DocPlay is the streaming service you didn’t know you needed, says Dan Slevin.
Rihanna (wearing Guo Pei) arrives at the red carpet for the 2015 Met Ball in The First Monday in May. Photo: DocPlay
If, like many of us, you are finding the amount of choice on Netflix to be almost paralysing – so you end up choosing the show that Netflix recommends which is also the show they are recommending to everyone else – let me draw your attention to an alternative.
DocPlay is an Australia/Aotearoa service filled with documentaries from around the world. Many of them have played at the New Zealand International Film Festival and other beloved specialised festivals like DocEdge and the Architecture & Design festival. Quite a few are Academy Award winners and there are some recent box office smash hits in the catalogue too.
I can’t pretend to you that the range of choice available won’t still be paralysing but you have a much better chance of selecting something decent even if you click at random. More than once recently, I have gone to DocPlay wanting to watch something specific and then been distracted by something else entirely – and it didn’t really matter. It’s all good.
Because I don’t know the kind of subjects you are interested in, I chose to follow my own passions and watch a selection of what I thought would appeal to me.
Fashion documentaries can sometimes be a bit hit and miss but The First Monday in May (Andrew Rossi, 2016) is a palpable hit. Every year the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum in New York throws a celebrity-studded fundraising party. The film follows the behind-the scenes dramas involved in throwing that event, but also follows the conceptualisation and construction of the exhibition – in this case “China: Through the Looking Glass” – that the party is supposed to be celebrating.
Full of interesting characters and with tremendous access to all of them, The First Monday in May does a terrific job of honouring the creativity of the designers, makers, curators, stylists, magazine editors and stars who make this world tick.
Photo: NZIFF
In 2012, the great animator Hayao Miyazaki let a documentary crew follow him around for a year while he and his team laboured over the film that was intended to be his swansong – The Wind Rises. In The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness (Mami Sunada, 2013) we get an unprecedented portrait of a cynical humanitarian and the difficulty of bringing his singular vision to life. Miyazaki’s partner in Studio Ghibli, Isao Takahata, was also making his final film at the same time and another documentary crew was following the much more laboured production of The Tale of the Princess Kaguya. I haven’t seen that documentary yet but there it is waiting for me at DocPlay.
Death of a Gentleman (Sam Collins & Jarrod Kimber, 2015) is a self-funded film by a couple of cricket-tragic podcasters about the descent of international cricket into a circus of T20 tournaments run for the benefit of a (mostly Indian) oligarchy at the expense of the traditional forms of the game. Once again, their access is superb and they uncover all sorts of dodginess that the recent resurgence in interest in Test Cricket hasn’t quite papered over.
Photo: BFI
In 2012, veteran British director Julien Temple made a documentary for the BBC about his hometown. London: The Modern Babylon is a personal essay using the riches of many film and video archives – and some of Temple’s own films like Absolute Beginners – to illustrate the history of modern London and its attraction to the waifs and strays of the world. Multicultural and ceaselessly tolerant London is one of the themes running through the wittily edited material as is London’s dedicated commitment to necessary civil disobedience. They like a good riot.
Like lots of these films, events seem to have overtaken the story somewhat – there’s not even a hint of Brexit in the film even though the seeds of it can be seen all the way through it.
My final film in a weekend binge of the DocPlay offering was one I’d been waiting almost ten years to see – Visual Acoustics: The Modernism of Julius Shulman (Eric Bricker, 2008). If architecture is an endlessly fascinating artform (and it is), then architectural photography is the icing on the cake and cinema about architectural photography is the cherry on top of that.
Case Study House #22 (Pierre Koenig) floats above Los Angeles in this photo by Julius Shulman taken in 1960. Photo: Julius Shulman/Getty Museum
Shulman basically invented modern architectural photography and his images of buildings by Frank Lloyd Wright, Pierre Koenig, Charles Eames, John Lautner (and the like) took their architecture to the world and became enormously influential. My only complains about this marvellous film are that this is one of the rare DocPlay titles that isn’t in high definition and that Bricker doesn’t sit long enough on the photos so we can marvel at them. Too busy getting on with his story…
DocPlay is available on the web and via high quality apps for the Apple and Google ecosystems. It costs $6.95 a month and they offer a 30-day free trial.
