Our Freddie, a cat found on the streets of Los Angeles, took great pride when we moved from a Studio City apartment building to our house in Costa Mesa. Every time the neighbor’s dog, a warm-hearted beast, neared our driveway, Freddie turned from a sweetie into a fierce avenger. Hair standing on end, he would utter a terrible cry and attack the giant beast, forcing him into a shameful retreat…
When I read the reviews of the documentary Kurt and Courtney, I couldn’t help sensing the same kind of territorial defensiveness. The city release of the documentary (the territory of feature films) made a reviewer ask if the documentary maker had the right to express himself or his point of view. Internet reviews are even more aggressive. They are written by writers who master myriad details, names, titles and lyrics. They know "everything" about the relations between Kurt and Courtney, the people the famous couple were involved with, including other musicians, lovers, reporters, fans, friends, assassins, and private eyes. The tone of their on-line reviews makes one wonder: aren’t the makers of Kurt and Courtney the thieves who stripped these reviewers of their exclusive right to love and hate their idols? The fact that filmmakers don’t feel ecstasy seems to be even more offensive to the on-line critics, and in their writings, they are putting filmmakers on their knees.
Not every documentary provokes such a reaction. For instance, Michael Moore’s The Big One, attracts a totally different bunch of enemies, probably executives whose careers may be endangered by Moore’s revelations.
The Big One, which refers to the United States, depicts the power of the corporate world. We are introduced to "welfare mothers," big corporations, that pry billions of dollars from the state to stay afloat. We see prison inmates—murderers and rapists—booking flights for major airlines which don’t have to pay them full wages. We see cities in ruins after corporations have moved jobs out of United States to Asia, where they shameless sweat shops for children and teenagers who make our favorite Nike shoes. Each scene cries "do something about it!"
I like the film, it opened my eyes regarding the environment that surrounds me. But coming from Russia I know that whatever would be done to satisfy the public, will not change the situation of the working teenagers in that remote part of the world. I have seen the consequences of the Russian revolution based on the similar ideas "to do something about it" developed by French revolutionaries and German philosophers. Michael Moore’s judgement comes from the same source. The source sounds so right, but for some reason, it application to real life had so far resulted in violence, Siberian labor camps, unheard suffering, wars, injustice. Maybe there is a way to look at things differently, learning something about the failure of the Russian revolution?
The documentary The Big One tries hard to make me worry about the global processes but as a result, watching the film makes me feel like a particle, one of the multitude of particles that make up the world. (Ironically, Stalin called an individual of the Communist society "vintik"—a screw, in other words, a particle that makes up a bigger system.)
Of course, I am more than a particle. And I find documentaries interesting that use their exclusively tenacious and rough material—real life images—to explore terra incognito, the life of the human soul. That happens when we are made to experience greater meaning of documented footage than the obvious and descriptive meaning. The question is, how a filmmaker makes us experience something bigger and more sophisticated than immediate meaning of a documented footage?
Interestingly enough, the same problem appears in an ancient literary genre, the sagas, for instance, The Sagas of the Islanders. According to Britannica, these sagas are "a unique contribution to Western literature and far in advance of any medieval literature in their realism, their controlled, objective style, their power of character delineation, and their overwhelming tragic dignity." These sagas offer a brilliant study of stories limited to retelling only "the facts." The word "saga" means "what had been said," namely by a first-hand witness in a specific historical setting. According to saga aesthetics, if I want to tell a story, I must summon a first-hand witness who was there, saw it all and heard it all, and who never says more than he or she had experienced personally and directly.
Applied today, the cameraman can convey only what a witness (interviewee) is telling him or her into his or her camera and sound recording devices.
The simple question is, why does this method leave us with "talking heads" in nearly all cases, producing only rare documentaries that carry aesthetic value?
Down through the centuries, history has done a good job of selecting and preserving sagas based on the most natural principle, "I like it." It has been said that in the best sagas the testimonials form a magic pattern or magic formula that enables us to recognize another divine world of myths and demigods beneath the translucent surface of the objective listing of facts. The synchronous co-existence of two worlds, the real one and the poetic (magic) one, has the tremendous power to kindle and involve the listener’s imagination.
I recall one such documentary by the Estonian author and photographer, Andres Sööt about the Song Festival that gathers nearly all of Estonia to sing on a giant stage built on a song plaza. (Later, Western media would label these festivals as the seed of the Baltic "singing revolution.") While documenting the event, Andres Sööt let the pompous Song Festival stay in the background of his footage. He focused on only one person, the master of ceremonies who organized the colorful parade of choruses, singers ascend on the stage, and kept track over thousands of details which came with the territory.
When firstly saw this documentary I already knew that this time the miracle had happened: the presence of that another and divine "reality" was there and it gave double meaning to everything that camera had documented. The parade of singers reminded a Roman Saturnalia, and our Master of Ceremonies looked like a satyr against its backdrop. Behind the stage sat a table crammed with microphones, food and drink; behind that table our hero, a fat and too sensitive satyr, was singing alone, enthusiastically, in entire self-oblivion, eyes turned heavenward… Our Master of Ceremony was no longer Mr. X, the citizen. He became The Grand Master of Ceremonies, embodied by Mr. X, the fine actor in a magical production worthy of being staged by maestro, Fellini, himself.
Andres’ documentary about the Song festival and its Master of Ceremonies also provoked strange territorial defensiveness. The release of this documentary coincided with the arrival a group of Moscow guests in the Estonian Union of Filmmakers. Of course, the new documentary was shown to the guests. The leader, a Moscow documentarian who had full control over the career of Andres Sööt, fell in ugly rage: "Those from the republics jump too high!"
If something ever happens to the Estonian film archive, and only this 30-minute film survives, it will tell all about the Baltic "singing revolution", who we were, and what we were striving for.
Kurt and Courtney is one of these rare documentaries that features this magical quality: another world is revealed through the author’s questions and witnesses’ answers.
There are dark rumors that Courtney killed Kurt. The director questions witnesses, a fascinating line-up of people speak about Kurt and Courtney’s life. Nick Broomfield’s questions peel off one layer after another from the rumors, opinions, points of view and personal interpretations, forcing the interviewee’s to face what they were really talking about, who they are, and why they see things as they do.
As a result of this sorting through rumors, a complex and controversial image Courtney Love emerges and grows until it obtains features of the frightening mythical figure, the goddess Kali.
Kali, the devouring, destructive goddess, is depicted as a hideous four-handed hag smeared with blood, with bared teeth and protruding tongue. Kali is naked, she wears only a garland of skulls and a girdle of severed hands. She is dancing on the inert body of her consort, Shiva, one of the main deities of Hinduism.
Kali developed a taste for blood when she killed the demon Raktaavja, who cloned thousands of look-a-likes each time a drop of his blood fell on the earth. According to the Britannica, Kali pierced the demon with a spear and, holding him high, drank his blood before it reached the ground. Goats are sacrificed to her daily at her temples, such as Kalighat in Calcutta. The thugs and assassins were worshippers of Kali and made ritual offerings to her of their victims.
Cobain’s musical group was called Nirvana, provoking very Indian associations. And the film creates a picture of Kurt and Courtney that fits the symbolic picture of Kali dancing on the body of Shiva. Kurt wants peace, but Courtney wants a fight. He wants nothing, but she wants everything. Many witnesses compare her to the devouring, destructive goddess.
In the world of famous couple Broomfield recognizes other personages of Kalighat. There are victimized fans and jilted lovers, who were used to fill garlands of skulls and girdles of severed hands. There is the demon Raktaavja, personified by Courtney’s father who charges his daughter with murdering Cobain. It is hard to believe, but there is even a worshiping crowd of assassins.
Broomfield walks us through the dark alleys of a narcotic’s decadence, inhabited by thugs. One of them swears that Courtney had offered him money to kill Kurt. Shortly after that interview, our thug was murdered by another thug. These assassins seem to wait for more orders to kill from their goddess.
There is also Courtney’s main worshipper, private eye Tom Grant, whose web page ensures that Kali’s shadow will stick to Courtney’s name forever. The entire picture of Kalighat permeates Broomfield’s story of Kurt and Courtney.
In his final footage, Broomfield guides us to a Hollywood high society, a free speech celebration. In the center of this event is Courtney in a glamorous pink silk gown. Now she is admired and trusted to emcee freedom of speech awards for some brave foreign journalists, in spite of the fact that here, at home, she was caught red-handed suppressing unwanted articles about herself.
Nick Broomfield who brought us here, gives up. He leaves the scene, believing that his point has been made.
And it has. In order to reach this spot of international attention, Courtney had to choose the path of Kali. Being born in the soulless suburbia, she learned blood lust from fights with her own father, the "demon Raktaavja" himself. If his every word produced deadly blame, she learned to "catch" these words "before they fell on the earth" creating new and new barriers for her.
Kurt and Courtney isn’t a film about who killed whom. It is a film about how impossible it is to achieve, to make dreams come true, to rise to stardom from nowhere and later to stay on the road. Kurt couldn’t stay on that road. For a woman, it is even harder.
According to Courtney’s background, the probability of Courtney’s ascent was near zero. Nick Broomfield depicted how his heroine handled that low probability. And if you don’t like the story, then look around and think about where the story comes from.
Some are concerned with the truthfulness of Broomfield’s version. I cannot judge that because I don’t know Kurt and Courtney personally. Few do. Ironically, in the present context, the message matters, not elusive truthfulness. And this message answers the question a Los Angeles Times reviewer asked: "Does the documentary maker have the right to express his opinion?" Probably yes, because viewers relate to the author’s opinion, not to the "truth," the bottomless well that can never fully examined.
The story of Courtney’s ascent stems from a theme that unites Broomfield’s many works. The terrible shadow of Kali emerges in the portrait of the female serial killer in Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer. Aileen Wuornos literally fought the demon Raktaavja by killing the policemen who bought her sex in the most dirty way imaginable. That extreme manifestation of Kali destroyed Aileen Wuornos as well. She was condemned by the law and the public. But Kali was there and in her rage, the touch of divinity was recognized by everyone who approached her, including Nick Broomfield and the viewers of his documentary. She was more than a serial killer, she was an avenger who stood up against the life situation that forced her to sell herself.
Kali’s shadow can be sensed in Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam. It unmasked false illusions in the traitorous world of Hollywood madams, police, their informants, prostitutes, and their clients. But the secret touch of Kali disabled the moral judgement as well, showing that for too many, Kali’s way was the only way to survive.
Viewers cannot accept these means of survival. The Hollywood madams know that. They go with the treacherous protection of Kali, the goddess who destroys her children sooner or later. They know that as well, but there are no other way to choose…
The TV is on. Businesswomen are chatting on The View, Barbara Walters’ show on ABC, often parodied by Saturday Night Live. One of these well-groomed ladies in expensive jackets with overly padded shoulders says, "If you pursue a career, you are called a bitch!" The response is loud. Everyone of them had been called a bitch for trying get ahead with her ambitions. I cannot help sensing hidden pride in being called "a bitch!" Strong women! All of them had borrowed rage from Kali in order to advance. No other way could serve them.
The greater the pressure, the more furious Kalighat becomes. Kali destroys in order to survive. Try to find any rational answer to the question: why are children shooting each other in the schools? For some reason, an easy answer—media bad influence—doesn’t sound right, we don’t believe it. And so far no one can offer a rational and believable explanation.
Broomfield tells us stories of fallen women. The pressure in their lives exceeded the limits of human capacity and it sets loose the rage of Kali.
I hear the muffled roar of Kalighat and stop here. I retreat into safe quietness…
The question, asked at the beginning of this article, why Kurt and Courtney provokes such an angry territorial defensiveness in some critics, is still not answered. I can only guess, maybe the touch of saga type symbolism makes a meaning of a documentary too personal, too dangerously. And some critics instinctively rush to defense their privacy. Because such a documentary mirrors the pain that we are not ready to face. And we behave as crying babies angered by the mirror. Instead of trying stop bleeding we punish filmmakers who mirror our wounds.
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