Parky at the Pictures (DVD 22/11/2018)

With her distinctive double-colour hair, Agnès Varda is instantly recognisable. By contrast, the enigmatic JR refuses to divulge his name or emerge from behind his hipster shades and pork pie hat. He is 55 years younger than the 88 year-old cat lover and they explain in an opening montage how they didn't come to meet on a country road, at a Parisian bus stop or in a bakery or a disco. Instead, JR came to Varda's home in Rue Daguerre after being enthralled by the strength of her image-making in films like Cléo From 5 to 7 (1962) and Murs Murs (1980), which celebrated public mural art in Los Angeles. Having been equally impressed with the collage of faces he affixed to the floor of the Pantheon and his portraits of Cuban women, Varda was happy to welcome her guest and pay a reciprocal visit to his studio to meet his co-workers Émile Abinal, Guillaume Cagniard and Étienne Rougery-Herbaut.

Describing himself as a `photograffeur', JR uses a specially converted van with a lens painted on the side to blow up snapshots in order to plaster them on walls and structures in order to comment on the sitter and their milieu. Varda is taken by the fact he reminds her of her old friend Jean-Luc Godard, who also likes to hide behind dark glasses and she vows to coax JR into posing without them, just as she had persuaded Godard (then the enfant terrible of the nouvelle vague) in the early 1960s. 

Agreeing to hit the road and see what happens, Varda and JR drive into the French countryside and make their first stop at the village of L'Escale. Inviting locals to sit in the booth in the back of the van with a baguette in front of their mouths, JR paste the pictures on to a long wall to create the impression that everyone is tucking into the same enormous sandwich. The onlookers are suitably amused by the conceit and Varda is delighted that JR is introducing her to new people to photograph so that their faces don't fall down the holes in her memory. 

Prompted by a collection of postcards that Varda had of some miners, the pair head north and reach the pit village of Bruay-la-Buissière in the Pas-de-Calais. JR photographs Varda against two vast slagheaps before they discover Jeannine Carpentier, who is the last resident of a row of cottages that have long been due for demolition. Having spent her entire life in the family home, however, Jeannine has no intention of leaving and she remembers how excited her siblings used to get when their father came home with the leftovers from his buttered baguette, which they used to call `alouette bread' because it had become gritty from being underground. 

As the team paste snaps of bygone miners on the terrace facade, strangers sidle up to Varda to confide their memories of working down the pit or of scrubbing their father's back when he got home from a bruising day in the bowels of the earth. Jeannine is deeply moved to see her own face looking back from the brickwork of her home and Varda muses on her valiant determination to stay put, as she sits on a bench near an imposing rustic church with her feet dangling because they don't reach the floor. 

Concurring that leaving things to chance is the best way to proceed, Varda and JR hit the road again. He recalls meeting farmer Clemens Van d'Ungern while hitchhiking and returns to Chérence in the Val-d'Oise to post a full-length portrait on the wooden doors of his barn. Clemens loves his machinery and his gadgets and admits that he is more of a passenger on his tractor than an old-fashioned farmhand. But he is also available for hire and works for several of his neighbours, even though most communal forms of farming have disappeared. Fortunately, he enjoys being alone, although he is glad to have a family to go home to and he jokes that JR's image of him shrugging with open palms will make him a celebrity in the district. 

Venturing south, the intrepid twosome fetch up in Bonnieux in the Vaucluse to meet Marie Dolivet and Jean-Paul Beaujon, the grandchildren of Émile and Émilie, who were so in love that he kidnapped her to overcome the disapproval of her family. The photograph of the couple is yellowed and torn, but JR finds a cameo frame for it and the siblings pose for selfies beneath the image pasted to the wall of Marie's home. The local gendarme joshes JR about needing a permit to put is scaffolding on the street and accompanies them to the café to meet Nathalie Schleehauf, a waitress who has agreed to pose with a parasol and a straw hat for a picture to be attached to the gable end of a row opposite her workplace. 

Vincent Gils brings his mother's wedding parasol and Nathalie feels self-conscious as she perches on a low wall with her bare feet dangling for JR to photograph. While the pictures are developing, he follows Vincent to the church for a lesson in bell ringing. Within hours of Nathalie's picture going up, it has become an Internet sensation and her children come to take selfies in front of it and to stand and tickle her giant paper feet. But, while Varda is delighted with the effects, she is disappointed by Nathalie's embarrassment at having become an accidental icon. 

Passing through fields of sunflowers, JR and Varda drive on to the Usine Arkéma at Château-Arnoux-Saint-Auban in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence. The town cinema owner, Jimmy, had told them all about Varda and they were keen to collaborate. As the factory makes hydrochloric acid, there is lots of salt in the storage bay and Varda and JR strike a pose as if they are explorers in an Arctic wilderness. They meet Claude Fiaert, Patrick Bernard and Amaury Bossy, the youngest worker on site, who is part of the health and safety team and is pleased to have a meaningful job. He's good at table tennis and Varda watches on as he plays JR on a tiny table with upturned cans for a net. 

They have decided to use the long, low walls of a passageway for their pasting and the workforce is charmed by the idea that they will all appear in the same place at once, as shift patterns mean that they are rarely all on site at any one time. JR makes them extend their arms above their heads and lean to one side so that it looks as though one group is reaching out to the next. The staff members are pleased to see managers mingling with underlings and Varda is touched that Didier Campy Comte is going to remain on the wall even though this is his last day before retiring. But, before they leave, Varda and JR can't resist decorating the water tower standing over the site with dozens of photographic fish. 

We flash back to see Varda and JR snapping the fish in the market and a graphic eyeball match cut takes us to an ophthalmologist's surgery, where Varda is having injections for the condition that blurs her sight. She jokes about the needle being nothing compared to the razor blade that slashes the pupil in Luis Buñuel's Un Chien andalou (1928) and JR tries to cheer her up by positioning a human eye chart on the steps of the clinic. He is impressed that she can remain so cheerful in the face of physical discomfort and decline and she mischievously avers that it's important to retain one's sense of perspective.  

A drone shot swoops over the abandoned settlement of Pirou-Plage in Normandy, which has been reclaimed as a `ghost village' by local artists. Folks of all ages come from the neighbouring villages to picnic and participate in a DIY art event and Varda devotes herself to people watching, while JR and his crew snap, snip and stick. In a Tatiesque tribute to Jour de Fête (1949), a uniformed postman cycles in with a letter `N' to give to a woman in the window of a ramshackle house. Yet there's a slight sense of artifice that this unfinished estate has been commandeered for a demonstration in how strangers from diverse backgrounds can rub along if they have a common goal.

Varda has known village postman Jacky Patin for a long time and she shows him the painting he once did for her. She repays the favour by having a full-figure portrait appended to a wall in the village and he is amused that the shutters of the house open across his face because he thinks he has an ugly mug. He once cycled everywhere with a radio on the handlebars and the farmers used to give him melons and tomatoes. But he now uses a yellow van, although this enables him to run errands for his elderly customers. 

Descending on the picturesque town of Reillanne in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, the pair create an open-air portrait gallery and 75 year-old bric-a-brac artist Pony-Soleil-Air-Sauvage-Nature comes to watch. With his parchment skin, hair in gnarled dreadlocks and snaggle teeth forming a cheeky smile, he takes Varda to his dwelling in the woods, which is full of pieces he has fashioned from items others have discarded. He claims to have inherited his warmth from his father and his coolness from his mother and, while he has to make do on a basic pension because he cheerfully admits that he hasn't worked a day in his life, he is essentially content. 

As they are watched by one of Varda's cats in her back garden, she opines that every new person she meets feels like the last one. JR tells her to stop playing the doomed granny and she ticks him off for being a cocky free spirit. But they are soon on the road again and calling in on goat breeder Patricia Mercier at Goult in the Vaucluse. Having visited a factory farmer who burns off the horns of his herd when they are kids to stop them fighting (and make them more docile when it comes to milking), Varda and JR are pleased to see that Patricia's animals are as nature intended. She maintains around 60 goats with one assistant and they do all their milking by hand. Similarly, she only uses natural ingredients in her cheese and Varda likes her all the more because she also keeps around a dozen cats. 

Local man Abdeslam Ould-Ja is amused by the giant close-up of a glaring goat on the wall of an outbuilding and vows to join the fight to outlaw de-horning. He suggests that farmers put rubber balls on the tips of the horns to stop them fighting and wonders whether using different colours could help them identify their animals. But, when Varda goes to take JR's picture in front of the paste-up, she gets cross with him for refusing to remove his sunglasses and they stomp off across a field in opposite directions. 

Varda recalls the black-and-white photograph she had taken in 1954 of a white goat that had fallen off a cliff and landed on the stony beach below. She had posed a naked man and a child in the background and revisits Saint-Aubin-sur-Mer, which JR also knows well from a motorcycling holiday. He had remembered a Second World War blockhouse that had tumbled off the cliff and landed on its side and he brings the team to work out how long the tides will give him  to cover it with an image of Guy Bourdin, a fashion photographer friend of Varda's who had posed naked for her in the ruins of an abandoned house. She suggests attaching this picture to an unfinished cinderblock house, as they are always looking for beautiful settings rather than evocative or authentic ones. 

JR teases her that it's a terrible idea, but feels so guilty at mocking her that he agrees to post Bourdin on the Nazi fortification. Varda takes him to her friend's old house and to the beach hut where she had positioned him for another picture. As the wind whips around them, JR strikes the same pose and Varda is clearly touched. While the crew begin the tricky task of pasting Bourdin's portrait with the tide getting nearer, Varda chats to the major of nearby Sainte-Marguerite, who reveals that the pillbox was deliberately pushed over the cliff in 1995. However, the fact that it landed on its side was a fortuitous accident and JR makes a wonderful job of arching Bourdin's image so that it looks as though he is slumbering in a giant military hammock. When they come to inspect their handiwork the next morning, however, they are saddened to see that it had been washed away by the tide. 

Hunkering down on the beach, JR declares that the elements make short work of the majority of his outdoor postings and Varda frets that Nature will sweep her away before she's had a chance to finish the film and take a photo of her co-director without his specs. While they're in Montjustin, they visit the graves of photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson and his second wife, Martine Franck. Varda is struck by what a tiny cemetery it is and she discloses that she's not afraid of death because she doesn't expect there to be anything on the other side. 

Footling on, they take a break in a café and JR reveals that he has always had a soft spot for old ladies. He takes Varda to meet his 100 year-old grandmother, who has no problem with him always wearing his glasses and hat. However, she isn't in a particularly talkative mood and, so, the pair decamp to the docks at Port du Havre in the Seine-Maritime. Varda has never been to Le Havre before and sings a song she had learnt as a child. JR introduces her to Christophe, David and Denis, who had worked with him on a project to put a pair of eyes on the side of a ship and who support his contention that the docks are like a village. 

Varda goes to meet their wives, Nathalie Maurouard, Morgane Riou and Sophie Riou, who drives trucks on the waterfront. The three blondes are dressed in black and sit in a nearby field in much the same way that Godard posed his trio of students in his pre-Dziga Vertov Group outing, Un Film comme les autres (1968). The women are proud of the solidarity between the dockworkers and they readily agree to pose for pictures that will be plastered across a stack of shipping containers on the wharf. 

As JR and Varda take a crane to inspect the work, they recall the last time they were in a lift together. They had gone to the Louvre to parody the sequence in Godard's Bande à part (1964), in which Anna Karina, Sami Frey and Claude Brasseur had charged through the galleries. Varda had plonked herself down in a wheelchair and allowed JR to push her through the Renaissance section, as she whispered the names of the artists they were skating past before they came to a halt in front of a couple of Giuseppe Archimboldo's. It's a gleeful digression, as is the dockside timelapse montage that concludes with Nathalie, Morgane and Sophie sitting (with varying degrees of confidence) in the open maw of the containers immediately beneath the faces of the container totems towering above the port. 

Varda hadn't been able to see clearly when the women had started flapping their arms like wings. So, JR takes extreme close-ups of her eyes and the soles of her feet so he can affix them to the side of tankers that will be pulled by trains across France. In this way, Varda can visit places she has never been and a railway worker in the marshalling yard thinks if's a sweet idea, even though he isn't entirely convinced that it's art. In order to show her gratitude, Varda bundles JR on to a train for Switzerland. En route, she plays him a clip from Les Fiancés du pont Mac Donald, which she made with Godard and Karina in 1961 and used as the film-within-the-film in Cleo From 5 to 7. He is excited to be going to meet one of his heroes. But Varda warns him that Godard can be unpredictable and that she's not seen him for a few years, even though he was once very close to her and film-maker husband, Jacques Demy. 

On arriving in Rolle, they stop at a café for some herbal tea before their 9.30am rendezvous. But there's no sign of Godard, who has written a cryptic message on the window that reminds Varda of the note he had sent her when Demy died. Unsure whether he is being cruel or touchingly apologetic, Varda is clearly shaken by his choice of words and she just about holds back the tears before calling Godard a `dirty rat' for letting her down. She scrawls a note of her own on the glass cursing him for his inhospitableness. Yet, she also appends a little heart and leaves a packet of his favourite brioches on the door handle.

They sit by Lake Geneva and JR wonders whether Godard was pranking her by challenging the narrative structure of her film. Varda is unsure, but certainly didn't appreciate the reference to her lost spouse and she smiles when JR tries to cheer her up by removing his shades. Amusingly, Varda blurs the shot to approximate her vision and they turn to gaze at the water, with Varda perhaps reflecting that the subtitle of his 1961 vignette was Méfiez-vous des lunettes noires, which translates as `Beware of the Dark Glasses'. 

If the pain wasn't so palpable, one might almost suspect that Varda had set up the climactic Godard no show, as this quirky Situationist road movie is strewn with references to the man, his films and his unpredictable ways. There seems little doubt that Varda is partly drawn to JR because he reminds her of her fickle, but phenomenally talented friend. But the personal politics surrounding this unhappy ending shouldn't be allowed to cloud the fact that this is a celebration of the best aspects of human nature. That said, it shouldn't be forgotten that Varda and JR barely scratch the surface of the social issues their raise on their tour and nor should it be overlooked that the vast majority of the faces that beam for the camera before being plastered on buildings in what are relatively cosy burghs are white. 

This evidently says more about the kind of people who would come forward to participate in such a joyous experiment than any selection policies. Varda has never been anything less than conclusive in her work and JR's choice of subject matter suggests likewise. But the social make-up of the sitters feels scarcely representative of Emmanuel Macron's France (or Marine Le Pen's for that matter) and suggests that this affectionate and occasionally whimsical odyssey doesn't have quite the same critical edge as Raymond Depardon's not entirely dissimilar documentary, Journal de France (2012), 

It might strike some that the notion of forgotten people seems a tad démodé in the age of instant imagery. But just as items are slipping through the holes in Varda's memory, so countless inhabitants of La France périphérique are at risk of falling between the cracks in an increasingly divided country. As she demonstrated with The Gleaners and I, Varda is such a compassionate and inquisitive humanist that she would strive to ensure that no one gets left behind. But it's harder to fathom JR's political stance from this elusive appearance, as the nature of the project dictates that the onetime graffiti artist spends more time problem solving with his team than he does communing with the common folk. Yet, while Varda provides the film's driving heartbeat in returning to features for the first time since The Beaches of Agnès (2008), JR proves a consistently empathetic companion and a more than willing apprentice. Few would complain if they felt the need to reunite.

Also now in his late 80s, Frederick Wiseman remains the finest exponent of Direct Cinema, the purely observational style of documentary making that resists the cinéma vérité temptation to tinker with reality. In particular, he excels at the institutional profile and, in a career stretching over five decades, he has considered bodies involved in healthcare (Titicut Follies, 1967 & Hospital, 1970), education (High School, 1968 & At Berkeley, 2013), the law (Law and Order, 1969 & Juvenile Court, 1973), the military (Basic Training, 1971 & Missile, 1988), leisure (Zoo, 1983 & Boxing Gym, 2010), the arts (La Danse, 2009 & National Gallery, 2014), public policy (Public Housing, 1997 & State Legislature, 2006) and social issues (Domestic Violence, 2001 & In Jackson Heights, 2015). But Wiseman's 41st feature, Ex Libris: The New York Public Library, is not only one of his most fascinating, but it also reminds audiences of the vital role that libraries still have to play in communities that have been fragmented by socio-economic decline and government cutbacks. 

In typical Wiseman fashion, he plunges straight into an ongoing situation, as geneticist Richard Dawkins plugs his Foundation for Reason and Science and calls for America's non-religious lobby to be more vocal in shaping the country's direction. He is feted by the interviewer for the lyricism of his writing and draws applause for mocking Creationism and marvelling at the complexity of the universe, single cells and the human brain. Amusingly, Wiseman follows this by cutting to the telephone help desk, where one operator is having to explain to a caller that a unicorn is an entirely mythical creature. Elsewhere, a librarian helps a woman researching her family history, while readers browse and tourists take snapshots. 

In an anteroom, library president Anthony W. Marx addresses a meeting about public-private funding and the digitisation of the collection, as access to information is key to the future of the institution and the city. Computers are certainly central to the ensuing montage, as Wiseman notes the different uses to which New Yorkers put the library's machines. But he's keen to move away from the main building behind the Carrère and Hastings façade on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street to see as many of the 88 satellites located across the Five Boroughs. Thus, he pops into the Jerome Park branch, where a number of mostly black female teachers are using books and computers to encourage youngsters from various ethnic backgrounds to improve their literacy and numeracy. Once again, Wiseman makes a telling cross-cut, when he returns to the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building in Central Manhattan to sit in on an unnamed African-American historian examining the links between monarchy, Islam and slavery. 

As night falls, we move to the Bruno Walter Auditorium at the Lincoln Center for a piano recital by Carolyn Enger. But we are quickly whisked off to the Bronx Library Center for a careers fair, with officers from the New York Fire Department, the US Border Patrol and the US Army giving recruitment talks. Then, it's back to Tony Marx and Chief Library Officer Mary Lee Kennedy leading a meeting about the funding and sustainability of educational programmes. Montages of people using microfiches and computers are separated by a lengthy introduction to the picture archive and its history, as a group of drama students search for images to help them bring authenticity to a scene. This is followed by a lively talk by historian Ted Merwin about the role that Jewish delicatessens played in the combating of anti-Semitism in New York in the mid-20th century (`Send a Salami to Your Boy in the Army'), while Elvis Costello thoughtfully recalls his musician father, Ross McManus, singing `If I Had a Hammer' and his changing attitude to the anti-Thatcher song `Tramp the Dirt Down'. 

Back in the meeting room, Marx and Kennedy discuss how the library can help the underprivileged with no computer access and how they can keep up with rapidly changing technologies. However, we return to the public spaces to see African-American poet Yusef Komunyakaa exploring politics and language before heading into Chinatown for a senior citizen computer class. We also see a Braille reading session and a talk on housing for those with a disability en route to a meeting about a building project at the Mid-Manhattan Library and plans it has for serving its constituents in the future. Following a performance by the woodwind quartet, Double Entendre, in the Bronx (in front of a small audience that conveys the broad mix of people such places have to cater for), we move to the Schomburg Center for an exhibition of black art and the New York Library for the Performing Artists, where street poet Miles Hodges has to compete with a crying baby while delivering a piece about being a modern man. 

Wiseman eavesdrops on another committee meeting with Kennedy exploring future social projects before we join a book club debating the merits of Gabriel García Marquez's Love in a Time of Cholera. He also happens upon a gripping demonstration by Candace Broecker Penn of signing for deaf theatregoers at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center prior to appointments at the archive photographic studio and the book stacks, where conveyor belts shuttle books and DVDs around a large warehouse for sorting and dispatch. Then, it's on to the Parkchester branch with Kennedy for a team meeting about how to enthuse teenagers attending after-school clubs and support parents trying to help their children with their homework. 

The scene shifts to Harlem and the George Bruce Branch, where Hot Spot modems are being loaned to ticket holders without online access. We also see a senior exercise class before heading to Westchester for a coding workshop for budding adolescent inventors and hear Khalil Gibran Muhammad give a speech at a candlelit celebration of the 90th anniversary of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Wittily, Wiseman cuts from this chic dinner to a mother-and-toddlers group singing `Old MacDonald Had a Farm'. But the tone becomes more serious, as he joins Marx and Kennedy at a meeting pondering the problem of homeless patrons using library premises for shelter and sleep. 

He returns to hallowed halls to show academics researching in the primary sources archive and lingers during an introduction to the print collection before sitting in on a meeting on funding and community engagement. Following a peak at a recording session for the talking book service, Wiseman makes for Jefferson Market, where he people watches in the reading room. Thence, he joins a history seminar contemplating the views of George Fitzhugh, Abraham Lincoln and Karl Marx before viewing a Halloween procession as it passes the Schwarzman Building. He also watches Patti Smith promoting her autobiography  

Following a brief visit to a meeting tackling maintenance issues, Marx and Kennedy join Chief Operating Officer Iris Weinshall for a discussion on e-book backlogs, dealing with publishers and the future of hard copy collections. We then see tables being laid for a function and listen to Kwame Anthony Appiah appraising the achievement of slave poet Phillis Wheatley and Ta-Nihisi Coates challenging preconceptions surrounding `black-on-black' crime. Christmas coincides with the `I Am in the Public Eye' photo exhibition, as Weinshall looks back on the year and focuses minds on what things need to be done in the months ahead. 

Wiseman then accompanies Khalil Muhammad to Macomb's Bridge branch in Harlem to explore ways the library can welcome African-Americans unsure of its facilities and suspicious of its motives. But he ends Downtown, as British artist and author Edmund de Waal lauds his hero, Primo Levi, in analysing the importance of paintings, objects and buildings in firing the active imagination and prompting people to wonder how things came into being.  

Photographed by John Davey with a precise eye for civic architectural contrast and a sense of discretion that still enables Wiseman to get to the heart of any situation, this is an endlessly revealing and unashamedly affectionate snapshot of the NYPL during the autumn of 2015. Serving as his own sound recordist and editor, Wiseman is evidently grateful for the existence of a body that is so committed to touching the lives of every single New Yorker, whether they want to borrow a book, play with robots, listen and learn, or doze in the warm. Consequently, he spends a good deal of time with the management team and the librarians, curators and lecturers who recognise the value of their service in an age of press mistrust and social media mendacity and are forever looking for ways to improve it and tailor it to the 18 patrons who cross their thresholds each year. 

In some ways, the stellar speaker meetings prove something of a distraction from the grassroots work, as staff driven by Andrew Carnegie's vow to bring knowledge to the masses strive to keep up to date with the digital equipment that many of their regulars find more enticing and useful than books. But it's the welcoming inclusivity of the programmes (some 55,000 each year and most are free) that proves most striking, as young and old across the class and racial divides find something that intrigues them. Unfortunately, it's clearly harder to raise funds for these neighbourhood initiatives than it is to sustain the likes of the Berg Collection of Manuscripts, the Rose Reading Room and the Bill Blass Catalog Room. Thus, Wiseman allows Marx, Kennedy and Weinshall to make frequent references to budgets and cutbacks, as one only has to look around our own county to see what happens to libraries when public purse strings are tightened. 

Continuing the octogenarian theme, Sir Ian McKellen entered his eightieth year on 25 May and Joe Stephenson celebrated the landmark with McKellen: Playing the Part, a documentary chronicle of a 57-year career that follows hard on the heels of Maggie Smith, Judi Dench, Eileen Atkins and Joan Plowright looking back on their own past deeds in Roger Michell's Nothing Like a Dame. At times feeling like a living obituary, this blend of reminiscence and reconstruction draws anecdotes from a 14-hour interview that saw McKellen being artfully lit by Eben Bolter while sitting in a red library chair. But, while the monochrome flashbacks can occasionally feel a little arch and Peter Gabriel's score infuriatingly overdoes the triumphalism, the archive material is adroitly employed to celebrate McKellen's achievements, while also scrupulously avoiding any mention of his private life. 

Reflecting on his childhood in Wigan, McKellen avers that he realised early on that living meant playing variations on oneself in order to fit it. He changed his accent at school and enjoyed dressing up as Charlie Chaplin and Sir Thomas Beacham. On one occasion, his mother helped him to put on his clothes back to front so that he gauge people's reaction. But the young McKellen (played in dumbshow by Milo Parker) also learned how to observe, whether watching stallholders making their pitches at the weekend marker or George VI and Queen Elizabeth paying a meticulously choreographed visit. He also had his first inklings about his sexuality when he encountered the hunks who worked on the funfair that used to take over the town square. Yet, even though he got an erection at nine watching Ivor Novello perform at the local theatre, McKellen channelled his urges into acting and admits now that his suppression of his instincts was probably unhealthy. 

When the family moved to Bolton when he was 12, McKellen started frequenting its three theatres and talked his way backstage to meet the nomadic players who made light of their tough existence to entertain in godforsaken places. Inspired by them, he began putting on plays of his own and he was always grateful that his mother blessed his ambitions before she succumbed to breast cancer. Despite failing the entrance exam, McKellen landed an exhibition at St Catharine's College, Cambridge after performing a speech from Henry V during an interview with a crusty don and worked hard to lose his Lancastrian accent while acting in 23 plays in three years, alongside the likes of Derek Jacobi, Corin Redgrave, Trevor Nunn and Michael Burrell. But it was a national review of his performance as Justice Shallow in Henry IV, Part Two that persuaded him to become a professional actor. 

Away from his father and stepmother, McKellen felt free to explore his homosexuality (at a time when it was still illegal) and fell in love for the first time with an American actor Curt Dawson. He spread his wings by working in rep in Ipswich and learned valuable lessons in how to act without fear while playing Aufidius in Tyrone Guthrie's production of Coriolanus at the Nottingham Playhouse. Shortly after his father had attended the first night party, he was killed in a car accident and McKellen remembers having to perform that night in a play with a coffin on the stage. As we see the twentysomething actor (Scott Chambers) strutting his stuff before the footlights, McKellen muses on the need to be fresh and alert to revive the spirits of patrons who have spent the day working and are entitled to nothing but one's best. 

Having come close to playing Noël Coward in Robert Wise's Star! (1968) and missed out on co-starring with Gregory Peck when snow caused the cancellation of David Miller's The Bells of Hell Go Ting-a-ling-a-ling (1966), McKellen decided against setting great store by films. Instead, he joined Maggie Smith and Albert Finney in Laurence Olivier's Much Ado About Nothing at the Old Vic. However, he realised competition within the National Theatre Company was stiff and he accepted a 1969 touring package of Richard II and Edward II that thrust him into the front rank of up-and-coming actors. 

We see TV footage of these productions and a profile of the rising star, as McKellen muses on the fact that he dwells in a world of passing strangers, as he would always rather play to packed houses in the provinces than go stale in the West End's tourist theatres. Consequently, he established the Actors Company with Edward Petherbridge in order to select plays and directors rather than keep having to be cast and follow ideas and orders without much input. He felt stardom was something of a burden, especially when one young fan slit her wrists in his presence. But this made him more aware of the power he had over audiences and the impact he could make on them with his performances. 

During a 1976 production of Macbeth with Judi Dench at The Other Place in Stratford, McKellen realised he preferred intimate venues and being able to make a direct connection with the spectators. But such small-scale ventures also prepared him for film and television and he concedes that he is unimpressed by many of his earliest screen roles, as he had yet to learn how to downsize for the camera. They also showed him how to have fun on stage without the audience knowing, as he describes how Dench had enlivened one performance by making each member of the cast hide a red sticker about their person and spend the play spotting them. 

Another performer who always made him laugh was Sean Mathias, but McKellen stops short of discussing their romance. He does, however, reveal that Mathias accompanied him to New York, where he saw his name in lights for the first time and won a Tony as Salieri in Amadeus in 1981. Yet their relationship remained secret, as McKellen didn't come out until he was 49 and looks back with some embarrassment that his press utterances while headlining Bent (1979) were about civil rights and not the gay struggle. However, a combination of the AIDS crisis and Clause 28 saw him emerge as an activist and he joined forces with Michael Cashman in setting up Stonewall. He directed The Equality Show and debated gay rights with Tory grandee Ivan Lawrence with David Frost. 

Although he had convinced himself that movies didn't matter, McKellen came to realise that a crew was there to help him perform while making Richard Loncraine's Richard III (1996) and his experiences on that picture as writer and producer gave him a new respect for cinema. He suggests that Magneto from the X-Men franchise and Gandalf from The Lord of the Rings series were also show-offs. although he draws an interesting comparison between the former and Malcolm X, as he was more militant in his defence of the mutants than Professor Xavier's Martin Luther King. He enjoyed making the Tolkien films, as he liked being on the Middle Earth sets and lapping up the spectacular scenery around New Zealand. But he did have a meltdown after a long day of green-screening and cursed that this was not why he became an actor. 

He is more proud of playing gay director James Whale in Bill Condon's Gods and Monsters (1998), which earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Actor, although the found round of interviews that followed a trial. Yet it wasn't until he played a caricatured version of himself opposite Ricky Gervais in Extras (2006) that he recognised that he also adopted different personae whenever he was interviewed. He admits to editorialising himself during these conversations and is aware that he has often come across as pompous or patronising in advocating his political causes and arch in promoting his films. 

As he grows older, McKellen becomes increasingly preoccupied by death and reveals that he once spent a pleasant evening arranging his funeral and memorial service. He remembers sobbing at the end of his run of Waiting for Godot (2009), as he feared he might never go on stage again. As he has never had a family, he has always been able to invest all his energies in acting and he muses on the extent that this has made him the actor he is. But he feels protective towards the younger generation and visits schools to share his experiences of being a gay teenager. While he may not be an expert in anything other than acting, he has come to realise he is a communicator like the teachers and preachers in his family and that his purpose is less to entertain than to help make the world a better place. 

Saying much, but actually revealing very little about himself or his art, McKellen plays this particular role with great skill and self-awareness. He knows what he doesn't want to reveal (maybe the undisclosed material remains buried in the unused 12 and a half hours of the interview) and gives the snippets he is willing to share sufficient significance to hold the audience captive. This is, therefore, a splendid display of smoke and mirrors that touches on a few career highlights and offers the odd insight into acting and being human, while keeping the really personal stuff closely under wraps. 

One suspects that rights issues might have limited the number of clips from McKellen's imposing filmography, but he seems averse to discussing individual productions outside X-Men and Lord of the Rings. He also says next to nothing about the collaborative nature of acting and how he builds a rapport with his co-stars to best serve his character. Similarly, he avoids the subject of being directed or how he responds to criticism. But, in favouring the pensée over the anecdote, McKellen gives the impression that he is delving beneath the surface and extemporising with admirable honesty. Yet if this film teaches us anything, it's that he prepares thoroughly for each role and nothing has been left to chance in this guarded, if undeniably genial and rewarding portrait. He may avoid overt luvviness, but Ian McKellen is always on and evidently revels in playing this part of a lifetime.

Wim Wenders had long planned to make a documentary about the German choreographer Pina Bausch, but she died in June 2009, just two days before their collaboration could commence. Fortunately, he decided to continue the project regardless and focus less on Bausch's methodology than on the works she devised and the impact that she had on the ensemble at her Tanztheater Wuppertal. The result was Pina (2011), which was being hailed as one of the first arthouse films to make creatively kinetic use of 3-D. However, viewers will have to be content with the flat version on disc. 

Judging by the inertia and pretentiousness of the talking-head recollections of the Tanztheater's principal performers, it's perhaps no great shame that Wenders was unable to produce his cherished profile. In fact, this task had already been admirably performed by Klaus Wildenhahn's What Are Pina Bausch and Her Dancers Doing in Wuppertal?, Chantal Akerman's One Day, Pina Asked For.. (both 1983), Lilo Mangelsdorff's Ladies and Gentlemen Over 65 (2002) and Anne Linsel's Dancing Dreams (2010). Thus, Wenders was much better off being forced to concentrate on the dance itself and the challenge of using three-dimensionality to capture the grace, dynamism and uniqueness of Bausch's choreography. 

Both Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly would have approved of Wenders's positioning and movement of Hélène Louvart's camera, as he not only shoots the dancers (for the most part) in full figure, but he also makes potent use of space and cutting on action to capture both the meticulous blocking of the dances and their distinctive vivacity. Consequently, even in 2-D, it's possible to appreciate the conceptual brilliance of Bausch's choreography and Wenders's mastery of stereoscopy and its ability to immerse the viewer in the action. However, it might have increased this sense of inclusivity had Wenders identified the pieces for non-aficionados. 

The opening interpretation of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring is not particularly inspired. But its energy contrasts with the more measuredly mesmerising movements contained in the dance-hall flirtation, Kontakthof, the dramatic restaurant sextet, Café Müller, the quirky human nature study Arien (complete with giant plastic hippo), and the audaciously splashy aquatic reverie, Vollmond. Wenders follows Bausch in utilising both teenage and veteran casts for Kontakthof, which explores the preening pressures of trying to make an impression of members of the opposite sex across the dance floor. And this generational mix is also employed in a gesticulatory procession that meanders beyond the proscenium and out in to ridge of a nearby quarry to the accompaniment of Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five's rendition of `West End Blues'. 

Indeed, Wenders shrewdly sets a number of set-pieces outdoors to exploit such eye-catching backdrops as the Wuppertal Schwebebahn monorail, an old factory, some woodland and a public swimming pool. But, even though this is a tribute and not a treatise, the refusal to name the talking-heads or contextualise their reminiscences is frustrating and reinforces the rather supercilious air that Wenders had so scrupulously avoided in such previous actuality outings as Lightning Over Water (1980), Notebooks on Cities and Clothes (1990) and Buena Vista Social Club (1999). 

Finally, this week, Stephen Nomura Schible's Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda is a classic example of the maker and subject of a documentary being on such different wavelengths that the resulting portrait is both distorted and wasteful. Made over five of the most traumatic years in Japanese musician Ryuichi Sakamoto's life, this should have been a moving and revealing dissertation on how art emerges from existence. But, unlike Joe Stephenson in McKellen: Playing the Part, Schible can't resist stage-managing episodes that seem entirely at odds with Sakamoto's approach to both his music and his beliefs. 

In the pre-title sequence, Sakamoto visits a school in Miyagi to play the corpse of a `drowned' piano that had survived the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. He also dons a hazmat suit to examine the after effects of the disaster at the Fukushima power plant before speaking at a rally in Tokyo opposing the resumption of Japan's nuclear programme and joining a cellist and violinist at Rikuzentakata Daiichi Junior High School to perform the theme from Nagisa Oshima's Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence (1983). 

With his round tortoiseshell glasses ad mop of silver grey hair, Sakamoto confides to the camera that he was badly shaken by the 2014 of Stage 3 throat cancer and he admits that it was difficult to stop working in order to concentrate on his treatment. However, when Alejandro González Iñárritu invited him to compose the score for The Revenant (2015), he was unable to resist and concedes that he drove himself to his limits in order to meet the deadline. A scene from the film shows how worthwhile the effort had been, as Sakamoto explains that he needs to keep his mouth scrupulously clean because his immune system has been weakened and he takes several tablets after finishing a simple supper of meticulously cut fruit. 

This brush with mortality made Sakamoto aware of the need to make every minute count and he hopes to continue making meaningful music. Inspired by the use of Bach's organ chorales in Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris (1972), he returned to work on async, the album he had set aside in order to battle his illness. Eager to incorporate the sounds of nature in the mix, Sakamoto ventures into the woods with his phone and records birdsong, his footsteps in the dry leaves and the noises he makes with the objects he finds beside an abandoned dwelling. Back in his studio, he blends them into his soundscape and is pleased with the results. 

Another piece sounds very 1980s and Schible flashes back to show Sakamoto playing `Tong Poo' live with Yellow Magic Orchestra in 1979 and (wearing some Bowiesque eye make-up) discussing his attitudes to technology in a TV slot from 1984. Back in the present, he wishes to conduct an experiment by composing music for a film that doesn't exist and seeks inspiration in Tarkovsky's book of Polaroids, Instant Light. He also revisits Solaris to assess the way in which the sound of water is used and attempts to recreate it during a downpour. But the effect proves elusive, even when putting a bucket on his head. 

Over the scene from Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence in which Sakamoto's soldier is kissed on the cheeks by Bowie's POW, he explains how brash he had been to ask Oshima to let him write the score. But the experience stood him in good stead when producer Jeremy Thomas asked him to compose a short piece on location in China for a scene in Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor (1987). Despite nailing the assignment, Sakamoto was taken aback when Thomas called him to write the score and he looks back with amazement that he produced much of the Oscar-winning material in a week. 

Schible includes footage of Sakamoto conducting the orchestra in Number Two Studio at Abbey Road to cross-cut between the famous staircase up to the control room in which George Martin had overseen The Beatles's recording sessions and Sakamoto descending the stairs to his home studio to play a cymbal with a bow. Seated at his piano, he muses about sounds that could reverberate forever and explains that the idea hails from Paul Bowles's cameo in Bertolucci's The Sheltering Sky (1990), in which he talks about the limited nature of time. He hopes to combine the music with recordings of the speech in different languages and smiles into the camera, as he does while relating an anecdote about Bertolucci using the efficiency of Ennio Morricone to goad Sakamoto into rewriting a passage of music he was about to record with a full orchestra. 

As Bach used to compose chorales to reflect his dismay at the state of the world, Sakamoto began to feel the need to explore his concerns about environmental issues in 1992. Rather pompously, he suggests that artists and musicians are like canaries in a coal mine, as they sense danger before mere mortals. But there's undeniable power in `Oppenheimer's Aria' from LIFE (1999) and Schible lingers on archive footage of a multi-screen performance to contextualise Sakamoto's admission that he admires the way in which Nature has re-tuned the `drowned' piano that humanity had taken such pains to fashion using the industrial know-how that had taken generations to refine. It dismays him that our species has devised the means of its own destruction, but he holds out hope that it won't be used. 

Sakamoto had been in New York on 9/11 and had noticed in the photographs he had taken of the atrocity how birds were flying away from the Twin Towers. After a few days, he heard a busker playing `Yesterday' and realised that no one had played any music in the city since the attack. A need to reflect the distances creating tensions between peoples prompted him to compose `Chasm' (2004) in reaction to the US-led invasion of Iraq. While contemplating humankind's tendency towards violence, Sakamoto felt compelled to trace our evolution from the earliest known settlements around Lake Turkana in Kenya. His experience led to him incorporating sounds recorded in a humble settlement into `Only Love Can Conquer Hate' (2004) and he wishes he could hear the speech and rhythmic patterns of the first humans in order appreciated how various musical styles had developed. 

In 2008, Sakamoto headed to the Arctic Circle and recorded pre-industrial ice melting and declares it to be the purest sound he has ever heard. This found its way into `Glacier' (2009). Six years on, he wanders along the beach beside the contaminated zone in Fukushima and returns to work on his chorale, `Solari' (2017). Back in his studio, Sakamoto plays Bach on his Steinway. But it's too cold to get his fingers moving. But he smiles as he informs Schible that he intends playing every day from now on, as he feels healthy once more. 

This optimistic note ends proceedings on an upswing. But this is a patchy profile that says as much about what Sakamoto doesn't want to discuss as much as it does about his music and his methodology. The absence of any biographical information will frustrate those who haven't slavishly followed Sakamoto's career, but it's the lack of a coherent structure that makes this such a frustrating exercise. Given the precision of Sakamoto's output and the access that Schible appears to have had, this scattershot assemblage feels capricious in the extreme and more than a little pretentious. Indeed, it resembles Lorna Tucker's struggle to master her material in Westwood: Punk, Icon, Activist - although the 65 year-old Sakamoto appears to be a much more genial, accommodating and candid subject than the prickly Vivienne Westwood. 

Editor Hisayo Kushida makes a tidy job of interweaving images of Sakamoto working with clips from his live performances and the films he has scored. Yet, there's an artificiality to the intimacy that Schible seeks to create, with the moment in which Sakamoto feigns surprise on the camera crew sneaking up on him while he is playing feeling particularly bogus. Indeed, he forever seems to be performing, even though there's no doubting the sincerity of his political views or his artistic intentions. The problem lies in Schible's lacklustre technique and his shortcomings (and seeming lack of curiosity) as an investigative documentarist.