Benita’s review – Alan Berliner puts a new spotlight on the late filmmaker’s work with a tribute | Video

This is an alternative document drawn and edited together with filmmaker Alan Berliner (The Stranger, First Cousin Removed), who also serves as the narrator – but most of his images, photos and illustrations were created by Filmmaker Benita Raphanand the title of the film. So, it’s not exactly a deal since Raphan killed himself in 2021, for reasons that the film tries to confuse. However, Berliner is committed to creating in this film something that softens the fragile spirit, the strange and canine origin, and the dog, the kindness of his deceased canine-loving friend.

In doing so, Berliner completes the unfinished film he lamented when he died but at the same time creates something new; it could be called a tribute perhaps, or a bio-pastiche, or perhaps a movie drama. Any way you slice and dice it, it’s an amazing piece of work, “an unsettling voice” like its title, as his mother Roslyn explained. in a New York Times op-ed.

A producer of short, slightly experimental documentaries, Raphan wasn’t as well-known as Berliner, but he had his own flair. new York City Films is a neighborhood, especially in art schools where the impatient Raphan nurtured young talents, for example at the School of Visual Arts in the Lower East Side. Born in 1962, he was of the right age to enjoy the post-punk scene centered around the Mudd Club and CBGB; He got his first break as a photographer shooting his friend’s group at the time. Peregrinations in Europe took him to the Royal College of Art and a spell in Paris where he built a CV as a photographer, working with big names, although (as one friend remembers) he couldn’t hold any job for a long time before he was fired. Although his work was difficult, he found success in making intimate, unflinching films about difficult artists with whom he felt a kinship, such as the mathematician John Nash (also the subject of A Beautiful Mind), the poet Emily Dickinson and the architect Buckminster Fuller.

Totally devoted to his rescued dogs, he planned to make a film about the realization of a dog that turned into a symbol of loneliness and destruction brought about by Covid 19. Berliner and friends think that the isolation of that time, along with a lifelong struggle with depression and anxiety, is what made him commit suicide. The film is wise to leave some of the questions about Raphan unanswered, and what is missing is the image of a complex, creative woman who is very dedicated in her work and yet who remains in death an unchanging, incomprehensible mystery.

Benita is at Bertha DocHouse, London from 24 June.