Alan Berliner
Nobody's Business, 1996; 16mm film; still photograph
The Uncomfortable Truth:
Personal Reasons for Making Personal Films
by Anna Farmer In the opening scene of Nobody's Business, a cinematic biography of Oscar Berliner, he vehemently protests the notion of a film about himself. "My life is nothing," he says exasperatingly to his son, the filmmaker Alan Berliner. "Who the hell would care about Oscar Berliner? I'm just an ordinary guy who's led an ordinary life. That's nothing to make a picture about."
Little does Oscar realize, but a compelling portrait of him is unfolding as he speaks. And by the end of this Emmy award-winning film, we find ourselves more touched by what this wary recluse hasn't told us, than what he has.
For Berliner allows his father's emotional baggage to protrude all over the place -- such as Oscar's deep disappointment over his divorce that he's "not going to talk about." Or his utter lack of interest in his family's genealogy: "To me, they're nobody," he describes a photo of grandparents he never met. And the way his sardonic humor counters his son's earnestness: "Can't you just share my fascination?" asks Berliner. "The answer is no, zero, no. Next question," responds Oscar curtly.
Despite the barriers, Berliner manages to get his point across. It's a perspective that's inherent in all his personal film essays, including The Sweetest Sound, in which he tracks down all the Alan Berliners he can find in the world and puts them together in one room. "I'm trying to elevate the ordinary to the extraordinary," says Berliner. "My point is everybody's nobody."
He's not alone in his fascination with the seemingly mundane. The current rage for "reality TV" demonstrates how riveting the lives of obscure individuals can prove for audiences. When viewers tune into The Osbournes, for example, which captures the everyday life of rock musician Ozzy Osbourne and family, they're actually clicking onto a trajectory that began with the seminal vérité series, An American Family. Broadcast on PBS for twelve weeks in 1973, it gave a global audience entrée to a Southern California family known as the Loud's, who let it all hang out and were often derided by critics as self-indulgent.
Certainly sentimentality and narcissism does drive some filmmakers to put themselves and their loved ones up on the screen for everyone to view. But many creators of personal documentaries are genuinely searching for what connects them to others. For instance, what's in the family contract that's unspoken?
"At first I wanted to have a tête-à-tête. To wake my father up, if possible," says Berliner about his stubborn zeal to get his profoundly sad father to express himself. Instead, their conversations often turn into verbal sparrings. Which is good, says Berliner, "because audiences can feel when you're protecting yourself or your subjects."
What Berliner ultimately discovered was that Nobody's Business, was about unfinished business. "It was really about my relationship to him," says Berliner. "In the end I was able to love him for what he was and for what he could never be."
The same thing can go for daughters. In Kim-Chi Tyler's celluloid unraveling of her family's convoluted history, she travels to Vietnam to confront the father she never knew. Driven by anger and curiosity, she sits him down in front of the camera and grills him as to why he forced her mother to leave their home.
"My father started crying, but I would not stop asking him questions about the past," she recalls. "I think it was painful for the audience to watch because I seemed so detached and I refused to stop the camera. It probably seemed cold."
Difficult as it was to film CHAC (named after her deceased mother), the process allowed Tyler to "connect all the dots." After growing up in America with a strong impulse to sublimate her Asian identity, and little time for personal reflection, her journey to Vietnam is a reunion with relatives and her country of birth. The experience, says Tyler, "gave me substance" and a chance to heal her relationship with her biological father. "My father is not the superhero I wanted him to be," she says, "but I came to love him."
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