Without doing a complete blow-by-blow of the festival films I saw, I did want to share a few highlights in individual academic journals. The first, although the third film I saw chronologically, was the documentary Knuckle, and what an amazing film it was. It was a film for documentary nerds like myself, and the passion and dedication, and in the end, the complete and utter devotion to chronicling these sordid lives of the Irish Travelers director Ian Palmer followed made the film an absolute must-see.
From a technological and cinematic perspective, Knuckle is not the most adept film. It's a shaky one camera that at times bled too much light, wobbled to exhaustion, and had a grainy quality of early VHS. But of course that's not the point, nor is it the sole measure of the film. Nor too is the oft-annoying mugging children who find their way into the frame of Palmer's lens.
What I focused on in my question in the Q & A forum after the showing at the Fleadh in the Town Hall Theatre, and what I think is the most interesting aspect of the film apart from the exploration of the subject at hand, underground illegal bar knuckle brawls between warring Irish Traveler clans, was the role of Palmer in the film itself.
Palmer is most certainly a character in the film, not like James or Michael in the role of protagonist or even that of a minor bystander. Palmer is as much an engine in the film as are the tainting tapes and DVDs the clans send to each other declaring intentions to beat each other senseless. In fact, a number of these "call-out" videos are made from the very same footage Palmer himself shot.
And while Palmer is narrating the action, he's not only showing and explaining the various plotlines at play in the direction, planning, and eventual celebrations before/during/after the fights, but he's letting us behind the curtain of the film-making process. Not as reflexively as the maestro of the boom mike Nick Broomfield, and more than willing to edit in few buttocks in tight jeans shots. But certainly Palmer is a character in the movie, and by sharing the disappointment in not being able to film a fight, or dealing with the secretive and reticent nature of his subjects at times, he is as emotionally involved in the action as he hopes we, the audience, would be.
Palmer declares that the documentary tradition of an unobtrusive, emotionally uninvested observational, cinema vérité style film, is in fact, dishonest. As Palmer says in his answer, "At this stage, I kinda feel there's an element of dishonesty in presenting the subject that way. You're pretending, you know, it's a, it's a, there's something happening invisibly in front of the camera; there's no interaction. Inevitably there is interaction."
Without the interaction Palmer is referencing, Knuckle is not the same movie. As he says in the video from the Q & A, it was an editorial choice, and it was the right one. To be fair, the subject begs for Palmer's approach, it is bare knuckle fighting after all, not a subject for a timid hands-off approach. Just as bare fist strikes against flesh, tearing wounds open and bruising with blunt force, Palmer had to be right in the middle of the action.
The thing that strikes me the most is that Palmer made this as an editorial choice. He let the action dictate his approach, and it was successful, and as such, he should consider himself a smart director. A stoic interview style, with a reporter's interrogatives and intuition, like Errol Morris or Alex Gibney, would have been too abrasive and jarring. A more self-referential or personal film from Michael Moore or Alan Berliner would have drawn too much attention away from his subjects.
Palmer was right; he found truth in this approach, and the result is a film you must see.
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