Parky at the Pictures (DVD 27/3/2014)

Nobody understands how George MacKay managed to survive a fishing expedition that claimed the lives of his crewmates. Mother Kate Dickie does her best to help him cope with the fallout, despite mourning the loss of her oldest son, Jordan Young. But the other residents of a small port on the Aberdeenshire coast are deeply suspicious of MacKay's inability to remember anything of his ordeal and his conviction that the others are not dead, but have been claimed by a sea devil in punishment for the wickedness of those left behind. Resisting the psychiatrist Brian McCardie's suggestion that he needs specialist care, MacKay tells Young's girlfriend, Nichola Burley, about his belief that the crew can be rescued from the demon he first heard about in a childhood tale told by his mother. But, while Burley has a certain sympathy with his plight, her beligerent father, Michael Smiley, orders MacKay out of his house and grieving trawlerman Lewis Howden similarly threatens violence when MacKay comes to the pub to explain his theory.

Despite their hostility towards her son, the locals remain on friendly terms with Dickie and she is encouraged to sing `The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face' during a karaoke night. But even the village kids led by Conor McCarron take to taunting MacKay, as they probe him about why he can't remember anything of the disaster. One night, the baiting gets out of control and MacKay strips to the waist to fight with some of the boys and even Burley (who had been for a nocturnal swim with MacKay) decides she has to sever all ties with him. McCardie returns to urge Dickie to have her son institutionalised and MacKay seems to agree it would be for the best. But he has already hatched a plan and collects materials discarded around the village to put out to sea on a rickety raft with a tray of stolen fish and a homemade harpoon in the hope of luring the monster to the surface.

He has to be rescued by Howden and he teaches him a lesson by leaving him dangling in a net for the voyage back to shore. But MacKay remains convinced of the rectitude of his mission and, having had Dickie tell him the story of the monster on the night before he is due to leave, he slips away at dawn and rows out in a stolen boat. Taking a knife, he carves gills in his neck and plunges into the water. Back on the mainland, Dickie waits for news of her missing child. However, when her neighbours call her down to the beach, she doesn't find his corpse, but the carcass of a large creature (probably a whale) that has been washed up on the tide. Yet, if MacKay has succeeded in rousing the devil from its lair, there is no sign of the lost fishermen.

Viewed as a mood piece, this has much to recommend it. Benjamin Kracun's cinematography captures the squally coastal light and his restrained use of colour makes the recovered yellow oilskin and the blood on the water all the more effective. Michael Aaglund's editing is also seductively measured and reinforces the ethereality of MacKay's reverie, as it crosscuts between grainy TV news clips, Super 8 recollections of childhood, night vision interludes, underwater imagery and jerky and often blurry phone-cam footage. But, while MacKay admirably maintains a trance-like intensity as he literally finds himself caught between the devil and the deep blue sea and Dickie produces another persuasive display of tough love, the supporting performances are often far less convincing. Part of the problem lies in the fact that the inhabitants seem to belong to a 19th-century Puritan settlement rather than one in modern-day Scotland, while Wright's dialogue is often gloweringly grim. This allows the likes of Smiley to overplay their fury and even Burley, who is initially sweetly forgiving turns on MacKay like a character in a soap opera rather than a work of cinematic art. Sadly, Wright must shoulder the responsibility for setting this tone and for opting to keep the audience at such a distance by providing little social or mythological context for the narrative, by refusing to broach the facts of the catastrophe (and, thus, divulge whether MacKay is traumatised or murderously malevolent) and by couching so much of the later action in obfuscatory magic realist symbolism.

Other aspects fail to convince, such as the fact that someone would bother to record (let alone keep) camera-phone snippets of Young bad-mouthing his brother. Moreover, there is no diegetic logic for its inclusion, as no one appears to be showing it to MacKay or watching it to make fun of his delusions. Instead, it simply creates the suspicion that, for all his outward displays of affection for his sibling, Young was a difficult character himself and that Smiley's rage towards MacKay may owe more to his disapproval of Burley's choice of boyfriend than the teenager's temerity to survive a wrecking that claimed five other lives. Thus, while this cannot be faulted for its earnestness or aesthetic austerity, it is too self-consciously uncompromising and too hazily allegorical to keep onlookers entirely engrossed.

Tina Gharavi overloads her debut feature, I Am Nasrine, with too many plot strands. Yet, such is the eye for detail acquired during her stint as a documentarist that this BAFTA-nominated drama still presents a realistic insight into the problems of being forced out of one's home.

Sixteen year-old Micsha Sadeghi lives in Tehran with her older brother Shiraz Haq and their affluent parents. She resents the Iranian rules that limit women's opportunities and dreams of becoming a journalist so she can campaign for reform. But her independent streak gets her into trouble when she defies convention by riding on a motorbike with a boy. She is arrested and charged with breaching decency laws and is only released when her father bribes the officials handling the case. Keen to get his daughter out of the country and alleviate the family's shame, he arranges for Sadeghai and Haq to relocate to North-East England and, while she is sad to be leaving behind her family and friends, Sadeghi is excited by the prospect of starting a new life in a society that positively encourages freedom.

As Haq struggles to hold down a steady job in a car wash and then a pizza parlour, he also finds it increasingly difficult to impose his fraternal will on his sister, who is blossoming at the local school. Moreover, she has made friends with Nicole Halls, a member of a Traveller community who knows all about prejudice and restriction and she helps Sadeghi come out of herself by teaching her to ride a horse. As the pair grow closer, Sadeghi develops a crush on Halls's brother, Steven Hooper. But, although Haq wants to challenge her romance, he realises he is on shaky ground, as not only has he become involved in some black marketeering, but he has also become enamoured of local scally Christian Coulson.

Sir Ben Kingsley has thrown his weight behind this drama, which its Iranian-American director has revealed owes much to such classic misfit rites of passage as François Truffaut's The 400 Blows (1959), Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardennes's Rosetta (1999) and Niki Caro's Whale Rider (2002). While not on a par with its inspirations, this is still a thoughtful and well-meaning picture that benefits greatly from David Raedeker's contrasting images of the Iranian capital and Tyneside.

The performances are also laudably committed. But Gharavi overplays her hand in setting the story on the eve of 9/11, as the change in attitude that Sadeghi and Haq experience has already been explored in a number of British dramas like Kenneth Glenaan's Yasmin (2004). Moreover, she risks lapsing into melodrama by forcing Sadeghi to cope with an unexpected tragedy and decide whether she is better off returning to the subjugation that her family will demand in Tehran or spread her wings in the shadow of the Angel of the North.

Writer Virginia Gilbert makes a middling debut behind the camera with A Long Way From Home. Despite the wonderful setting of the ancient towns of Nimes and Arles in southern France, this study of exile, desire and coupledom suffers from a technical sloppiness that one might not have expected from the daughter of the maker of such solid pictures as The Frog Prince (1986), Tom & Viv (1994) and Wilde (1997). However, in hiring cinematographer Ed Rutherford, Gilbert is clearly seeking to emulate Joanna Hogg rather than her father Brian. But, while this tale of age-gap infatuation lacks the dramatic finesse and thematic depth of Archipelago (2010) and Exhibition (2013), it is deftly played by a quartet fully attuned to their characters' longings, fears and regrets.

Now in their seventies, James Fox and Brenda Fricker have been married for five decades. Even though they are very different personalities, they know each other inside out and don't need to speak in the mornings as he tootles in with the croissants and they read the paper and do the crossword on the balcony of their apartment complex. Yet Fox has become bored since they retired to in Nimes and watches elderly Betty Krestinsky chat to her dog as she sweeps her patio with the same faint disinterest with which he regards Fricker as she takes yet another French lesson with Isalinde Giovangigli.

They eat most nights in a quiet restaurant owned by Didier Bourguignon and Fox rolls his eyes as Fricker orders the same steak dish and cracks the same joke with the overly tactile host. Thus, he seizes upon the opportunity of befriending touring couple Paul Nicholls and Natalie Dormer when they are seated at the next table. The holiday-makers are considerably younger, but Dormer is grateful to Fox for his excursion suggestions and the warmth of his welcome.

Although Fox seems the more mentally robust, his occasionally forgetful Irish wife still has plenty of vigour, whether she is arranging for their grandchildren to visit or complaining about local doctor Julien Masdoua chiding her about her diet. She also seems to be the only one with any emotional tenacity and, when they see a cat get run over by a car outside the restaurant, Fricker is the one to put it out of its misery by wringing its neck. Moreover, she also has a keen understanding of her husband and says nothing when she sees the way Fox looks at Dormer and offers to show Nicholls around friend Jacques Hansen's vineyard.

As Nicholls takes a tour of the outbuildings, Fox and Dormer link arms for a sun-dappled stroll. They discuss their families and Fox realises how different their lives are and how she still has the whole of her life in front of her. But his discreet infatuation still grips him and Fricker senses he is lying when he follows the pair to Arles and becomes frustrated when he cannot track them down. They meet up again, however, for a farewell dinner at the best restaurant in town and Dormer confides in Fox that Nicholls has proposed and that she is uncertain whether this is the man she wants to spend the rest of her life with. As Nicholls and the tipsy Fricker go in search of a postbox, Dormer kisses Fox on the mouth and gushes that he would have been a wonderful father to daughters.

The realisation of her true feelings confines the crestfallen Fox to his bed for a few days. Aware he has been hurt, Fricker brings him breakfast and reassures him that he has merely been overdoing things and just needs to rest. She knows he would never have left her and has simply had his head turned by the attentiveness of someone of Dormer's youth and beauty. But she also knows that their future together isn't going to be easy, as his boredom, her mental lapses and their gnawing sense of far-from-home isolation are only going to get worse as time goes by.

Always feeling more like a sketch than a feature, this is still a touching exploration of ageing and attraction. In having Dormer doubt whether Nicholls is Mr Right, Gilbert invites us to speculate about the evolution of Fox and Fricker's partnership and how passion cools to yield the more enduring facets of affection and companionship. But, while the narrative is mercifilly free of melodramatic contrivance, it is also short on incident and the characters rarely do anything unexpected. In this regard, Gilbert's measured pacing is entirely apt. Moreover, she has been in this territory before, as her BAFTA-nominated short, Hesitation (2007), centred on a man whose French vacation is ruined by the taunting of a local boy. But Gilbert and editor Thomas Goldser frequently cut unconvincingly between scenes, while some of the continuity work is a bit slipshod.

Nevertheless, as was the case with Roger Michell's recent outing, Le Week-end, the performances more than compensate for any lapses in the storyline and the style, with Fricker easily stealing the show with a display of watchful spousal cognisance that complement's Dormer's radiant vivacity and romantic caution, the workaholic Nicholls's gauche devotion and Fox's melancholic realisation that age and mundanity have caught up with him and that this brief dalliance was probably his last hurrah. Thus, this EM Forstser-lite vignette remains genial and graceful, without ever entirely engaging.

Around the time one presumes that Fox and Fricker were in their prime, Raymond Depardon was debating whether to become a film-maker or a photographer. Ultimately, he excelled at each métier and his dual career is assessed in Journal de France, a documentary collaboration with Claudine Nougaret, who has been his partner and sound engineer since they met three decades ago. In many ways, this is similar to McCullin, David and Jacqui Morris's profile of photojournalist Don McCullin, who similarly spent so many years covering conflict overseas that he came to feel like a stranger in his own land. But, while Nougaret contextualises the gems she unearths in Depardon's archive, he opts to focus on the transient present, as he potters around La Patrie in a little camper van snapping eclectic relics of both a disappearing landscape and the society that begat it.

Depardon is first seen composing a shot of a tobacconist's in Nevers. He likes the façade because it has a 1950s feel and he chunters to himself as various vehicles and pedestrians wander into his viewfinder. As he removes the plate from the back of the box camera perched on a high tripod, Nougaret explains that she has been making films with the 71 year-old Depardon for over a quarter of a century. He has asked her to sort through the materials he has stored in his basement and she jokes that her painstaking process soon prompted him to hit the road to reacquaint himself with a country he barely knows. As he drives along, Depardon confides that he has grown bored with listening to others and wants a little silence and has rather enjoyed his four years photographing whatever caught his eye, whether it was a quaint shop front, a roundabout, an industrial complex or the Garet farm near Villefranche-sur Saône, which he knew from his childhood.

As a young man, Depardon had experimented with still and moving picture cameras and a brief montage links footage taken at a wedding, a department store and a street near Notre Dame in Paris, where his handheld vérité style allows him to flit between the faces of the passers by and their environs. Within a year, however, he found himself filming civil unrest in the Venezuelan capital, Caracas. In 1964, he made the first of his many visits to Africa to record newly elected president Jean-Bedel Bokassa celebrating Independence Day in the Central African Republic he would come to tyrannise as a self-proclaimed emperor. Just as he had filmed milling shoppers while descending an escalator, so Depardon boldly meandered between the flag-carrying youths marching in the parade and this readiness to pitch himself into the maelstrom is very much at odds with the Direct Cinema detachment that would become his leitmotif.

Fetching up at the seaside, Depardon drops in for a haircut and chats with a barber whose shop is set to close after 50 years. He sympathises with his situation and is grateful that he is his own boss and still has much to achieve, as he is currently more familiar with Djibouti in the Horn of Africa than he is with the Meuse in the north-eastern region of France. Nougaret explains the reason for this over images captured on the West Bank in 1967, as Depardon had founded the Gamma Agency, whose guiding principle was that photographers could take whatever pictures they liked and retain an authorship over them.

Leading by example, Depardon imposed his own perspective on his coverage of Chilean revolutionaries, stand-offs along the Suez Canal and the Jordanian border and everyday life in the Yemeni cities of Aden and Saada and Papa Doc Duvalier's Haiti. In 1968, he went to Biafra with Gilles Caron to profile the mercenaries who had been hired by Western oil companies to protect their investments during a civil war that precipitated a calamitous famine. The French soldiers joke on camera about their wage packets and the local ladies, as they eat their supper. But, for all the levity, as they sing and dance into the small hours, they find themselves in a hellish situation the following morning and the jolliest of the interviewees is killed and his comrades lament that his passport and money have been stolen from his jacket.

The following year, Depardon found himself in Prague, as protesters continued to defy the Soviet occupation by taking on the tanks stationed at landmarks across the city. His shockingly visceral monochrome footage shows people of all ages lining up against tear gas and water cannon to show their solidarity with immolation martyr Jan Palach and Depardon himself was arrested by the secret police and spent three days in prison before being deported. Nougaret proclaims that the peaceful protests of the Czechs eventually drove the Russians out, but this seems a rather sweeping statement, as the Kremlin decided when its troops came home and another two decades were to pass before the Velvet Revolution finally completed the job started during the Prague Spring.

Fittingly, a small-town war memorial forms part of the next montage assembled from Depardon's peregrinations. He takes particular delight in shooting shop fronts and eccentric pieces of street furniture and jokes that his van has become a capsule projecting him into orbit. However, he bemoans the fact that even an idyllic odyssey can have its drawbacks, as he dislikes photographing in flattering light, as he prefers his reality to be less picturesque.

An adroit cross-cut takes us to the Louvre, as Depardon covers the presidential campaign of Finance Minister Valéry Giscard d'Estaing for the documentary, 1974, Une Partie de Campagne. Giscard had insisted on having final cut and his own soundtrack music. However, Depardon detested his choices as much as Giscard disliked sequences such as the one in which he informs his campaign team that he will continue to make brilliant speeches, but will say nothing controversial to ensure he does not alienate any potential voters. On coming to power, Giscard had the profile banned and it was only shown in France in 2002.

Embittered, Depardon went to Tibesti in northern Chad to highlight the failures of the administration's foreign policy by tracking down archaeologist Françoise Claustre, who had been abducted by the Tubu forces led by Hissène Habré. In all, Depardon would spend two years with the rebels and was torn between empathising with them as human beings and resenting the way in which they tormented a frightened woman after her one of her male companions escaped and the other was released on the payment of a ransom. Depardon was allowed to interview Claustre and her sense of betrayal at being abandoned is as pitifully evident as her anger and fear. On returning to France, Depardon succeeded in getting the meeting into news bulletins. But, in spite of alerting the nation to Claustre's plight, he was jailed for failing to aid a fellow citizen in distress and a further two years were to elapse before Claustre was released on the intercession of the Libyan leader, Muammar al-Gaddafi.

Nougaret can find no record of Depardon's TV broadcasts in the network archives, but she decides against delving any more deeply into this shameful episode. Nor does she mention the fact that Depardon made a fictional account of the Claustre kidnapping, La Captive du Désert (1990), with Sandrine Bonnaire. Instead, she takes us to Venice for a clip from the harrowing 1982 documentary, San Clemente, which was filmed in the eponymous island asylum that is now a luxury hotel. Depardon had been urged to film there by Franco Basaglia, the leader of the Democratic Psychiatry campaign, and the close-ups of residents left unattended to stare at the camera in desperation or grim resignation retain their awful power. Lenses were also to the fore in Reporters (1981), as Depardon filmed his Gamma colleagues and their rivals papping such public figures and celebrities as Maurice Papon, Jacques Chirac, Jean-Luc Godard, Jean Rouch and Alain Delon.

Back on the open road, Depardon wonders whether it required him to spend decades chasing the news abroad to make him sufficiently dedicated to discover his homeland. He clearly has an eye for personality, as well as the photogenic, as he poses four old men on a bench and they quote the 1930s film star Raimu in discussing olive trees, blacksmith forges and the fact they will all still be here in 20 years time, just as they are now, two decades after Depardon first snapped them. This ability to make blend into the background and allow his subjects to express themselves freely is readily evident in the extract from Faits Divers (1983), in which the members of a police medical unit chat casually about a 35 year-old doctor who had hanged himself with a hi-fi wire as they speed along the Rue Saint-Jacques in Paris.

Ever restless, Depardon headed for Mogadishu to make Une Femme en Afrique (1985), in which the camera assumed the perspective of an unseen man falling in love with Françoise Prenant during a trip to East Africa. There is a hint of jealousy in Nougaret's concession that sensuality informs every frame. But she was about to enter the story herself, as we see joyous Super-8 footage of the director and stars of Eric Rohmer's comedy, The Green Ray (1986), on which Nougaret made her debut as a sound recordist. She had already met Depardon, who had convinced her she would be perfect for a series of photographic tests, as a pretext for being with her.

Yet, no matter how smitten he might have been, work came first and Nougaret accompanied him to the Hôtel-Dieu de Paris to make Urgences (1988), which saw psychiatric patients like Marie-Thérèse entrust their stories and their fears about dying in the road like a dog after losing her parents and being abandoned by her siblings. The notion of coping with confinement recurred in Africa: How Are You With Pain (1996), as Nelson Mandela showed Depardon how he could keep silent for precisely 60 seconds because of a technique he has learned on Robben Island. By contrast, the small crowd he films in a township chant and sing with fervour, as they urge their leaders to seize the day after the collapse of apartheid.

As he lines up a shot of a diner sign featuring a giant knife and fork, Depardon admits that he finds dusk a sad time, as it makes him wonder what life is all about. He claims to prefer darkness and a cut takes us to the bowels of the Palais de Justice in Paris, as a man named Valet is interviewed by a prosecuting attorney and a young defence lawyer in Caught in the Act (1994). Neither seem very interested in his crime or his admission, as he resigns himself to prison, that he can be a bit of a rogue. Speech was just one of the sounds that Nougaret sought to meld into an ambient symphony in Paris (1998), an experimental documentary that saw Depardon hire casting director Sylvie Peyre to find him a cross-section of women who would be willing to answer a series of probing questions. In the sequence filmed at the Café le Gymnase, for example, a young woman tells her male companion how liberated she has felt since her mother died in a car crash in Le Touquet

A need to understand his changing nation prompted Depardon to make two documentaries on farming: Profils Paysans: L'Approche (2001) and Profils Paysans: Le Quotidien (2005). In between times, he returned to Chad to record stunning monochrome images of nomads on camels in the Djourab desert before making his third visit to the Palais de Justice (following Muriel Leferle, 1999) for The 10th Judicial Court: Moments of Trial (2004). The scene in which a female judge tries to convince a young man of North African descent that it is not okay to run a traffic light in order to make a drug delivery, especially when one doesn't have a driving licence. Yet, while they converse in French, it is clear they are not speaking the same language, in this typically humanist insight into the way in which the law works against ordinary people.

Over a lovely shot of a snow-covered farm in the village of Le Villaret (to which he returned for La Vie Moderne in 2008), Nougaret declares that Depardon keeps working because he has an insatiable curiosity. A flurry of images taken in America, Russia, China and an unnamed rainforest connect him to the streets of Paris, where he continues to draw inspiration as strangers go about their business without seeming to notice he is watching them.  

There is something Godfrey Reggio about this flashy sequence, which sits a touch uncomfortably alongside the bulk of Depardon's oeuvre. He has always had an eye for the mesmerising image, but his speciality is the candid coverage of the commonplace, as is made plain by the photos taken en route, which ended up in a 2010 Bibliothèque Nationale exhibition entitled `La France'. It is apt, therefore, that this blend of self-portrait and affectionate homage should end with him photographing unassuming shops in another nameless French town before he rolls up to a beach and the scene fades to white. This seeming to vanish into the landscape epitomises Depardon's approach to filming and it is hardly surprising that he proves to be such an elusive presence in his own profile. 

Yet, while this playfully soundtracked actuality should be a treat for Depardon's admirers, it is a somewhat frustrating picture. Obviously, this is a highly personal and, therefore, an inevitably selective alternative history. But, while the footage gleaned using the tried-and-trusted `listening and looking' method cogently examines the consequences of French colonialism and the workings of domestic institutions and their effect upon the populace, there is too little sense here of an evolving society. Indeed, the very detachment that makes Depardon's documentaries so compassionate and compelling counts against him here, as a sense of the man is vital to understanding his attitude to reportage and its presentation on screen.

A very different version of the past is presented by Rithy Panh in The Missing Picture. Although he has been acclaimed for such fictional works as Rice People (1994) and The Sea Wall (2008), Panh is best known for unflinching documentaries about the Cambodian genocide. But, while S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2003) and Duch, Master of the Forges of Hell (2011) made powerful use of personal testimony, this deeply personal adaptation of his own book, The Elimination, combines archive material with claymation to recreate lost scenes from Panh's past and reclaim his own history from the propagandist depictions fabricated by Pol Pot and his Khmer henchmen. Aesthetically, this is a bold approach that occasionally runs the risk of trivialising a age of atrocity. However, the blend of naiveté and nostalgia is entirely intentional, as Panh seeks both to expose the fallacies contained in footage designed to seduce the Kampuchean Revolution's Communist allies and to warn against the ease with which flawed humanity can succumb to its worst instincts.

Panh was 13 when Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge on 17 April 1975. As he recalls in a commentary co-scripted by Christophe Bataille and read by Randal Douc, the regime quickly exploited the tensions between the bourgeoisie and the lower classes to impose a programme of re-education that saw thousands of city dwellers dispatched to agricultural labour camps, where stubborn resistance was systematically weakened and eradicated by increasingly pitiless corporal and capital punishment. The killing fields were secretive places, however, and no cameras were allowed to record the barbarism they witnessed. Consequently, Panh stages their crimes in a series of dioramas populated by clay figurines that restore the missing pictures and memorialise the family members, friends and strangers who perished at the hands of `brothers' and `sisters' who acted as much out of envy as fear before falling victim themselves to the suspicion and paranoia that became the norm under Brother No.1, as he sought to impose an ideology comprising concepts borrowed from Jean-Jacquess Rousseau and Mao Zedong.

In the opening sequence, Panh shows a stack of film canisters and reveals that the monochrome imagery they preserve was faked to show the glorious triumph of the people over misrule. But, while he makes poignant use of this footage, he rather overdoes the metaphor of the crashing sea unleashing a tidal wave of memories that the Khmer Rouge were unable to hold back. Similarly, Marc Marder's score is frustratingly insistent in its eagerness to convey the simple decency of the models sculpted with laudable attention to detail by Sarith Mang and photographed with subtle sensitivity by Prum Mesa to enhance their personality as they immobily endure back-breaking labour, cramped living conditions, state-orchestrated malnutrition and brutal executions.

Brightly coloured and presented in tableau that manage simultaneously to suggest authenticity and artifice, the figures convey the terror and helplessness of the population, while also distancing the viewer from the full horror of the traumas that accounted for over two million souls in four years. Panh is too shrewd not to recognise that it might be a mercy that such barbarism was never filmed and he and editor Marie-Christine Rougerie frequently juxtapose intimations of happier times with evocations of cruelty to force the audience into realising the full hideousness of the new normality, in which dying of starvation (as Panh's father did) becomes an act of heroic resistance. But, while it contains many moments of excruciating poignancy and chilling depravity, it's the totality of the enterprise that is most significant, as it stands as a testament to Panh's own survival and his eloquent ability to commemorate and condemn long after his tormentors have been confounded.

While considering a markedly less contentious topic, Matt Wolf's documentary, Teenage, is much more conventional in approach. Indeed, this slick and engaging adaptation of Jon Savage's epic tome, Teenage: The Creation of Youth 1875-1945, is disappointingly superficial. Apparently, the book emerged from the research Savage undertook for a mooted television series and it's a shame this format was not adopted here, as this 77-minute feature feels like an elongated trailer for an in-depth look at adolescence around the world. As it is, the focus falls solely on America, Britain and Germany, with the bulk of the material being drawn from the period between the 1918 Armistice and the 1945 edition of the New York Times that contained Elliot E. Cohen's manifesto, `A Teen-Age Bill of Rights'. What's here is fascinating, but so much more is missing and this sense of insufficiency undermines the entire project.

Mixing archive footage with archly composed reconstructions, Wolf and Savage decide that the gulf between childhood and adulthood was first bridged by a third stage of existence in 1904, when child labour laws were changed and young people no longer had to spend their days toiling in factories, mines and other arduous places of exploitative employment. When not in school, a growing number of juveniles got up to mischief in their crowded urban neighbourhoods (no attempt is made to examine rural affairs) and the authorities were at a loss to reverse rising crime rates.

One solution came from Britain, where Robert Baden Powell founded the Boy Scouts in 1910 in order to encourage young men to enjoy the outdoor life and learn fidelity to their faith, monarch and country. However, as one cynic put it (in an uncredited extract), the Scouts also prepared lads for the Great War, when millions volunteered and perished for a cause they scarcely understood in the hope of tasting glory. As stalemate left the Allies facing the Central Powers in trenches scarring the continent, the United States entered the conflict in 1917 and the Doughboys brought with them a glimpse of a fresh, vibrant society that stood in stark contrast to the decaying traditions of Europe.

As if to reinforce how drastically the world changed in the decade following the Treaty of Versailles, Wolf cross-cuts between veterans suffering from shellshock and young folks doing such modern dances as the Charleston. The flappers of the American Jazz Age found their counterparts in the Bright Young Things of London's upper echelons and a home movie clip shows Oswald Mosley putting on a skit with Cecil Beaton and Stephen Tennant. But not all of the fun was so innocent and Wolf and Savage include the scandalous case of aristocratic addict Brenda Dean Paul (Leah Hennessey) as a cautionary tale.

While Paul was succumbing to stimulants during country house weekends en route to spending time in Holloway Prison, the financiers on Wall Street were heading towards the crash that sparked the Depression and brought about the New Deal in the United States and the Third Reich in Germany. Yet, while American kids once more found themselves working to keep the wheels of industry rolling, their German counterparts were learning that tomorrow belonged to them in the Hitler Youth. Melita Maschmann (Ivy Blackshire) was among those idealists who unquestioningly embraced the movement before realising too late its true import. Unattributed passages are quoted from her 1963 memoir, Account Rendered, which are set against the experiences of Tommie Scheel (Ben Rosenfield), a boy from Hamburg who had becomes so obsessed with imported Swing music that he was prepared to endure punishment in a detention camp `to tell these dumb bastards that we were different'.

As one might expect of the director of Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell (2008), Wolf ably captures the excitement that Swing caused on both sides of the Atlantic. Yet, he also pauses to highlight how average African-Americans like Warren Wall (Malik Peters) felt about the true extent of socio-cultural interaction under Franklin Delano Roosevelt. As the voice-over states, white folks were happy to have black soldiers fighting for them overseas, but they didn't want them on their buses, in their schools or at their lunch counters. But, having stated that the Armed Forces were one of the few areas where integration was tolerated and having touched upon the infamous Zoot Suit Riots (in about as much detail as they discuss the Edelweiss Pirates), Wolf and Savage decide against delving more deeply and opt to end their survey in Year Zero with a flash-cut montage of instances of teenage rebellion that would characterise the ensuing seven decades.

Given the centrality of teenagers to the seismic cultural, consumerist and communication booms of the last half century, it's tantalising to think of a time when youth was an irrelevant inconvenience envied only by the elderly. The story of its evolution demands more time and space than Wolf and Savage have at their disposal and it's a shame that so many nations are ignored and that the the chosen exemplars appear to have been selected so randomly. It is also frustrating that the insights supplied off-camera by Jena Malone, Ben Whishaw, Alden Ehrenreich, Jessie Usher, Daniela Leder and Julia Hummer are uncaptioned and embellished by faux recollections whose modern idioms are ruinously anachronistic. The insertion of Super 8 clips to pad out the monochrome vintage footage is less egregious, although cinematographer Nick Bentgen's lighting and texturing are never as deft as Joe Beshenkovsky's editing.

The score by Bradford Cox also has its jarring moments. But it's the refusal to provide any worthwhile context or analyse the sociological aspects in any depth that proves most irksome, as though Wolf and Savage were hoping to snag an attention-deficit adolescent audience by sticking to snippets and sound bites. The almost capricious overlooking of the impact made by cinema and Hollywood's prototype teen, Andy Hardy (who was played by Mickey Rooney in 15 MGM programmers between 1937-46) is also regrettable. Technically and stylistically, this patchwork blurring of fact and fiction is highly astute. But the result is a snapshot when what's needed is a boxed set.

Following in the footsteps of David Weissman's deeply personal memoir We Were Here (2011) and the more combative pairing of Scott Robbe's Act Up! and Jim Hubbard's United in Anger: A History of ACT UP (both 2012), David France's Oscar-nominated documentary How to Survive a Plague provides a first-hand account of the campaign mounted by the New York gay and lesbian community to shame both the federal government and the pharmaceutical industry into funding and finding an effective treatment for AIDS and making it accessible at an affordable price. Exceptionally edited by Woody Richman and Tyler H. Walk from archival news material and home movies taken by activists at meetings and demonstrations between 1987 and 1995, the footage is presented in such an unashamedly triumphalist manner that this could almost be a celebration of the Civil Rights movement or the race to space, with the leading figures in the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power finally being hailed as the heroes and heroines they are.

Making a fine companion piece to Dylan Mohan Gray's Fire in the Blood (see below), this is not just a film about combating a pernicious disease. It's a compelling social document and an important affirmation of the power of the people when they unite behind a pressing political cause.

An opening series of captions states that in Year Six of the AIDS epidemic, the lack of viable drugs means that there is a 100% death rate among those being diagnosed with HIV. As an anti-gay backlash intensifies, hospitals are beginning to turn cases away and New York mayor Ed Koch is taken to task for calling gay activists fascists. Enraged by the lack of affirmative action as the worldwide death toll tops 500,000, lawyer David Barr, PR executive Bob Rafsky, playwright Jim Eigo, author Larry Kramer, video activist Gregg Bordowitz, bond trader Peter Staley, television personality Ann Northrop, club DJ Bill Bahlman, actor Spencer Cox and film archivist Mark Harringon joined forces under the ACT-UP banner and marched on City Hall in March 1987. As the policing becomes more aggressive, Kramer tells a TV crew that he feels as though he is fighting a war, as people are being allowed to die through fear, ignorance and bigotry.

Looking back, Staley remembers how the disease took hold of him and left him prone to the smallest infection and he was confident he would die before a treatment, let alone a cure, was found for either the Human Immunodeficiency Virus or Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome. Yet, as he started attending meetings at the Lesbian and Gay Community Centre, he began realising that he was not only surrounded by like minds, but also some very informed and inspired ones and the way in which ACT-UP challenged a security guard at St Vincent's Hospital for beating up HIV patients to keep them away from his ER gave Staley confidence that he was with the right crowd.

As an associate physician at the hospital, Barbara Starrett was dismayed by how quickly infection felled sufferers and teamed with retired scientist Iris Long in running underground drug trials to try and find effective combatants. A married housewife from Queens, Long taught the activists about the nature of the disease and the ways in which they affected the body and the immune system. Kramer and Eigo recall her compassion and the eagerness with which everyone seized upon her wisdom and willingness to help. Teenager Garance Franke-Ruta became part of the Treatment and Data group and Harrington compiled a glossary of terms that standardised the vocabulary used in relation to AIDS and Rafsky and Staley became regulars on news and chat shows, as they tried to browbeat Washington and Big Pharma. But even when Burroughs Wellcome released AZT in late 1987, ACT-UP refused to be grateful for the most expensive drug in history, as a course of treatment cost $10,000 per annum. Indeed, four activists broke into the company's headquarters and made sure the news crews caught their assertion that executives were profiteering from the decimation of the gay community.

As the counter at the top of the screen shows the death rate top 800,000 in 1988, France shows us footage of a dying man and his empty hospital bed, as Starrett recalls how corpses used to be removed in big bags and that many funeral parlours refused to bury AIDS victims. Mathilde Krim from the American Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR) concurs that basic care was being withdrawn, as homophobic senators like Jesse Helms railed against unnatural acts and Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Health (NIH), conceded that the gay aspect of the disease made it difficult for the Establishment to fund research.

Left to their own devices, groups like the People With AIDS Health Club began importing drugs that were legal outside the United States and Derek Link and Franke-Ruta recall how many of them were quickly revealed to be `what the hell drugs' as they were so ineffective. But Long urged ACT-UP to eschew the black market and campaign to make the open market work more fairly. In a bid to embarrass the US Food and Drug Administration, a demonstration was held outside its offices in Rockville, Maryland and gay activist Vito Russo turned up to speak as banned drugs were sold among the protesters and 185 arrests were made. However, as if to prove there was no such thing as bad publicity, Staley went on the Crossfire programme with Tom Braden and Pat Buchanan to endure the misgivings of both Democrats and Republicans about the way ACT-UP was conducting itself.

As if to prove it could get things done, ACT-UP turned its attention to a new drug, DHPG, which had been shown in trials to help those with advanced AIDS from losing their sight. When the FDA refused to sanction its sale, a sit-in was staged at the Bethesda headquarters of the Oversight Committee until regulator Ellen Cooper was so struck by the vehemence of the heckling against her and the cogency of the points made in ACT-UP literature that she secured a reversal of the original decision. Yet, all this proved to Harrington was that the FDA had no coherent strategy for tackling AIDS and he helped draft a manifesto that exposed the gaps in treatment and research policies around the world. Armed with this, they picketed the International AIDS Conference in Montreal and Susan Ellenberg from the NIH was so impressed by the document that she recommended it to her colleagues. Scientists at Bristol-Myers were also won over and pushed for DDI to be made available as quickly as possible, while Emilio Emini and Joseph Vacca at Merck were sufficiently encouraged to step up research into the way that protease inhibitors could prevent the reverse transcription process that enabled the virus to replicate in infected cells.

Even though AIDS-related deaths passed the 1.2 million mark in 1989, the Roman Catholic Church continued to denounce homosexuality and insist that celibacy was the only way to avoid becoming infected with HIV, as condoms offered no protection. In order to prevent Cardinal John O'Connor undoing valuable work in educating people about the use of condoms, ACT-UP organised a protest inside St Patrick's Cathedral as O'Connor presided over mass, while artist Ray Navarro dressed as Christ with a crown of thorns to accuse the cardinal of endangering life. Shortly afterwards, NIH HQ was also invaded with Rafsky taking Fauci to task for costly mistakes, while Staley delivered a speech of great eloquence and power at the International AIDS Conference at San Francisco, in which he pleaded with the pharmaceutical giants to enter into a partnership with ACT-UP to atone for the indifference of the Bush administration.

Amazingly, Fauci agreed to end the policy of secrecy surrounding AIDS research and invited Treatment and Data personnel to attend trials and meetings. Emini recalls the value of this development, as ACT-UP members encouraged him to bounce back after setbacks. Yet, while protests were staged at the courses where Geoge Bush was playing golf and a giant condom was erected outside Jesse Helms's house, the situation took a turn for the worse in 1990 (with 1.7 now dead from AIDS), as new infections kept springing up and the company that had patented a treatment for the skin lesions known as Kaposi's sarcoma refused to release the drug in the United States. A furious Rafsky accused the executive who came to meet the occupation party of letting him die and Staley admitted on TV that he expected to die sooner rather than later.

In 1991, as figures reached 2.4 million, a cabal of dissenters within ACT-UP declared that the Treatment and Data representatives were becoming too cosy with their drug company counterparts and all efforts to mediate by Barr, Northrop and Kramer fell on deaf ears (in spite of a blistering speech about the plague threatening them all that the latter gave after being heckled during a meeting). Consequently, Harrington, Staley and Rifsky formed the breakaway Treatment Action Group (TAG), with the latter making national news when he confronted Bill Clinton on the presidential hustings in 1992 (3.3 million). The arrival of the AIDS quilt in Washington and the reading of names also captured the public imagination, although an angrier protest saw some bereaved marchers emptying ashes of their loved ones on to the lawn outside the White House. On the night before the ballot, Rafsky brought the coffin of AIDS victim John Fisher to the same spot and delivered an impassioned oration in which he cursed Bush for his neglect. However, it would prove to he his last hurrah, as Rasky died soon after and France includes footage of the wife and daughter to whom he had remained close.

Amidst these very public displays of grief and anger, Emini and Vacca made a breakthrough at Merck when Patient 143 responded positively to Crixivan and they tried to analyse why it worked so well on him and not anyone else in the test. Yet, while they continued to toil, news came that AZT, DDI and DDC had proven less effective in the long term than had initially been hoped and Barr and Staley gave a press conference regretting their naiveté in thinking that there was a magic bullet just waiting to be discovered. Such pessimism persisted into 1994 (6.2 million) and onetime comrades fell out dramatically over the FDA director David  Kessler's desire to speed up the release of Saquinivir, with TAG reps Link and Gregg Gonsalves urging caution to prevent a repeat of past mistakes. But, just as internecine fissures began to tear, fortune smiled.

France links close-ups of Harrington,, Link, Gonsalves, Cox, Bordowitz and Staley in the present day, as the 1995 counter slips past 8.2 million deaths. Staley laments that so many good people were lost and feels guilt at surviving when so many others did not. Fauci praises Harrington and his circle for matching intelligence with diligence, as their promptings helped Emini and Vacca devise the triple combination treatment that showed such remarkable results within 30 days that the press began proclaiming a `Lazarus Effect'. An emotional Staley expresses his pride at the goodness and humanity the gay community and their supporters showed in taking care of each other, while Kramer and Eigo commend the courage and zeal of ACT-UP. However, Harrington cries as he lambastes Reagan and Bush for not acting sooner and the film concludes with the staggering statistic that six million AIDS victims have survived thanks to combination therapy - while a further two million die each year because they cannot afford it

Complete with a happy ending, this often feels like a summation of the countless documentaries that have charted the progress of AIDS research since the early 1980s. It is angrier with the White House than some and more forgiving of Big Pharma than others. But it is most intent on lionising those in the ACT-UP and TAG vanguards, who took on all-comers in the face of institutionalised neglect. That so many of them lived to tell the tale is remarkable, but that they do so with such sensitivity and lack of self-congratulatory hindsight is even more admirable. As a journalist who covered the story first-hand, France knows his material and the personalities involved inside out. But he only occasionally takes prior knowledge for granted and, as a result, this could become the defintive account of a struggle that shamed a nation and still casts a dark shadow over the reputation of the global pharmaceutical industry.

Dylan Mohan Gray's Fire in the Blood is designed to provoke outrage, as it provides an unflinching tribute to the unlikely alliance of activists, doctors and high-profile champions that challenged the capitalist system and the patent laws it hides behind and forced the avaricious American pharmaceutical industry into making life-saving anti-retroviral drugs available at affordable prices to the developing world's most impoverished HIV victims. The courage, selflessness and ingenuity of the campaigners is humbling. But it's the arrogance and greed of the drug tycoons and their political lackeys that leaves the lingering impression, as they conspired to allow 10 million to perish in Africa, Asia and Latin America in the name of maximised profits.

The debuting Gray, who also serves as his own editor and narrator, opens his case by introducing doctors Peter Mugyenyi and Noor Jehan Majid, whose despair at being unable to treat patients in the Ugandan capital Kampala and the town of Machava in Mozambique came to the attention of HIV+ Cape Town judge Edwin Cameron, who felt it was unfair that he could experience the Lazarus Effect produced by ARVs when others less fortunate than himself were condemned to die. He found allies in fellow South African Zackie Achmat and Ugandan journalist Elvis Basudde Kyeyune, whose campaigns to raise awareness of the chemical apartheid being defended by Big Pharma insiders like Jan Raaijmakers of GlaxoSmithKline and Andrew S. Natsios from the United States Agency for International Development aroused the indignation of intellectual property expert James P. Love, who set out to discover how much a course of treatment actually cost and why US-based multinationals refused to reduce their prices to prevent a calamity.

Back in 2000, Achmat had tried to import a Thai generic version of Flucanazole, which cost only $1 per tablet rather than the $40 charged by Pfizer at a time when the average African weekly wage was $68. However, South African patent law meant that the cargo was contraband and it was impounded. As a consequence, Achmat announced that he would not take ARVs until everyone in the world could afford them and Nelson Mandela visited his home to salute a stance that also inspired Love, who was informed that the conglomerates refused to offer discounts to Africa in case the gesture caused the drugs to under-perform in the expanding markets of India and China.

Love was far from convinced by the arguments that scientists were afraid that people in the developing world would misuse the drugs and cause AIDS to mutate and once again become a deadly threat to affluent Westerners. Indeed, as doctors Suniti Solomon (from Kousalya) and Eric Goemaere (from Doctors Without Frontiers) point out, women like Nomvuselelo Kalolo (who is caring for her ailing daughter Lisa n Mfuleni in the Western Cape) and Chennai resident Kousalya Periasamy (who was infected after an arranged marriage with an older man) are more likely to follow instructions to the letter as they are aware the drugs offer the sole chance of survival.

However, as former Pfzer vice-president Peter Rost and New York Times business reporter Donald McNeil confirm, corporations are much more interested in making money for their stockholders than in sponsoring humanitarian programmes. Moreover, as they hold such sway in Washington, the status quo was unlikely to change, even when it attracted such notable opponents as Archbishop Desmond Tutu and former president Bill Clinton. Ironically, however, it was another onetime Washington big-hitter, William F. Haddad (who had been an advisor to John F. Kennedy), who proved to be the game changer, as he not only backed Love's bid to expose the callous cynicism of Big Pharma, but he also found a willing ally in Yusuf K. Hamied, whose father had been encouraged to study pharmacology by Gandhi in the 1930s and whose Cipla company had enabled Indira Gandhi to rewrite the Indian patent laws governing medication in 1970.

In league with Haddad, Love and Denis Broun of the World Health Organisation, Hamied attended a closed-door conference of pharmaceutical giants in Brussels in the autumn of 2000 and announced that he would provide free help to any country prepared to fund its own ARV initiative. None of his competitors rallied to his call. Indeed, some leading manufacturers even started marketing cocktails of drugs in order to protect brands coming to the end of their period of patent exclusivity. Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz called for such prejudicial patents to be scrapped and Donald McNeil backed his intervention by revealing that only 12% of Big Pharma's profits is invested in research, even though it receives generous funding from governments and public sources. McNeil also discovered that many companies held patents on drugs they had not invented and took out advertisements in the so-called Third World questioning the purity of generics even though their own ingredients often came from the same suppliers.

Despite the global outcry that only one in 2000 Africans could afford ARVs five years after the triple therapy breakthrough was announced in 2001, the situation remained unchanged. So, James Love urged Cipla to come up with a dollar a day regime and Hamied responded with an annual course of treatment that would cost $350 instead of the $15,000 being charged by Big Pharma. Yet, even though its rapacity had been exposed, the industry still tried to block the supply of Cipla generics and threatened to press charges against Peter Mugyenyi when he placed an order. However, he hit back by indicating that American companies had suspended patents on anti-anthrax drugs following a spate of post-9/11 attacks and he was backed by the Ugandan government, who waived patent laws to admit the delivery. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan also entered the breach by announcing the formation of the UN Global Fund to help pay for generics in the world's poorest states and even George W. Bush called for cheap ARVs in his State of the Union address on the eve of the invasion of Iraq in 2002.

However, Bush was soon forced to distance himself from his own policy, as ex-Eli Lilly CEO Randall Tobias was appointed AIDS czar and he ensured that the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief purchased the drugs it donated from US companies. Unsurprisingly, the budget was soon exhausted by the inflated prices and PEPFAR's self-interest was exposed when the Clinton Foundation bought Cipla generics and sparked a worldwide defiance of patent laws that saw a vast increase in the numbers being treated. Among the lucky one was bodybuilder Pradip Kumar Singh, who managed to win the Silver Medal in the Mr India pageant despite contracting HIV from shared heroin needles in the provincial town of Aurangabad. But, as Tutu Foundation medic Linda-Gail Bekker and Noerine Kaleeba from UNAIDS disclose, there were still shortages and they often had to decide who would be treated on the basis of a person's potential usefulness to their family and/or community.

Once again demonstrating a commitment to commerce over compassion, Big Pharma joined forces with the World Trade Organisation to coerce nations into accepting the TRIPS Agreement that closed the loopholes relating to other profitable drugs. Hamied considers this action to be genocidal, while Stiglitz notes that it means more Americans than ever before are unable to afford their pills. Furthermore, the subsequent rise in the cost of benefits packages helped contribute to the economic downturn, as employers could no longer meet their healthcare obligations.

An emotional William Haddad says that it makes no sense that millions are still dying from AIDS when a course of generics now costs under $100 per annum. But, as Peter Rost reminds viewers, nobody benefiting from a flawed system is going to change it voluntarily and he concedes that Big Pharma is essentially punishing the world for challenging its right to print money with ARVs. He hopes that Gray and his film can bring about necessary reform and prevent the 18 million deaths that the World Health Organisation claims occur each year because cheaper drugs are not available. However, both he and we already know that even a picture as righteously furious, meticulously compiled and impassionedly eloquent as this one stands next to no chance of persuading the rich to think of anyone but themselves.

Stylistically, this is a pretty basic offering. But content matters much more than form in cases such as this and Gray cogently states the facts while wisely allowing his talking heads to push the message. The juxtaposition of ordinary people, celebrities and experts is shrewd, but it might have been useful to include a few more self-condemnatory remarks from industry bigwigs or find another Damascean voice to back up Rost. But these are small quibbles with a film of great intellectual and emotional integrity that achieves everything it sets out to do and one can but hope it fares better than David France's Oscar-nominated How to Survive a Plague (which has still to be released in this country) in finding the audience it deserves.

Finally, there's a change of tack, as Paul Crowder examines the safety record of Formula One. The growing popularity of sport was one of the by-products of the increased leisure time available to adolescents and motor racing found a niche among the wealthier classes from the 1920s onwards. Speed was always the name of the game. Indeed, as narrator Michael Fassbender reveal in 1, such was the emphasis on the reckless courage required to take the chequered flag that safety was never a priority for either the drivers or the event organisers and, as a consequence, many died needlessly on the track. Richard Heap did a decent job of exposing the sport's technical and administrative shortcomings in Grand Prix: The Killer Years (2011), which was shown on the BBC. Yet, while Crowder covers much the same ground with many of the same talking heads, his experience as an editor on Stacy Peralta's skateboarding and surfing documentaries Dogtown and Z-Boys (2001) and Riding Giants (2004) ensures that this is a much slicker account, even if it can't quite match the mastery of Asif Kapadia's Senna (2010).

On 10 March 1996, Martin Brundle survived an horrific crash during the Australian Grand Prix in Melbourne. Indeed, such was the sturdiness of the Jordan that Brundle barrel rolled that he was able to run along the track to find chief medic Sid Watkins in order to get his clearance to resume the race in a replacement car. It is unthinkable that anything similar could have happened during the previous 50 years of the sport's tragedy-strewn history and Crowder opens this grittily nostalgic account with a montage of classic footage to take motor sport from its first meets to the postwar era when drivers replaced fighter pilots as the heroes of schoolboys everywhere.

Nigel Mansell, Damon Hill and John Watson recall the legendary rivalry between Juan Manuel Fangio and Stirling Moss, with Emerson Fittipaldi and Michael Schumacher averring that the Argentine (who won the world title five times) was the greatest driver of them all. But he retired in 1958, just as a new breed of supercar was being introduced by Colin Chapman at Lotus. Mario Andretti and John Surtees agree that this cavalier engineer changed the sport forever and their contention is supported by son Clive Chapman, designer John Bernard and Brazilian ace Fittipaldi, who insists that Chapman was the kind of maverick team boss for whom it was a pleasure to race.

Jim Clark was Lotus's star driver in the 1960s and fellow Scot Jackie Stewart declares him the smoothest and canniest competitor he ever faced. Clark enjoyed a fierce, but friendly rivalry with Graham Hill and girlfriend Sally Swart recalls how the drivers were essentially a band of brothers who partied and holidayed together with their partners, who often acted as unofficial time-keepers and formed their own cabal, the Doghouse Club. The favourite Grand Prix during this period was Monaco and Damon Hill, Jody Scheckter, Jenson Button and Lewis Hamilton all concur that downtown Monte Carlo remains the tightest, trickiest and most exciting circuit. Mechanic Jo Ramirez proclaims Ayrton Senna the master of the streets, as his peerless powers of concentration enabled him to win the race on six occasions, one more than Graham Hill, whose skill and charm are lauded by Grace Kelly in a clip that follows a thrilling cockpit point-of-view sequence that is accompanied by the driving sound of the Focus instrumental, `Hocus Pocus'.

In 1967, however, Lorenzo Bandini died in a fiery crash that prompted drivers to demand changes to the way racing was run. Each of the 23 cars on the grid now had lighter chassis and more powerful engines and yet the tracks and their perimeters remained the same. Drivers wanted some of the money being raised by selling sponsorship space on their vehicles and uniforms to be reinvested in safety precautions. But, as Max Mosley (who was then driving in Formula Two) recalls, nothing was done and, as a result, pin-up Jim Clark perished in an F2 race at Hockenheim on 7 April 1968 when a tyre deflated and he careered into trees on a part of the circuit that was unprotected by barriers. The shockwaves reverberated throughout the motor sport fraternity - as can be seen by Bruce McLaren's stunned reaction while being interviewed the next day by Peter Purves on Blue Peter. - as everyone realised that if someone of Clark's calibre could die, so could they.

A month after Clark's funeral, Graham Hill was back in harness at the Spanish Grand Prix, which he won on his way to becoming world champion. But another Britain was making his mark and Jackie Stewart's thrilling win at Monza in 1969 convinced Enzo Ferrari to redouble his efforts to regain the constructors' championship he had last won five years earlier. Surtees remembers the passion of the Italian fans with great fondness and Schumacher admits that it took him a while to realise the special relationship that Ferrari drivers have with their supporters.

Back in the 1970s, however, Ferrari's commandatore was playing catch-up with Colin Chapman, who had added wings to his Lotus cars to increase their aerodynamic downforce. There were slight teething problems, with the wings collapsing on Graham Hill and Austrian Jochen Rindt on only their second outing at Montjuich, outside Barcelona, in 1969. Engineer Eddie Dennis and driver John Miles reckon that this incident shook the unpredictable Rindt's faith in Chapman and he became more difficult to handle than ever. Orphaned at 15 months and buying fast cars with his inheritance at 18, Rindt was not used to taking orders and manager Bernie Ecclestone ensured that his opinions were heard. Nevertheless, Chapman continued to experiment with modifications, with the wings being perfected almost on an ad hoc basis as the season progressed.

Having won triumphantly at Zandvoort in the Netherlands and opened up a huge lead on Jack Brabham in the championship race, Rindt decided to remove the wings at Monza. However, he lost control of the car and was killed at the age of just 28, leaving his widow Nina to collect the only posthumous title in the sport's history. What made his death more tragic was that the Grand Prix Drivers' Association had an ambulance at the circuit, but it was not used and the driver of the local vehicle took Rindt to the wrong hospital. Bruce McLaren and Piers Courage also lost their lives that season and, as Ecclestone and Mosley came to the forefront of those calling for root-and-branch reform, Andretti reveals that drivers were wondering why their cars were becoming so dangerous when rockets could land men on the Moon and bring them home in one piece.

As an 11 year-old boy, Koen Vergeer (who would go on to write the bestseller Formula One Fanatic) could see that Grand Prix racing was a perilous occupation and John Hogan, Maurice Hamilton and Paddy McNally recall how badly organised many events were. In some ways, the problems were rooted in a lack of funding, as television coverage of what was still essentially a minority sport was patchy at best. Things changed, however, when the rivalry between Jackie Stewart and Jacky Ickx intensified in the early 1970s. But this was much more than a clash of egos on the track, as Stewart wanted seat belts and other safety apparatus to become mandatory, while Ickx felt such measures depleted the sense of danger that was the sport's key selling point. When Ickx refused to join the GPDA, his opponents voted to cancel the Belgian's home race at Spa until their concerns were addressed and, with Ecclestone and Mosley now both team owners, they began to have a bigger say in how the sport operated.

The new drivers on the grid also made their views known, among them Jody Scheckter, Emerson Fittipaldi, John Watson, David Purley, Roger Williamson, Ronnie Peterson and François Cevert. But little changed in the short term, as 11 cars were retired at Silverstone in 1973 and the macho gladiatorial spirit that caused the largest pile-up meant that nobody but Purley stopped to assist Williamson when his car ignited at Zandvoort and the race continued to its conclusion. Stewart laments that the mindset of the time prioritised winning at all costs and recalls the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile bringing in new fire and safety regulations, as the Doghouse Club started collecting for the families of lost colleagues.  

Yet there was still an element of amateurism in the sport, which was epitomised by 22 year-old Lord Hesketh setting up his own racing team, with its logo depicting a teddy bear in a Union Jack crash helmet. Eddie Jordan recalls how many insiders disapproved of toffs playing with fast cars. But the mood changed when James Hunt emerged as a serious contender for the title and girlfriend Jane Birbeck enthuses that he became an overnight icon, whose fast living made as many headlines as his speedy driving.

Indeed, the social side of motor racing was considered one of its perks, with the parties at Seneca Lodge during the weekend of the American Grand Prix at Watkins Glen being among the highlights. Jackie Stewart knew that the 1973 race would be his last at the circuit, as he planned to retire after his 100th outing. However, he withdrew out of respect when prodigy François Cevert was killed during qualifying and Stewart flinches as he recalls the horror of the injuries the playboy Frenchmen suffered. What made the accident so dismaying is that it could have been avoided if the barriers had been a fraction higher and Scheckter and Fittipaldi wonder how they managed to carry on when they knew their bosses set such little store by their safety.

John Watson remembers Bernie Ecclestone urging him to drive after Cevert's smash, as he had been doing what he loved right up until the second he died. But the calls for reform grew louder as Peter Revson (the heir to the Revlon cosmetics empire) and Austrian rookie Helmuth Koinigg were killed within weeks of each other in 1974. The following season, reigning champion Emerson Fittipaldi refused to race at Montjuich, as the barriers fell apart when he kicked them. Yet, when the intrepid Jacky Ickx took to the track regardless, the others couldn't resist the challenge and Fittipaldi lost a boycott vote and completed a single lap before retiring in protest. Mechanics from the various teams had been out repairing the crash barriers of the own volition. But they couldn't prevent four spectators from being killed when German Rolf Stommelen flew into the crowd on his 25th circuit.

According to Max Mosley and journalist Nigel Roebuck, this episode proved the last straw, as the authorities recognised that the drivers needed protecting from themselves. They were aided in their cause by an upsurge in public interest sparked by the burgeoning rivalry between James Hunt and Nikki Lauda. This has already inspired Matthew Whiteman's BBC film Hunt vs Lauda: F1's Greatest Racing Rivals, as well as Ron Howard's Rush, which starred Chris Hemsworth and Daniel Brühl. But Crowder rehashes the story of the 1976 season in excessive detail, as McLaren and Ferrari went all out for the crown, which seemed to be going to the Austrian after he won four of the first six races. However, Hunt bagged two of his own and would have chalked up a third, but for a demotion in Spain. But the turning point came during the German Grand Prix at the Nürburgring.

Built in the Weimar era (and not at the behest of Hitler, as is stated here), the track was 22km around and notorious for the 17 jumps that often sent cars airborne. Jackie Stewart describes it as  dangerous, but thrilling and Lauda was so concerned about the state of the circuit that he called for the race on 1 August to be abandoned. He lost by a single vote and, when he crashed on the second lap, he only avoided losing his life as well because Brett Lunger stopped to haul him out of his seat. Such were the extent of the burn injuries, however, that few expected him to survive and Lauda recalls sourly how his wife's tears on seeing how badly he had been hurt did little to raise his morale. Yet, five weeks later, he was back behind the wheel at Monza, where his fourth place finish was hailed as an act of supreme courage.

Moreover, Lauda remained three points ahead of Hunt in the championship, which turned the season finale in Japan into the decider. Such was the global interest in the race that it dawned on Ecclestone that Formula One was the next big TV sport and he bought the rights to all the races for $1 million. He offered the other nine team owners a share, but they turned him down and, as a consequence, he became ridiculously rich and motor racing's new kingpin. On 24 October 1976, however, he lacked the clout to force Lauda into competing when torrential rain reduced visibility at 180mph to 20%. Having experienced the horrors of a crash, Lauda was not prepared to put himself or his family through the trauma again and Hunt went on to finish third (in spite of tyre trouble) and win the championship by a single point.

Jo Martinez openly admits that he has never forgiven Lauda for being selfish that day and putting himself before his Ferrari teammates. But, when one considers the facial injuries that Lauda sustained, it is difficult to sympathise with Martinez's viewpoint. Ecclestone and Mosley certainly didn't agree, as they were keen to avoid drivers dying on live television. Yet, even though Sid Watkins was installed as the new medical supremo, he was prevented by the police from tending to Ronnie Peterson after James Hunt pulled him from his Lotus at Monza in September 1978. He died the following day from complications arising from the crushing of his legs and Watkins insisted on standardising medical response procedures and even persuaded Ecclestone that he should follow the first (and most dangerous) lap of every race in a safety car.

Only four more drivers were lost during testing and races over the next 16 years. But events at Imola in the spring of 1994 demonstrated once more how dangerous motor racing could be. The day after Brazilian Rubens Barrichello had survived a crash in practice, Austrian Roland Ratzenberger was killed in qualifying. But it was the death on 1 May of golden boy Ayrton Senna that most shocked the sport, as the three-time champion was a megastar whom many believed was the greatest driver of all time. Lewis Hamilton reflects on his nine year-old self crying at the loss of his hero and new FIA chief Max Mosley vowed to eradicate fatalities from F1. Sid Watkins was charged with analysing every facet of the sport to avert deaths and Martin Brundle's 1996 near miss seemed to confirm he had done an excellent job. Sebastian Vettel opines that it remains a crazy sport, but the fact that Robert Kubica and Mark Webber could walk away unscathed from horrendous crashes finally prompted Jacky Ickx to concede that Jackie Stewart might have been right all along in campaigning for safety.

Senna remains the last driver to die in a grand prix, but it remains a mystery why the authorities were so slow to react to the fact that 15 drivers died in the 1950s, 14 in the 1960s and 12 in the 1970s. It speaks volumes that only six have been lost since 1980 and Crowder denounces the faceless and unnamed officials responsible for the earlier carnage with cogency and power. As he showed in Once in a Lifetime: The Extraordinary Story of the New York Cosmos (2006) and Amazing Journey: The Story of The Who (2007), which he co-directed with Murray Lerner, Crowder is an engaging storyteller, who marshals his archival and interview material with care and flair. He also proves more tactful than Richard Heap in presenting footage of the fatal accidents and has chosen some cracking rock tracks to counterpoint the action. But Crowder is also prone to factual inaccuracy and digression. He also lingers over-long on the Hunt-Lauda showdown and might have allowed some of the expert input to play over contemporary imagery instead of constantly depicting middle-aged men sitting against uninspiring backdrops. Yet, while petrolheads may grumble at the lack of fresh insights, newcomers will be grateful for this melancholic chronicle before it starts to resemble a fawning tribute to Messrs Mosley and Ecclestone.