Four Important Documentaries in 2011

Looking back at 2011, I would say that it was a great year for documentaries.  Here are four that I had the pleasure to see, learned a lot from, and reviewed.  They are listed in date order, because ranking them would be apples and oranges.  The dates and links are those of my reviews, which could be earlier than official release dates, in cases in which I was able to see a preview.

• January 6, 2011:  There But for Fortune, Kenneth Bowser's vivid, incisive movie about Phil Ochs, second only to Bob Dylan in the opinion of many, certainly above Dylan in some ways ... more relevant than ever in view of Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring ... look for it on PBS in 2012 ... details on the movie's Facebook page

• January 18, 2011: Default: The Student Loan Documentary, Aurora Meneghello's movie about usurious bank practices regarding student loans ...  one of the main causes of Occupy Wall Street ... look for it on PBS in 2012 ... details on the movie's Facebook page

• August 14, 2011: Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness, known as the Yiddish Mark Twain, Aleichem showed - and this movie by Joseph Dorman shows -  a first-rate understanding of media on the level of  Marshall McLuhan, in the centenary of McLuhan's birth ... details on the movie's Facebook page

• September 2, 2011: Connected, Tiffany Shlain's triple threat movie, one part bio-doc about her father Leonard, one part history of media ala Marshall McLuhan, one-part about the growing interconnectedness of our world now expressed in Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring ... details on the movie's Facebook page

Sholem Aleichem and Marshall McLuhan

I saw Joseph Dorman's 2011 documentary, Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness, with Tina last night.  Superb footage and sage commentary about the man born Sholem Rabinovich in Russia in 1859, who died world-renown under his pen name Sholem Aleichem in New York City in 1916 (a year after my father was born here in 1915, four years after Marshall McLuhan was born in Edmonton in 1911).  Sholem Aleichem was known as the Yiddish Mark Twain.   Given one of his specialties in ironic endings of short stories, he also could have been known as the Yiddish O'Henry or De Maupassant.

But the Twain reference speaks most to Sholem Aleichem's relevance to Marshall McLuhan.  Mark Twain's ear for American vernacular, and capacity to put it on the written page, fired up his master works Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.  Aleichem did the same for Yiddish.  McLuhan provided tools for explaining this genius of both writers - hybrid energy, their capturing of one mode, the acoustic, and rendering it convincingly in another mode, the visual.

As Dorman's movie makes clear, Sholem Aleichem might have written in Russian, his native written language, or in Hebrew, the formal, sacred language of his people.  Instead, he chose to write in the shtetel slang he heard all around him.  This made him cooler than Tolstoy and the Talmud, a written rapper of his time.

McLuhan understood and wrote about the power of slang, including its transformation into cliche and in turn into archetype (see my Digital McLuhan and its discussion of McLuhan's tetrad for more).  Sholem Aleichem, alas, died a decade before his work would achieve its full archetype status - in the Soviet Union, Palestine, and America, in different ways, as the movie shows.

Laughing in the Darkness now buttresses that enduring status.   I had one quibble with the documentary - it made no mention of Joe Stein, who wrote the play, Fiddler on the Roof,  which catapulted Aleichem's Tevye the Milkman stories into theatrical and then cinematic prominence in the 1960s and 70s.  Although I studied Sholem Aleichem in the Workmen's Circle Yiddisheh shuleh in the late 1950s, and heard about him from my parents and grandparents, for many people Fiddler was their introduction to Sholem.

From the ear to the page to the screen, a McLuhanesque story of media evolution right there.