimes, a good analysis lights everything on fire. This doesn't have to spring from malice or spite, just an honest line of questioning so thoroughly explored that the subject's flaws become apparent and the entire framework they operate in seems suspect. Subject, the new film from Camilla Hall and Jennifer Tiexiera, asks those questions about the ways documentaries (and, often implicitly, audiences) treat their stars. You could watch it as a "Where are they now?" catch-up with doc subjects you've seen in other contexts-- that was the hook for me-- but this is about living in the real world as we watch almost-real representations of it on film.

There's the event and there's the recollection and there's the rest of your life afterward. In some documentaries, the event happens as a film is being made and you watch the participants deal with it live, but even then there's some distance after the lengthy editing process at the end of any movie's production. When I watch a movie like Hoop Dreams, I'm seeing a slice of its subjects' lives, and I'm hearing them reflect on everything that's happened during the filming process, but it's easy to forget that they're human beings who have, I hope, decades of living left to do. Documentaries necessarily freeze people's lives in amber and (Up series aside) it's on the audience to have some emotional intelligence and think of these people as more than characters in a story. It's an obvious idea-- that people have dimension outside of what we've seen-- but it's rarely explored in the way Hall, Tiexiera and the people they interview take it all on here.

The subjects of Subject come from five movies and they're the movies you'd want to see covered (though you, like me, will probably develop a running list of dream films as you watch this one). We meet back up with people from major true crime documentaries Capturing the Friedmans and The Staircase, Egyptian Crisis chronicle The Square and the then-children of coming-of-age movies Hoop Dreams and The Wolfpack. The director of Minding the Gap also gets significant time to pick apart his decision to become part of his movie and what he got from that versus what he expected or wanted or needed from it.

You develop your own wishlist as the movie goes. I wished they had sat down with Mark Borchardt and anybody from Paris is Burning. I wished, for multiple reasons, that Bob Flanagan and Troy Hurtubise were still alive, even if they didn't really fit Subject's themes. That is, perhaps, why I wanted them or people like them. I also wondered what somebody like Ross McElwee, who makes explicitly autobiographical work and self-flagellates for a living, would say about the Minding the Gap case. A documentary can stand on its own and still spark enough conversation that you're left wanting a dozen more hours tacked on.

The first person we see in Subject is Margie Ratliff, one of the daughters of the central couple of The Staircase. "It just felt like a huge invasion of privacy and we were never safe again. I can't describe how painful it is to relive my mom's death over and over," she says about the documentary series that asked whether her father killed her mother or if it was all a freak accident. I watched The Staircase and then went on with my life, but Margie, confronted by billboards for the series, a Netflix continuation, a dramatization and on and on, has been living inside The Staircase for 16 years.

In the funniest moment of a film that gets truly bleak, we watch Michael Peterson, Margie's father, watch himself in The Staircase. His Staircase self asks an Alexa to play Leonard Cohen's "Everybody Knows," which leads his Subject self to laugh as his Alexa plays the same song. There are a few of these mobius strips, but the film never disappears into its own belly button.

Michael says he wanted to be in a documentary to help prove his innocence, but he admits he didn't give much thought to how all of the filming would impact his children. "In a way," Margie reflects, "we made a choice to be in the documentary. But we were so young, we didn't really have a choice." As she dealt with the documentary, she was also in footage shot for outlets like Court TV, forced to analyze her own posture, acne and everything else for years. "People who watch the documentary and think my dad is guilty, they put that guilt on me," she says.

That's everybody's lives here. As Subject asks other documentarians and people who have written on the form to give their considered, layered opinions about consent, the public's perceptions of people in film, participant compensation, on-set therapy, the race of a crew and the race of their subjects, etc., we meet people whose lives were profoundly changed by being in documentaries and who continue to live both as people and, unwillingly, as movie characters.

I wrote down a dozen observations that changed or at least shook notions I'd casually cemented over years. Sonya Childress points out that "just because you're sharing your story doesn't mean you're in control of how it's framed and presented." Michelle Stephenson asks, "How do you [as a director] make the process less extractive? You have to build a relationship through trust, otherwise you leave a slew of bodies behind you. The film may do well, your career may be launched, but what does it do to the people around you?" Thom Powers says "Documentaries aren't capturing somebody's story, they're becoming a part of somebody's story. When that film goes out into the world, the person in it is transformed."

I would like to say these are obvious points, but you get swept up in documentaries! You can intellectually know the family in Capturing the Friedmans lived years' worth of time besides the 107 minutes we see in that movie and still think that you know what Jesse Friedman's really like. I know that a greatest hits compilation of the arguments I've gotten into with my family would make it seem like we don't get along and I know that we all love each other and yet I can't always extend that grace to these people whose lives I end up evaluating. Patricia Aufderheide (who was my teacher at American University) remembers seeing the film at Sundance and then, walking around between screenings, watching as people crossed the street to avoid Jesse Friedman. She thinks the filmmakers didn't leave the viewer with enough of a solid feeling other than an overriding suspicion of everybody in the film. "I don't know what [the movie] did for anybody," she says. "I don't know why the family was put through that." Elaine Friedman remembers not wanting to give her home videos to the film crew. She describes Sundance as a charade.

Still, Jesse insists Capturing the Friedmans could be the best thing that happened to him, even as he discusses having to reconcile how he didn't have any say in the filmmaking process. He calls it "a miracle of a documentary" and the movie that saved him from prison. "For me, [the filmmakers] were exonerating me," he says. He'd been in jail for 15 years when Andrew Jarecki started filming the documentary and knew "no matter how they told the story, it would at least tell the truth." His now-wife discovered him while watching the film.

It's jarring, looking at Jesse. It's been 20 years and he no longer looks like the teenager he was in the film. I watched that movie once, years back, but I immediately recognized his and his mother's voices when they're introduced in Subject. As irrational as I know it is, I have a feeling that I know these people. I've watched less than two hours of highly-curated footage of Jesse and Elaine Friedman, of course I know all about them.

Later, Jesse will separate from his wife and tell the camera, "If you watch that movie now, it has nothing to do with my life. The movie was 19 years ago, depicting events that took place 16 years before that." It's defined his whole life and he expresses a desire to leave it all behind.  "I can barely experience joy in any form, no matter what I'm doing," he says.

His wife is interviewed, separately: "Jesse has been a subject all of his life... The cost of being a subject in Jesse's case has been complete. It's been his entire adult life. Everything he's said or done has been publicized, over-analyzed and scrutinized endlessly." When they split, she says she "can't sacrifice [her] life for his." She says the best thing for Jesse would be to become anonymous and just be Jesse.

If this sounds difficult to watch, I promise it's even more difficult than that. Breaking down the film's title, The Square's Ahmed Hassan says being a 'subject' means "you're going to be studied one day." He's wrong, though-- he's being studied now. He's been studied since the camera powered up on the first day of shooting.

Subject works because there aren't definitive answers. Jesse Friedman's life is hard and Ahmed Hassan can't find work as a filmmaker (he was The Square's cinematographer, as well as its subject), but Arthur Agee of Hoop Dreams was compensated for his work and speaks of the whole experience with a glow. He tells funny filming stories, even as he remembers feeling embarrassed at the scene where his dad shows up to court, skinny and wired, looking to buy drugs. But he also watched his dad rehabilitate, he sat next to Spike Lee at his film's premiere at the Lincoln Theater and now, as he raises a son about as old as he was when Hoop Dreams began filming, he's moved into public speaking. Susanne Reisenbichler, the mother of the kids of The Wolfpack, was able to escape her abusive husband because of her movie because the film helped her recognize his behavior as domestic abuse. She remembers the premiere as the moment where she "declared [herself], 'here I am,' for the first time. This is not a movie about how documentaries are bad. They can fail people, but they can also bear witness in ways that are life-changingly helpful.

None of the documentary experiences are all good or all bad. For all of Arthur's positive experiences, other people like Sonya Childress have wondered if Hoop Dreams, a movie that inspired her, should be further interrogated for the way the filmmakers entered the situation they covered. The Wolfpack helped Susanne and her children, but Subject doesn't shy away from letting its talking heads describe the movie as "voyeuristic." The enterprise can be both necessary and unethical. You can be suspect of Capturing the Friedmans and mourn Jesse's private life and still treat its part in getting a man out of prison as a great outcome. Subject's only real didactic point is to rid your film of didacticism as best as you can and from every considerable angle and to watch films with a critical awareness that could help make up for a director's shortcomings.

As the film ends, Margie Ratfliff says HBO Max is now making a series based on The Staircase. "Sophie Turner from Game of Thrones is playing me," she says. "When I found that out, I thought uuuuuuggggh, this is going to be a thing. This is going to be a thing that people bother me about and it's going to make my life harder." Antonio Campos, who directed the dramatization, emailed Margie and said Sophie Turner wanted to speak with her about the role. "So you want me to talk about the most traumatic points in my life, that I have spent decades of my life in therapy over, with an actress, who then gets paid to portray me," she tells the camera. She describes this as the moment where she draws a line and said she'd "like to be stripped from The Staircase completely." She says she signed up for Subject because she wants other people to have the agency to know what they're signing up for. "I didn't have power and if I can give that to other people, that makes me feel better."

I actually liked HBO's Staircase series, primarily for its performances and because Campos intentionally inserted moments that confronted viewers with the fact that we were watching a fictionalized version of a real story that was itself distorted by various factors the last time we heard it. I certainly don't blame Margie for feeling as she does and maybe now I feel a little icky about enjoying the whole thing in the way I did. I hope she finds peace. I'm not going to google Margie to find out if she's broken as free of the world's attention as she hoped she would, though, because in many ways, the point of Subject is simple: It's none of my business.