From Fact To Friction

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He located another kindred spirit in Timothy Treadwell (Grizzly Man), who lived with wild bears for 12 summers and was mauled to death by them in the 13th. But whether Herzog is filming auctioneers, televangelists or Saharan herdsmen, he always finds the drama. Sometimes he invents it, staging scenes to underline some point. He finds the standard documentary form boring and banal--"the truth of accountants." What he deeply believes in is "poetic, ecstatic truth ... that can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization."

That's the artful cunning behind the great ecstasy of filmmaker Herzog. And over 40 years, his audiences have found that ecstasy can be contagious. --R.C.

A CHALLENGE TO SANCTIMONY

THE BLAND FACE OF EVIL

The recent release of director Amy Berg's Deliver Us from Evil, a profile of defrocked priest Oliver O'Grady, the most notorious pedophile in American Catholicism, has already resulted in front-page news stories and in O'Grady's departure from exile in Ireland, where newspaper accounts of the film made him a marked man. It renewed interest by the Los Angeles County district attorney in prosecuting the church hierarchy for its cover-up role in a narrative that both breaks the heart and angers the blood.

That's not bad for a documentary film that, given the nature of its medium and its distressing subject matter, is bound to have limited audience appeal. But, of course, serious documentarians never work for money or fame. Since the beginnings of the genre, their aim has usually been to call attention to injustice and, if possible, correct it. Berg got onto this story by making segments about the topic for news programs, then found she could not avoid making the O'Grady case the focus of her first full-length film.

Her coup was getting him to grant several long interviews in which he is cheerfully "disassociative," as Berg puts it. Why would he so expose himself? Because, she thinks, he went in and confessed to the church and was granted absolution, which doesn't encourage one "to really punish yourself." In a way, that's also true of the visibly squirming Roger Cardinal Mahony, shown in a videotaped deposition as he tries to defend himself (and his church's wealth and power) from the scandal. Whether or not legal consequences derive from it, that footage alone makes Deliver Us from Evil one of the most powerful indictments of hypocrisy in high and trusted places you are ever likely to see. --R.S.