Back in the 1960s Ed Pincus made some key social-issue documentaries and wrote a how-to book that became a bible for low-budget filmmaking. If he’d kept on that track, he would have remained a respectable figure in the world of non-fiction film.
Instead, Pincus rejected the idea that a camera could record something without changing it, and made a first-person documentary about his own life, “Diaries (1971-76),” released in 1982.
That 200-minute epic was scorned as Me Generation navel-gazing by the New York Times, but also widely acclaimed. Pincus’s work was influential (his former Harvard student Ross McElwee clearly aped the Pincus style in his classic “Sherman’s March”), but the man himself dropped out of filmmaking for 30 years to raise flowers and family in Vermont.
We hear about the reasons for that in “One Cut, One Life,” a summing-up movie that nevertheless raises old concerns. Instigated by Pincus after he received a diagnosis of terminal cancer, the film is co-directed by Lucia Small.
Faithfully following the directorial philosophy of laying it all out there, “One Cut” becomes as much about Small’s life — she has recently lost two close friends to violent death — as it does about Pincus and mortality.
There’s also the fact that Ed’s wife Jane, the co-author of the feminist handbook “Our Bodies, Our Selves,” is pained not only by the intrusion of the camera but by the closeness between Ed and his younger female collaborator. (Jane’s been through this before, as the extramarital affairs of the Pincus open marriage were included in “Diaries.”)
Awkward encounters abound, and it is difficult to escape the scent of narcissism even as you might admire the honesty involved.
The longer the movie goes on, the more interesting it gets. The subject matter itself is not explored with great insight, but in many ways “One Cut” is not about Pincus dying or Small dealing with grief, except in the sense that they need to document it with a camera.
That’s what the film is really about: Why is there this compulsion to record these life moments, to preserve them and give them order? To their credit, the people involved sort through these issues (when Jane compares the videotaping of sensitive scenes to rape, Small puts the camera aside and our next shot has the camera recording from Jane’s point of view).
Maybe the filming is a way of trying to cheat Death, to borrow a phrase used in a different context in the movie. Or maybe it’s just one long denial.
“One Cut, One Life” (three stars)
This portrait of the terminal illness of low-budget filmmaker Ed Pincus is no ordinary documentary; instead, he and co-director Lucia Small turn the film into a conversation piece about whether the impulse to film everything should include the intimate moments of life. There’s quite a bit of navel-gazing, but interesting issues, too.
Rating: Not rated; probably PG-13 for subject matter
Showing: Grand Illusion theater
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