This is a short review of Jane (2017)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2017 (19 to 26 October)
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29 January
This is a short review of Jane (2017)
For some reason, I thought that I was en route to @Saffronscreen for 8.00 to enliven my scant recall of a book about Marie and Pierre Curie (where they refined pitchblende by hand in a garret) :https://t.co/1C81ybgEGh— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 29, 2018
Jane (2017) will do just as well ! :) pic.twitter.com/4KuYtmxBDa
For once, no more Tweets in this review – as they actually lengthen the process – and even a vague attempt at a nod in @everyfilmneil's style of reviewing in the approach here...
* Disambiguated by IMDb (@IMDb) as Jane (II) (2017), the film is first and foremost about Jane Goodall's work (and life).
* A little in the way, say, that Iris (2015) treats of Iris Apfel* (though she is very much less likeable, quite apart from the question what she has to offer the world), Jane gives us Jane Goodall as a woman who made her way in the world - in her own words (however chosen - please see below), it is she who narrates her own path to the chimpanzees of Gombe (in Tanzania).
* There is much to value here, but, from the perspective of what a documentary that depends so heavily on archival material can and should do (i.e. given the standards of the work of the best of such film-makers*), there must be some caveats.
* Primarily, the film unnecessarily was allowed to show us so much of the rediscovered historical footage far ahead of our knowing how it came into existence [Jane's future husband, Hugo van Lawick, shot it]. As a result, because of questions of its quality, content and how it was even in being**, it ran in such a way that thoughts of gratuitously and highly posed reconstruction kept distractingly presenting themselves as to how it had come into being - which, of course and on one level, it is, but filmed with the patent fondness of a marital partner(-to-be).
* Yet, for those in the know about Jane Goodall (and maybe less bothered about how a film is made and / or a cinematic story told), this would not have been a problem... except that, particularly in the case of a documentary that goes back and, as the opening titles say, re-establishes someone's credentials (and also presents an idea of the sexist reporting that was used to undermine them), a documentary needs to stand on its own two feet, not what one is assumed to know ?
* Unfortunately, the use of high-speed animated note-books, survey-sheets and graphical presentation of data really does the significance of Goodall's work a disservice - by tokenistically demonstrating the volume of what was being done, but only really for no better reason than as a visual interlude - and so, contrary to the message, tending to appear to trivialize*** the research, with which the film (except as mediated by Jane's words, and so about her in relation to her studies) has no intention of engaging with at any real level / depth (despite The National Geographic name on the film).
* One should have guessed that, of The Rhymicisists (as these pages call practitioners in and of 'minimalism'), the irritatingly restless arpeggiation had to be that of Philip Glass - not his fault that, being too high in the mix, his score tended to drown the voice-over in the central part of Jane, but his, in not his best film-score, for sounding too often like Michael Nyman, writing indifferently, and not like himself on form. (Again, it did not help that one was on such high alert about what one was being shown that it affected how one received what was heard.)
* In various set-ups, seemingly contrived for the purposes of this film, Jane Goodall appeared and answered questions to camera. However, they did not seem to be the best questions, or, if these were the best answers so elicited, a different approach should have been taken.
* Some material (however selected – that could not be established, as each screen of the credits flicked by, but it was said to be from her writings) was read by [someone who sounded like]
[...]
End-notes :
* Or Mavis ! (2015), rather conventionally, of the career of Mavis Staples : just compare with Jeanie Finlay’s (@JeanieFinlay's) Orion : The Man Who Would Be King (2015), or Janis : Little Girl Blue (2015).
** In addition, other footage - as things such as picture-quality and style of filming indicated - originated from other sources.
*** Does it seem to send a patronizingly wrong message, i.e. 'Look, a woman doing all this !'
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
