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Tell Them Who You Are
Mark Wexler

Nathalie Rothschild
posted 16 August 2006

Cinematographer, documentary filmmaker and two-time Oscar winner, Haskell Wexler has the camera turned on himself in this documentary film made by his son, Mark Wexler. Tell Them Who You Are is a personal film about a father-son relationship, which seems particularly complex precisely because it is analysed and worked through in a film. This documentary, narrated in first person, would make perfect material for family therapy programmes for celebrities and their children.

Early on in the film, Haskell tells his son that he wants the documentary to be a personal one, an opportunity for father and son to sort some things out. He doesn't want it to be just a biography about his professional life. Mark is surprised, but welcomes the suggestion and goes on to make an honest and exposing film about his famous father of whom he says he is, 'not exactly what you call a fan'. 'I'm a son,' Mark says, 'and I have spent much of my adult life struggling to step out from under the shadow of that fame'.

Haskell certainly doesn't make it easy for his son to step out of his shadow. He is constantly intervening, telling Mark when he should cut, that he takes too long to set up, that he should have brought a soundman with him to the birthday party he films. In that case at least, Haskell was right. Not until after the party does Mark realise the mic connection had failed and he is left with two hours of unusable footage. While his voiceover explains this, we also get to see some of that 'unusable footage'.

The generation gap between Haskell and Mark is evident not only in their attitudes to life, but also in their approaches to documentary filmmaking. Mark takes his lead from the kinds of documentaries where the filmmaking process and the filmmaker are as important as the stories being told, in the tradition of Nick Broomfield and Michael Moore.

Haskell was a pioneer of Direct Cinema, which, as fellow documentarian Albert Maysles explains in Tell Them Who You Are, takes as its premise that a film 'has to be truthful in order to be a documentary'. In the 1960s and 70s, Haskell made overtly political documentary films such as The Bus, about the 1963 civil rights markh on Washington, Introduction to the Enemy, about the situation in Vietnam during the war, and Underground, about the Weathermen, the militant faction of the Students for a Democratic Society.

Maysles says that today most documentary filmmakers don't have the confidence that they can get to the truth, and that an essential element of documentary filmmaking is that you empathise with your subjects and that they trust you. This element seems to be missing here. Mark holds a lot of resentment towards his father and Haskell does not initially trust his son to be able to make a good documentary about him. The film itself becomes a process through which father and son get to know each other better and build up trust, as evidenced by Haskell's refusal to sign a release form until the very end - a moment which may qualify as what they call 'closure' in therapy.

In the opening scene of Tell Them Who You Are Haskell shows his collection of film equipment, which he says is very much part of his life. For instance, he holds up a magazine that he had with him while shooting America, America. Mark interrupts, asking his father to explain where they are and what's happening on this very day. Haskell suddenly snaps at him: 'If you don't know where the fuck we are right now, just look around. You're making a goddamn documentary. So you don't have to have me say in front of the camera where we are'.

It's a very uncomfortable moment, a parental scolding which most would find embarrassing for others to witness. This particular complaint from Haskell has to do with his view of honesty in documentary films. Do you capture things as they happen or do you direct your subject to explain, in an unnatural manner, what is going on in order to guide the audience? Well, according to Haskell, 'If you get it, fine. If you don't, tough shit.' This certainly reveals and older approach to documentary filmmaking, in which terms like objectivity and neutrality were possibilities to strive for and not just interesting concepts whose limitations you reflect on in your film.

Tell Them Who You Are is an intimate portrait of an artistically talented and skilful, but personally difficult, man. Because of Mark's access to his father, the person behind the legend comes out in a very frank manner. Haskell lets his guard slip over and over; he reveals his lack of patience and self-obsession and lets his son produce a documentary which often shows him in an extremely unsympathetic light.

Mark also explores many of the personal and professional relations that Haskell has had with friends and colleagues, ranging from Jane Fonda, who says that the moment she met Haskell was magical, to Elia Kazan, who says he didn't like Haskell personally, but thinks he is a 'damn good cameraman'.

It would have been fascinating to learn more about Haskell's eventful life. He grew up in a privileged family during the depression, then voluntarily enrolled as a marine during the Second World War before beginning to build a career as a filmmaker. He ventured into feature films, documentaries and commercials, becoming politically aware during the 1960s, and in his career made groundbreaking achievements as a cinematographer.

But instead, Mark gives us a self-reflexive, first person family therapy film, much like fellow documentarian Nathaniel Khan did in My Architect, which is an attempt by the filmmaker to understand his father, the renowned architect Louis Khan. Though one might expect such public displays of deeply personal reflections of child-parent relations could only work for celebrities, the self-reflexive, soul searching theme is in fact often explored by unknown people too. One example is Tarnation (2004), Jonathan Caouette's autobiographical cinematic essay about his relation to his mentally ill mother and his grandparents who raised him.

But, as is often the case with these autobiographical tales, the most interesting moments are those in which we glimpse the wider picture that tells us about more than just the nature of a particular personal relationship. In Tell Them Who You Are those moments are the ones in which we learn about Haskell's career and his contributions to American film history. As Billy Crystal says, looking back at Haskell's body of work is almost like looking back at the history of contemporary film. It seems Haskell and Mark have missed the opportunity of telling that history.

Haskell, who was already in his mid-80s at the time of making Tell Them Who You Are, is obviously very much aware of death. He regularly reads the obituaries in the New York Times and calculates the average age of death to predict how many years he has left. Tell them who you are documents a moving effort by a man to get closer to his son before it's too late. But in the end I found myself very unsympathetic to Haskell's and Mark's plight to reconcile in this public manner.

After all, the reason Haskell Wexler is an interesting subject for a documentary and for the general public is because of his professional achievements, which make his story extraordinary. Haskell may have been a lousy father and certainly seems like a nightmare to work with, but he is not famous for his fatherhood, he is famous for his contributions to film history, and it is that history which is shared by all of us. His own private life is none of our business.