Doc Days

UP THE YANGTZE (June 20-24) Yung Chang’s engrossing, visually stunning documentary explores one of the strangest sites on earth—China’s mammoth Three Gorges Dam project—and finds that the world’s largest hydroelectric dam is also a bottomless wellspring of local and global ironies. TVA on an unimaginably vast scale, set to displace some 2 million people, the dam will create a watershed that submerges entire cities. Among its unforeseen results, it has created a temporary industry for the region’s youth: serving as waitstaff on luxury boats that carry foreign tourists on “farewell tours” of the Yangtze River’s soon-to-vanish banks—where their own families scrape by. Chang follows the teenage workers’ schooling in international etiquette (“Never compare Canada to the United States”), English and the proper amount of subservience—the kind that draws compliments such as, “You were less obtrusive than I thought you were going to be.” Juxtaposing the cruises’ bubble world with the parents’ hardships on shore, Chang captures the full human scope of the dam’s mixed blessings and unambiguous curses, summed up in an unforgettable series of dissolves that washes away one family’s entire way of life. —Jim Ridley

MY NAME IS ALBERT AYLER (June 24, 26-27) Though he polarized critics in his prime, African-American avant-garde saxophonist Albert Ayler has come into favor as a cult hero and jazz pioneer long after his body was found floating in the East River in 1970—a presumed suicide. The Cleveland native was only 34, having already collected acclaim in Sweden, France, England and New York for his animated, multiphonic skronk-fests, but his uncompromised artistry never produced much scratch; friend and acolyte John Coltrane was known to give him handouts. Swedish filmmaker Kasper Collin’s melancholy, beautiful feature debut does more than just chronicle this undervalued musician; it brings Ayler and his message of spiritual unity back to life. Standard doc techniques resonate with a curious poignancy as former bandmates react all over again to Ayler via headphones, and we learn how he brought his younger brother Don (intimately interviewed here, along with their father) onto the stage until he was institutionalized for psychosis. Demanding ex Mary Parks, thought by some to have isolated Ayler from his friends, rightly insists that being heard only in voiceover will just make her seem mysterious, though not nearly as haunting as Ayler’s soft-spoken proclamations from seven years’ worth of interviews. Matched with the rarest of performance and family footage, his well-curated oration gives the whole endeavor an impressionistic aura, as though there’s a ghost in the room who still refuses to be ignored. —Aaron Hillis

STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE (June 20-26) Errol Morris’ latest documentary addresses Iraq—specifically the infamous photographs of abused prisoners at Abu Ghraib and the so-called bad apples who took them. The images are hardly unfamiliar; Morris’s mission is to interrogate them. How did these pictures come into existence? And what, if anything, do they reveal? The snapshots and videos are mainly annotated by interviews with four of the bad apples, all former MPs, as well as letters home written by the most diligent of the amateur photographers, Sabrina Harman. What emerges from this testimony, which also goes a bit up the chain of command to include the former brigadier general in charge of the prison, is the suggestion that the MPs—bored, ignorant and afraid—were just entertaining themselves. The prisoner photographed naked with a dog collar around his neck wasn’t actually dragged by the leash. The hooded guy standing on a box, wires attached to his outstretched hands, was never really in any danger. These pictures were posed! For Morris, who seems skeptical that photographs can ever disclose anything, the issue is legalistic. Focusing only on the photographic evidence, he asks if these images prove the commission of criminal acts or if they simply illustrate what one MP calls “standard operating procedure.” If there’s a moral distinction, I must be too dense to grasp its significance. —J. Hoberman