(Check out Brandon Wilson’s Benita movie review, it opens today for a week-long release at Firehouse: DCTV’s Cinema for Documentary Film, from Nov. 28 to Dec. 4 before a wider rollout. Seen it? Join the conversation with HtN on our Letterboxd Page.)
Few things tell you more about Benita Raphan than her 2002 short film 2 + 2. When the film appears in Alan Berliner’s new documentary about the filmmaker, what we see is an abstract visual and aural collage. Numbers dance, text breathes, images approach and pass us by like oncoming traffic. But this is not a purely abstract work. Benita Raphan (11/5/1962 – 1/10/2021) spent most of her filmmaking career making films about geniuses. But these films were not merely expository works or talking heads docs. Raphan made experimental films about her subjects, films more interested in replicating what was going on inside the heads of her subjects rather than how they were perceived by others.
2 + 2 is about Nobel Prize winner John Nash, who is also the subject of Ron Howard’s Academy Award winning and deeply conventional biopic A Beautiful Mind. The fact that Raphan made something so radically different and downright antithetical to Howard’s film about the same man is Benita Raphan in a nutshell. I haven’t seen either 2 + 2 or A Beautiful Mind but the distinction is clear: Howard took a genius, plagued by mental illness, and put him into a conventional film anyone could understand; Raphan sought to make a film that made you feel what it was like to be in a beautiful but tormented mind. It was also her way of sharing what it was like to be Benita Raphan.
Alan Berliner was a friend and creative rabbi to Benita Raphan. So after her tragic suicide at age 58, her surviving family reached out to him. They had a simple but daunting request: that he pore through her archives and try to finish the film she was planning at the time of her death. Berliner takes up the gauntlet. What results is a synthesis of her experimental short film style and his signature essayistic documentary filmmaking. Benita, the completed work that resulted in the collaboration with his fallen comrade, is not just a requiem or a dirge. It is a loving and respectful tribute to Raphan, one that pays tribute to her craft and drive, explores her pain, and reckons with mystery, both the mysteries of how she lived and her decision to die.
In his more incisive days, Paul Schrader once remarked that there were no Emily Dickinsons in film. This statement proves that Schrader was not acquainted with Benita Raphan, who took up Dickinson as the subject of one of her works (Up To Astonishment, 2020). She lived alone all of her adult life, dedicating her life to her work and her dogs. Berliner’s film traces Raphan back to her roots, where her mother Roz describes the filmmaker as serious, sensitive, high strung, and profoundly creative from the very beginning. She enters adolescence in the New York City of the 1970s, emerging as a fiercely original visual artist just as the city is giving birth to a galvanizing punk scene.
After art school, she lived in London and Paris. When she returns to America, her course is set. She takes up film, creating her own hybrid of experimental and documentary film. Most of the footage in the doc, from films and video taken of herself on her iPhone, is by Raphan, including handwritten text from journals. Berliner includes newspaper clippings and his own interviews with Raphan’s family, friends, and collaborators. The portrait he paints of her as a person and an artist is haunting, particularly the way her youthful individuality and infectious inventiveness slowly transformed with age. The decades take their toll. Her eccentricity, it is suggested, masked serious mental health issues that prevented her from achieving an intimacy in her work and life that she craved.
We often celebrate the lone artist, but we don’t often want to grapple with the price they pay to create. Benita does both, and does them beautifully.
– Brandon D. Wilson (@GeniusBastard)
Alan Berliner; Benita movie review
Post a Comment
