A summertime question for Chuck Tryon.

Choosing what I regard to be the "top" documentary of the year is both an exciting and mildly overwhelming prospect. Exciting because it allows me to revisit the many fine documentaries I've already seen in 2006. Overwhelming because I find it almost impossible to choose one film from so many diverse documentaries that I truly appreciate while also fully aware that I've probably missed at least a dozen others that are equally deserving of a wider audience.

Some of the documentaries that left me most energized after seeing them included Tara Wray's low-key and deeply insightful Manhattan, Kansas, which explored the filmmaker's tenuous relationship with her eccentric mother; Frank Popper's Can Mr Smith Get To Washington Anymore?, which offers one of the most insightful explorations of American politics I've seen in a long time; Davis Guggenheim's An Inconvenient Truth, which may be most important for its effect on US environmental policy; and James Longley's Iraq in Fragments, which provides us with a compelling portait of the conditions Iraqi citizens continue to endure during the occupation.

But if I had to choose one documentary, it would likely be Gary Tarn's Black Sun, which I had a chance to see at Silverdocs earlier this summer. Tarn's film can best be described as an experimental documentary in the spirit of Chis Marker's Sans Soleil (in addition to directing the film, Tarn also composed the music). Black Sun is based on the writings of Hugues de Montalembert, a visual artist based in Manhattan, who was blinded during a mugging in his apartment when one of his attackers threw paint thinner in his eyes. De Montalembert narrates from his own descriptions of blindness, recalling the attack and conveying how it changes his experience of the world while Tarn's camera restlessly records these images, often pixelating the images or using other effects to convey the ways in which we use vision to apprehend the world. Like the imagined filmmaker in Sans Soleil, De Montalembert chooses to travel the world, his stories becoming cinematic postcards representing the places he visits, which include Indonesia, Iceland and India. I tend to resist choosing a single film as the "best" of any category, but because Black Sun tapped into so many fundamental questions, about identity, memory and experience, that are crucial to my academic research, I'm confident that it's a film I will be thinking and writing about for a long time.

Posted by dwhudson at August 3, 2006 2:58 AM