When Chris Wilcha found himself working a corporate job for the first time, he stumbled upon a way of turning his soul-deadening 9 to 5 into art. "The year following my college graduation, I got a job in the marketing department at Columbia House, a mail-order CD and tape club fondly remembered by many for its susceptibility to being swindled out of free CDs through subscriptions under fake names," Wilcha recounts.
"I made the then-unconventional decision to bring along a Sony Hi8 video camera to work every day, intending to document my experience in corporate culture and to mitigate my sellout anxieties," he explains. "Through the act of filming — capturing day-to-day dramas, documenting the internal power dynamics within the company, interviewing the larger-than-life characters that worked there — I knew I wanted to be a documentary filmmaker."
Wilcha turned the footage into his first film, 2000's The Target Shoots First, which took home awards from both Slamdance and SXSW. In the years since, he has directed episodes of This American Life for Ira Glass (for which he won the Emmy for Outstanding Directing for Nonfiction Programming), the concert film Another Day, Another Time for the Coen Brothers, and Knock Knock, It's Tig Notaro for comedian Tig Notaro. His new documentary is Flipside, in which Wilcha looks back on the unfinished documentary projects of his life.
"Flipside undoubtedly serves as a bookend and accidental sequel to The Target Shoots First," he says. "During the gap between the two films, the most vital lesson I've learned as a documentary filmmaker is perseverance. It is essential to sustain belief in your projects and ideas over extended periods of time, especially when others may lose patience or interest."
Below, Wilcha shares with A.frame five films that had a major impact on him and, in his eyes, helped to redefine what a documentary can be.
Directed by: Thom Andersen
I was a student of Thom Andersen's at Cal Arts when he was teaching a class that evolved into his documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself. This encyclopedic essay film is composed almost entirely of clips from movies set or shot in Los Angeles. Part memoir, part cinematic history, and part caustic love letter to his hometown, Andersen's documentary is overflowing with insights about how L.A.'s architecture is depicted in film and how Hollywood distorts the city's image. From Andersen's work, I learned that first-person narration in a documentary grants a unique license to digress, reflect and theorize in ways that more traditional, objective narration does not.
Directed by: Ross McElwee
Ross McElwee is perhaps best known for his documentary Sherman's March, but his film Time Indefinite is his true masterpiece. Filmed on 16mm, Ross collects poetic moments from his everyday life that he seamlessly weaves into a profound mediation on family, marriage, aging and death. The conversational tone of Ross' voice-over conceals the intricate structure and literary sophistication of the film. Time Indefinite taught me that everyday life is a subject worthy of loving scrutiny and metaphysical consideration.
Directed by: Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard | Written by: Iain Forsyth, Jane Pollard and Nick Cave
For the past decade, documentary filmmaking has been in the midst of a remarkable creative renaissance — a radical, exuberant redefining of what nonfiction film can do and how it does it. 20,000 Days on Earth is a jolting reminder that telling a "true story" doesn't mean presenting a linear set of facts; it means pinpointing the essential truth of a story and visualizing it in the most inventive way possible to translate that spirit.
Directors Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard use every filmmaking tool available — moody, artfully-designed cinematography, scripted voice-over monologues, a staged conversation with a therapist, a visit to the fictional "Nick Cave Archives" — to encapsulate the art and legacy of musician and writer Nick Cave.
Directed by: Sadie Benning
The prompt for this list was to highlight five films that had a major impact on me. Among them, two films share a unique familial tie that drastically reshaped my approach to filmmaking. I'm bending the rules a bit here, but when I saw the video work of Sadie Benning for the first time at the Whitney Biennial 1993, it was revelatory. Shot on a Fisher-Price PXL2000 toy camera in glitchy black and white, Benning's queer coming-of-age collage videos were an intimate, funny and inventive form of autobiographical video art. They were also an urgent, inspiring counterpoint to the dominant forms and voices of commercial cinema at the time.
Directed by: James Benning
Two years later, during my tenure at Cal Arts, Sadie's father, James Benning, premiered Deseret, his experimental documentary that chronicles the history of Utah, solely through static landscape shots juxtaposed with voice-over excerpts from 93 news stories about the state that appeared in The New York Times between the years 1852 and 1992. While this premise might sound like a mathematical equation — and in a way, it is — it also served as an invitation to completely reimagine the scope and potential of documentary filmmaking.
