Angus Macqueen

Angus Macqueen

Filmography (selected) 2003 The Rock Star and Mullahs (Producer / Director) The Last Peasants (Producer / Director) Prix Europa 2003 Gierson Documentary Series Award Kodak Award Royal Television Society Awards for Photography, Editing and Team Directors Guild Best Directing on a Documentary What She Wants (Producer / Director) Nominated for One World Media Awards 2002 The Empty ATM / Cry for Argentina (Producer / Director) Silver Hugo Award, Chicago 2003 CineFilm Golden Eagle Award 2003 2000 Vodka (Producer / Director) 1999 Gulag (Producer / Director) IDA Documentary Feature Award, Los Angeles 2000 Gierson Award, Best British Documentary 1999 British Academy & Royal Television Society Nominations 1998 Loving Lenin (Producer / Director) 1997 Dancing for Dollars (Producer / Director) 1995 Death of Yugoslavia (Producer / Director) 1991 Second Russian Revolution (Producer / Director)

Angus Macqueen by Angus Macqueen

I never set out to be a documentary filmmaker. I ran into a medium which allowed me to communicate about the events that I had lived through when living in Poland and the Soviet Union in the early 1980s: the Solidarity Revolution and Martial Law in Poland, and then the coming of Gorbachev´s Glasnost and Perestroika.

My first taste of TV was being asked to do some translations for a series on Poland, an experience, which ended up with me realizing that documentaries gave me privileged access to the people who were living the events I was so fascinated by. At the other end of the process I fell in love with the magic of editing, watching artists (the editors) at their steenbecks conjuring up picture stories.

I was swept along by the seismic events that that period offered, from being virtually the first people to film in Kolyma, the ghastly heart of the Gulag, in 1989, to interviewing President Gorbachev after the coup of 1991. I got the chance to work for some of the best in the business: Tom Roberts at October Films with his passion for film and for exploring ways of drawing audiences into the intimate histories of normal peoples’ lives; Brian Lapping and Norma Percy, the two great British producers of my generation.

Brian and Norma, both on the series about the Gorbachev Revolution and on THE DEATH OF YUGOSLAVIA, taught me about storytelling. They are masters at working seemingly opaque and complex material into entertaining tales. And they taught me perseverance. Never let go at any stage of the process. What I think is remarkable about COUP and THE DEATH OF YUGOSLAVIA, both made during the events they so intimately describe, is that there is little of the history told that needs changing despite all the new information that has come out in the subsequent decade.

The 90s were for me about the Russia that was emerging from the break-up of the Soviet Union. With a remarkable producer, Liana Pomerantsev, I had the chance to explore the change that was whirling around us. What did it all mean for a people that for generations had not known their own history, and what did that mean for this new capitalist Russia?

Along the way I reacted against the increasing pressure to explain everything, to cover films with commentary and facts. We have far too much information in the modern world. While I am no purist in that commentary has its place, I am convinced that our audiences are visually incredibly sophisticated and can read images without everything having to be spelt out. Look at modern advertising. The films I respond to all have emotional moments, voices or images, which remain long after the facts have been forgotten.

In that sense, GULAG is not a history film. There are few facts, and testimony is often not chronological. Naturally, I wanted to perform the historical duty of capturing the stories and voices before the characters died, but the central drive of the film is to explore what Stalinism and the Gulag have done to the fabric of society. What did it mean to suffer and not be able to tell the truth even decades after the event? What was it like to be an informer? At the heart of the film is the lack of guilt felt by anyone. The Camp Commandant is still publicly feted and perpetrators live comfortably next to their victims. They continue to feel they were right. In the film with all its unresolved outcomes, the Gulag is the symbol for the wider nature of Soviet society with its layers of fear, silence, and lies. Perhaps it goes a little way to explaining the attraction of President Putin´s return to a KGB-governed Russia.

VODKA, on the other hand, stands for the nightmare that Russia became in the 90s. For those who thought that some capitalist utopia would emerge from the collapse of Communism, the realities of life for most Russians should be a rude awakening. It is difficult to argue that life for the majority that do not live in Moscow or Petersburg has improved since 1991. Quite the reverse. Indeed, in the years immediately after 1991, male life expectancy dropped by about 7 years, and the deregulation of vodka was a major cause. Again, instead of telling these shocking statistics, I attempted to find a way of couching very personal stories in the context of Russia’s culture and past. History is the present and vice versa.

The use of framing devices such as the Pushkin fairytale in VODKA, or the brutal comedian in CRY FOR ARGENTINA, signal my constant desire to let the voices speak for themselves. I am seeking to avoid the films being told simply from my perspective. Yet in their artifice, the devices acknowledge that there is a director at work here. Equally, in other so-called observational films, I am happy to have people acknowledge the presence of the camera.

All these films (even GULAG at three hours) were shown in primetime on British television, a privilege which our broadcasting system has afforded until recently. It allowed me to take stories vital to an understanding of a changing world into millions of strangers’ homes. I want to tell of those who do not usually invade the comfort of our living rooms, except perhaps as incomprehensible snippets on the news or impersonal headlines in our newspapers. If we get it right, the audience does think and remember and care.

With THE LAST PEASANTS, I set myself the task of making an audience fall in love with an illegal immigrant. In Britain, they are usually the subject of lurid headlines about invasions and scroungers. Yet these are the people who clean our houses, dig our gardens, and generally do the jobs we no longer want to. I wanted to understand what drove them from their own homes to the urban squalor that so many live in on the edges of our cities. On that journey, I came to understand that this was the story of all our ancestors, that the present immigration is no different to that from countryside to town over a century ago.

So documentary has become the way I have found to talk about that world out there. I have written this piece firmly in the present tense, because while I feel very honoured to have been chosen for a retrospective, I hope I am in the middle of my career. We all know that it is increasingly difficult to persuade broadcasters to fund documentaries that talk of what audiences do not know. But we must go on persuading them. I believe our job is more important than ever on this increasingly divided, angry, but ever-smaller planet.

Angus Macqueen by Tim Adams

In the fifteen years since the Berlin Wall came down, Russia and its former empire have remained insistently foreign even to neighbors in Europe. For all of that time, Angus Macqueen has led a one-man crusade against this indifference. In a series of remarkable films he has not only helped us to understand the human legacy of the Soviet past, but also shed light on the uneasy cultural and economic relationships between East and West long after the barriers have come down.

Macqueen sometimes finds it curious that we don't all seem more alive to the monumental upheavals of our own times. “It seems to me it is 1815, it is 1945,” he says, “but for whatever reason we don't really talk about these things. Later this year, all these new countries will join the European Union. Berlin will once again become the new center of the European map. What I have wanted to show in a small way is how some of these people's lives might relate to ours, how what is happening there affects what is happening here.”

In pursuit of this goal, and at a time when serious documentary filmmaking has all but disappeared from the television schedules, Macqueen has proved, that quality - and craft and patience - remain journalistic virtues to be treasured. His method relies to a great extent on an old-fashioned kind of faith: faith in the absolute relevance of his subjects' remarkable lives, faith in the ability of his audience to absorb the subtlety and import of the experiences they relate. Macqueen's films all but dispense with commentary, allowing his interviewees to speak for themselves, building compelling narratives out of uninflected voices.

Like all of the greatest documentary makers, in this respect, he is a profound listener, and he is rewarded with profound stories, stories that in many cases seem as though they have been stored up to tell, so cathartic does their telling feel. There is a gentleness in this approach. But also a stubborn need to preserve and to understand. His camera dwells unsentimentally on the details of lives that often seem not only geographically but temporally distinct from our own, lingering on hands that have never stopped working, on faces that have seen too much.

In GULAG, epic in effect, intimate in scale, he returns to the landscape of Stalin's brutal labor camps, lets our eye range over terror's legacy of dams and railways, each one a mass graveyard. Blending archive footage of transports with interviews of survivors and guards, his film communicates the devastating human truth of a history that has resisted understanding. Whether wandering through snow-covered prison barracks, quietly questioning former camp commanders - spared their Nuremberg, and still justifying their atrocity – or searching out those who re-live at their kitchen tables the horror they suffered, GULAG stands as a monument against forgetting.

In some senses, it also serves as the back story, even the conscience, of much of his other work. It lends an extra context and poignancy, for example, to the perfect pair of films about the Russian Ballet - DANCING FOR DOLLARS - which explore the parallel histories and philosophies of the Kirov and the Bolshoi, and their changing place at the heart of Russian culture.

It gives, too, an extra charge to his extraordinary inside story of THE SECOND RUSSIAN REVOLUTION, the days in August 1991 when, with Gorbachev under house arrest in the Crimea and Yeltsin barred from the Kremlin, it looked like power might be forced from the grasp of the democratizers. Much more than a first draft of history, this account - like his film for the award-winning DEATH OF YUGOSLAVIA series, THE ROAD TO WAR - offers eyewitness insights that will be exemplary primary sources for any student of the last decade of the twentieth century.

The impact on some of that epochal history on ordinary lives, remains, however, Macqueen's prime concern. As well as documenting the comparative harshness of life in the aftermath of Communism, he is alive to the very human escape routes from that harshness.

VODKA, which examines the extraordinary relationship between Russia's ubiquitous spirit and its "tragic soul," is told with the apparatus of a fairy tale. In search of this love story, Macqueen unearths contemporary tableaux full of otherworldly lightness. At a three-day peasant wedding a thousand miles from Moscow, seemingly unending quantities of home-distilled vodka are consumed; the epic binge is followed by a community-wide hangover not helped by the fact that most of the guests have to rise early to slop out pigsties.

There is something elemental about these stories, which share a vision of peasant Europe with, say, the photographs of Josef Koudelka, or the fiction of John Berger: they not only have the effect of humanizing our understanding of the changes that have affected those at the margins of Europe, they make those changes feel a part of our own lives, too.

The precarious communities Macqueen is drawn to live now under terminal threat. With the arrival of the free market, for example, the vodka industry has been deregulated. The fallout of this deregulation has had a dramatic effect on Russian society. It has led to the rise of such figures as Vladimir Pekarev, a self-made vodka tycoon filmed by Macqueen touring Moscow in his armor-plated Mercedes, protected by his private security army, drumming up votes for his parliamentary election campaign.

The likes of Pekarev make their rubles from men like Boris, a hospital porter, all seven of whose family have died of alcohol-related illnesses. Boris is desperate to break his own addiction; so desperate, in fact, that he finds himself seeking help from an ordained hypnotist, with a zealot's grin, a flaming torch, a retouched “Icon of the Bottomless Cup" and a hotline to the teetotaler in the sky: "Great Jesus Christ, grant me a thread to weave a cocoon around Boris," the hypnotist chants. Boris, meanwhile, understandably, feels in urgent need of a drink to steady his nerves.

Macqueen sees something urgent in the mission to describe such lives. Part of it has to do with a kind of visual storytelling style. In an article addressing the challenges of his craft, he explored the things that made a documentary something more than a home movie or an internet spycam: that mix of vision and serendipity that "takes you to the heart of a historical moment, an achievement finally shaped by the director, film editor, and all involved." The finished is in other words a collaborative essay between those behind and in front of the camera, and the result is something that finds universal truths in unexpected corners of lives.

His work has reached a level where such symbiosis seems second nature. Perhaps the most complete expression of this is his most recent film, THE LAST PEASANTS. Nearly four years ago, driving through remote northern Romania, Macqueen found himself in communities barely changed since the Middle Ages. In the village of Budesti, for example, there were horses and carts on the rough roads, scythes and sickles wielded at harvest time. The power in Budesti lay, as it had always lain, with the families who owned the threshing machine, or the water mill, or the timber yard. The men built their own houses, reared and killed their own livestock, distilled and drank their own apple brandy, spoke guardedly of witches and evil spirits. It was as if the twentieth century had never happened.

With his cameraman Roger Chapman, Macqueen spent much of the subsequent year and a half in Budesti, recording in elegiac detail a pastoral way of life that was once all of our European histories, and which, in a generation, will have disappeared entirely from the continent. The three multi-award winning films that were the result of this patient work, THE LAST PEASANTS each examine the tensions within a particular family. They stand as a beautifully realized chronicle of our moment, one in which the inexorable pull of urban capitalism puts an end to all alternative ways of life.

Budesti, having resisted Communism for half a century and the outside world pretty much forever, had, Macqueen discovered, in a short decade of democracy all but caved in to the seductive hopes and dreams of the consumer society. The young people of the village now routinely imagined a life elsewhere, in Paris, in London. They were the bright-eyed individual faces in the swell of economic migrants, going west.

Macqueen talked to me at the time his film appeared about the principle of setting out to examine the human story of this migration, one of the great narratives of our age, as viewing things at “the other end of the telescope.” The tales he uncovered may have looked like they belonged to another world, but they were, too, in Britain and western Europe increasingly the stories of the people our lives daily rubbed up against: who were digging our gardens, cleaning our bathrooms, minding our children, and building our houses.

Part of his understanding of the contradictions of these places concerned their attitudes to time. The people of Budesti, for example, he said, have traditionally "lived circular, seasonal lives, and they don't particularly see progression as part of their experience.” Suddenly, from television, advertising, and word-of-mouth, they were being confronted with our own more linear, aspirational idea of life, and been seduced by the mantras of self-fulfillment: “The proposition that somewhere deep within ourselves we believe we should earn more money, we should change, we should progress." The incompatibility of these two philosophies plays itself out in the village in the separation of fathers and sons, husbands and wives; and it is those often-uncomfortable spaces that THE LAST PEASANTS explores.

Ion Damian is representative of this restlessness. He vows to his wife and sons in Budesti: "I will get there in the end. It does not matter how. I will get to the West in the end." The film tracks him as he attempts to make good on this boast, traveling five hours hanging on to the underside of a train to get to Vienna, using false papers to try to make it from there to Paris, en route to Dublin. Ion is arrested on the train, imprisoned and forced to return home, to try again.

Recording this brutal journey, Macqueen said, "put great ethical strains on me because it is a classic story of journalistic non-interference. I could have got them to Paris. But you have to just let them do what they do. You cannot help. Not least because you would be breaking the law." He and his assistant producer posed as a honeymoon couple on the continental train, waving a hand-held camera about, never drawing attention to the real subject of their film. “When I met Ion again,” he said, "back in Romania, I thought he would hit me. But actually he embraced us."

Such moments seem to point to the importance of Macqueen's ongoing project, of bringing home the real texture of lives far removed from that of the average viewer. In this, he often finds himself out of step with the prevailing wisdom at television networks: at odds with schedulers who believe that "though the world is getting smaller, our attention span is apparently shrinking even faster." It is, he suggested, somehow as if we only want to hear the stories that we already know. "They have lots of research to suggest that we don't expect television to show us much of anything different, that young people like to zap between six different channels at once because everything looks roughly the same."

The affective power of Macqueen's films lies in their quiet and absolute determination to put faith in something other than that. Borrowing the pace and depth of the world they inhabit, his films offer a vision that sometimes looks a lot like our past, but which tells us a great deal about our present. They may not sound anything like "reality shows," but they look a great deal like reality.

Tim Adams is a staff writer and critic for THE OBSERVER in London, UK.