Three Documentaries Make A Post: For these are the lands of my forefathers. And these are the dances of my ancestors.

Way of the Morris (2011): Despite the tagline – which is for once used in the film – this documentary directed Rob Curry and Tim Plester is not made for that clientele, but rather a very personal exploration of Morris Dance that is interested in the dance as a rural, social, working class phenomenon that’s clearly also deeply personal for one of the filmmakers. There is some diving into the history of Morris dancing, but it, too is focused on the local and the personal connection between today’s Adderbury Morris dancers, the hard cut World War I meant for many folk traditions, as well as unexpected connections to the folk revival.

It’s often a genuinely beautiful film that’s all about community as a web of personal connections.

The Gleaners and I: Two Years Later aka Les glaneurs et la glaneuse… deux ans après (2002): Keeping with documentary filmmaking deeply informed by personal connections between people – and a great, unpathetic sense for human kindness – Agnès Varda returns to some of the subjects of her utterly brilliant The Gleaners and I. If you’re of the complaining type, you’ll probably mutter that she doesn’t add anything truly new with her return to the subjects of the first film. However, there’s such an emotionally true sense of life passing and people changing in Varda’s re-encounters with these people, it’s not really a criticism I see applying. Rather, I see Varda insisting that these people, mostly poor, disenfranchised or a little too weird for polite society are worth engaging with seriously, worth being looked at not with the the eye of the social worker (nothing against social workers) but with one that truly faces them eye to eye.

Tales of the Uncanny (2020): Coming out of the same bubble of Severin films also responsible for the incredible, deeply exciting, folk horror documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched (2021) – a film desperately in need of a German distributor – this isn’t directed by Kier-La Janisse (who does appear as a talking head) but by David Gregory. It’s about the long and pretty exciting history of the horror anthology movie, with a particular emphasis on Amicus. As a Corona lockdown project, this doesn’t go quite as deep as I would have wished – while there are dozens of talking heads, there’s a bit too much vague gushing about the general awesomeness of any given movie for my tastes. Also disappointing is the complete lack of any mention of the long series of Filipino, Hong Kong and Thai series of anthology movies like the “Shake, Rattle and Roll”  or “Troublesome Night” series.

On the plus side, there’s also a lot of very insightful commentary (Ernest R. Dickerson talking about Bava alone would be worth the price of admission). The use of archive footage and film clips is also very well realized, often juxtaposing talking head and footage in incisive and clever ways while also finding a genuinely exciting approach to presenting the films talked about.