Hot Docs Planner: Coping With Trauma, Klezmer-rap, and Yogic Flying

By Torontoist

Every weekday and Saturday throughout Hot Docs, Torontoist is looking at a handful of festival offerings, recommending the worthwhile and de-recommending the not-so-worthwhile.

Josh Dolgin performing in Gary Beitel’s The “Socalled” Movie.

On offer this Tuesday at Hot Docs: The “Socalled” Movie, a profile of eclectic Montreal musician Josh Dolgin (A.K.A. “Socalled”) and his equally-esoteric blend of traditional Yiddish music, hip-hop, and funk; Jeff Malmberg’s Marwencol, the story of a beating victim reluctantly thrust into the art world’s spotlight; and David Wants to Fly, a probing inquiry into the bottom-line of the transcendental meditation movement. Torontoist’s Steve Kupferman, Suzannah Showler, and John Semley look at all three, after the jump.

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The “Socalled” Movie

Directed by Gary Beitel. Canada. 95 minutes.
“I’m like the Mahatma Gandhi of hip-hop,” says Josh Dolgin, about five minutes into The “Socalled” Movie. He’s joking, trying to make a point about the inclusiveness of his musical style, which combines funk, hip-hop, and the nineteenth-century Jewish music style known as klezmer into a euphonious whole. Dolgin’s music is definitely unique and inclusive, but his actual stature is way less than Gandhi-esque. And that’s one reason the doc isn’t a success.
Directed by Gary Beitel, a former professor of Dolgin’s, The “Socalled” Movie succeeds in painting an affectionate portrait of its subject. Dolgin is a Montreal-based musician and artist who performs under the name Socalled. He’s a hoodie-wearing, jew-fro-sporting guy with a kind and generous personality, and a penchant for performing magic tricks. He’s open about his sexuality (gay), his religious views (atheist, despite the religious underpinnings of his klezmer musical stylings), and his upbringing (at one point, we visit his childhood bedroom, and meet “Fuzzface,” his stuffed bear). We even follow him on an eleven-day klezmer cruise, with his friends and parents, along the Dnieper River.
If Dolgin were someone about whom this type of information were inherently interesting—like, say Gandhi—“Socalled” would still be trivial, but it would have some real universal documentary value (see: Derrida). As it is, the doc is likely to be interesting mainly to people who are already familiar with the music of Socalled, or are just hardcore klezheads.
On one level, The “Socalled” Movie is interesting—as a concert film. Beitel captures Dolgin’s collaborations with other musicians, including Fred Wesley, an old-school funkmaster who used to play trombone for James Brown; and Irving Fields, a nonagenarian lounge musician whom Dolgin set on the path to internet stardom, by convincing Fields to write and record an ode to YouTube. For what it is, the whole production is well put-together, and provides an intimate look at Dolgin’s unique creative process, which involves a lot of electronic sampling from vintage Yiddish vinyl.
Despite the music, The “Socalled” Movie comes up short. Only by placing Dolgin at the centre of some kind of story or conflict could Beitel have made his subject interesting to a general audience. Instead, the doc is split into eighteen brief, discrete chapters. As a result, all we ever get are tantalizing glimpses of the inner man. A lack of detail about the relationship between Dolgin and Socalled backup singer Katie Moore was particularly disappointing.
At one point, Dolgin sums up his philosophy as a performer for the camera: “It’s not political. It’s not religious. It’s just music.” Yup. SK
Screens Tuesday, May 4 at 11:30 p.m. at the ROM Theatre (100 Queen’s Park) as part of the Next series.

Mark Hogancamp recreates the site of his psychic trauma in Jeff Malmberg’s Marwencol.

Marwencol

Directed by Jeff Malmberg. USA. 83 minutes.
In 2000, Mark Hogancamp suffered an attack outside a bar that left him brain damaged and with no recollection of his previous life. With few options available, Mark eventually developed a home-grown breed of therapy by constructing an elaborate WWII-era town in his backyard. Including alter-egos for his friends, his family, and himself among the Barbie-sized residents of Marwecol, Mark spends his days constructing full-scale human dramas at one-sixteenth the size. When Marwencol is discovered by the outside world, Mark’s consuming method of catharsis is elevated to the status of art, with Mark assuming the uneasy role of artist.
Director Jeff Malmberg lets us fully into Marwencol with long sequences of close-up stills of the dolls enacting dramas that Mark narrates. These portraits are beautiful and claustrophobic in exactly the right way, bringing the audience too close to avoid sympathy. While the larger questions about art, trauma, and identity that the film asks are interesting, Marwencol is at its best when magnifying the miniature.
When it does pull back into the world at large, Marwencol is ultimately weakened by a strangely-timed revelation about Mark’s identity that refocuses and disorients the film’s structure. As we watch Mark struggle to accept a part of who he is that the first two-thirds of the film has kept hidden, it’s hard not to feel that the aspect of his identity that he struggles with most is maybe the least interesting thing about him. SS
Screens Tuesday, May 4 at 9:45 p.m. at Isabel Bader Theatre (93 Charles Street West) and Thursday, May 6 at 1:30 p.m. at Cumberland 3 (159 Cumberland Street) as part of the International Spectrum Series.

American filmmaker and transcendental meditation spokesperson David Lynch in David Sieveking’s David Wants to Fly.

David Wants to Fly

Directed by David Sieveking. Germany, Austria, Switzerland. 96 minutes.
David Wants to Fly seems to unfold in real-time. Its various developments seem unbidden by planning, each discovery as much a revelation to writer/director/star David Sieveking as it is to us. And that’s a good thing, adding a welcome degree of intimacy, spontaneity and charm to Sieveking’s film.
While some moving in Hot Docs circles have referred to David Wants to Fly as “the Lynch doc,” that’s really not an accurate assessment. True, the film begins with Sieveking, recently pitched from film school and into parentally-subsidized boho destitution, trekking from Berlin to America to hear is idol, American filmmaker David Lynch, lecture on transcendental meditation (TM). But Lynch—all tousled hair, boyish lilt, and fluttering fingers—quickly takes a backseat as David Wants to Fly evolves from a piece of idol worship into a righteous takedown of the TM movement and its barely hidden agenda to sell enlightenment (and, more preposterously, the ability to levitate) wholesale.
Comparing himself to Kyle McLachlan’s plucky gumshoe in Lynch’s own Blue Velvet, Sieveking unearths the various lies and cultish schemes buried beneath TM’s airy-fairy façade—a journey which takes him from Germany, to Iowa, to New York, and finally to the mouth of the Ganges. Buoyed by its especially genial protagonist, David Wants to Fly is a scrupulous, and seldom cynical, probe into the machinations of TM and its smiling celebrity ambassadors. David Lynch disciples be warned: this is far from a flattering portrait of your favourite filmmaker. JS
Screens Tuesday, May 4 at 9:00 p.m. at the Bloor Cinema (506 Bloor Street West), and Wednesday, May 5 at 3:45 p.m. at the Cumberland 3 (159 Cumberland Street) as part of the International Spectrum series.
All stills courtesy of Hot Docs.