Parky at the Pictures (DVD 31/1/2019)

The brainchild of Yosef Yekutieli, the first Maccabiah Games were held in Tel Aviv in 1932. Their purpose was to give Jewish athletes an arena in which to compete at a time when a wave of anti-Semitism meant that they were increasingly being excluded and persecuted, As a publicity stunt, 11 motorcyclists were sent across Europe in 1930 to recruit sportsmen and women from a range of disciplines and some 400 competitors from 18 countries lined up at the Maccabiah Stadium in March 1932. Despite the objections of the  British Mandatory government then ruling Palestine, a second edition was held in April 1935. But a third Maccabiah was postponed in the spring of 1938, as the authorities feared an exodus of illegal immigrants and both the Shoah and the foundation of the State of Israel had taken place by the times the Games were eventually staged in 1950.

As narrator Jason Isaacs reveals, a group of 11 bikers set out to carry the Maccabiah torch to Berlin for the 2015 Games in tribute to the trailblazers of 1932. Among them was architect Gal Marom, whose grandfather, Solomon, had made the original ride to summon the dispersed tribes. Also saddling up are 78 year-old Holocaust survivor Yoram Maron and his son, Dan, a press photographer who is keen to learn more about his father's experiences. 

Isaacs explains that the venue is of huge significance, as the Olympicstadion hosted the Games that Adolf Hitler had used to promote his Aryan ideals. He had even revived the torch procession to symbolise the transfer of legitimacy from Mount Olympus to the Third Reich. Moreover, he had tried to prevent any Jewish athletes from competing and many nations had sought to appease the Nazis by excluding them from their teams. The United States, for example, dropped Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller from the 4x100m relay quartet - although they replaced them with Jesse Owens and Ralph Metcalfe, who were both African-American and had won the gold and silver medals in the 100m final.

In recreating the 1930 odyssey, the Maccabiah XI quickly discover that flying the Israeli flag on Greek soil attracts adverse attention. However, art dealer Kobi Samuel is determined to visit Thessaloniki, which had been home to his grandmother, Angel Margo, before she was dispatched to Birkenau to form part of a road gang. She briefly recalls the exhausting nature of the work before we join Samuel in a cattle car in a siding at the old station, where the heat is so intense that fellow rider Gili Shem Tov (whose grandfather was Israeli politician Victor Shem Tov) has to leave. In all, 45,000 Jews entrained from these platforms between 4 March and 2 August 1943. Yet, while Margo was among the 2000 Thessalonians to survive the war, she was detained by the British when she attempted to relocate to Palestine and spent a prolonged period in a displacement camp in Cyprus that provided chilling reminders of her recent experiences in Auschwitz. 

Heading north, the group reaches the Bulgarian town of Samokov, where Victor Shem Tov had been born. She visits the ruins of the synagogue, which is the only reminder of the once-thriving Jewish community, and recalls how Kiril, the local Orthodox bishop, had intervened to prevent the Jews from being deported in March 1943. However, the country still sent 48,000 people to the death camps and, as the bikers cross into Romania, Isaacs reaffirms that the Germans were not alone in persecuting the Jews in this period.  

In the Central Synagogue in Bucharest, Marco Katz describes how his grandfather and uncle were dragged into the streets and tortured by Legionnaires of the Iron Guard. The convoy visits the cells at Jilava Fort No.13 before Katz takes them to the Jilava Forest, where his Uncle Isidore was stripped naked and shot in the head. He also reveals that 13 others were taken to an abattoir and suspended from hooks with the words `kosher meat' written on their bodies. 

Surgeon Yaron Munz also wants to see the places where his parents once lived. They survived the Holocaust, but refuse to discuss their experiences and he tells Katz how his grandfather was only spared execution by an earthquake that destroyed the Iron Guard barracks where he was being held. A caption notes that over 400,000 Romanian and Ukrainian Jews were murdered on the orders of dictator Ion Antonescu between 1941-43. 

Such was the international awareness of Hitler's Jewish policies that the Évian Conference was convened in July 1938 at the suggestion of American president. Franklin D. Roosevelt. Delegates from 32 countries attended, but they failed to agree a strategy to deal with those seeking sanctuary and the bikers are given a stark reminder of how Europe still struggles to deal with the issue of migration when they witness clashes between the police and Syrian refugees on the Serbian border with Hungary. 

The Nuremberg Laws restricting Jewish rights were promulgated while the 1935 Maccabiah bikers were riding and Isaacs mentions how they were later expanded to include homosexuals, travellers and the disabled. Keen to make the younger generation aware of what their forebears had endured, the 2015 riders visit a Jewish summer camp in Hungary and receive an enthusiastic welcome. Among them is Hila Fenlon, a farmer whose Lithuanian grandmother had met the original bikers before moving to Palestine to escape the growing tensions in her homeland. None of her relations survived the massacre that followed and Fenlon empathises with those seeking a fresh start after fleeing poverty and warfare.

Arriving in Budapest, Alexander Rosenkranz and his daughter Talia make Shoes Memorial on the banks of the River Danube, where between 15-20,000 Jews and Romanis were killed by members of the Arrow Cross between 1944-45. Rosenkranz's mother had been rounded up and was sitting in a truck waiting to be shot when a German officer was so taken by her beauty that he reprieved her and sent her home. She would later be sent to a labour camp (from which she escaped) and a caption informs us that 437,402 Jews were deported from Hungary to Auschwitz-Birkenau during a 33-day period in 1944.

Requiring a police escort to the main synagogue, the bikers plan their detour from the 1930 route to visit Auschwitz. They meet up with Yoram Maron and fellow survivor Joe Gottdenker at a nearby hotel and discuss how emotional it feels to be so close to such a symbol of evil. Maron remembers arriving in a cattle car and his mother throwing him out to safety after another man had been crushed under the wheels. They had evaded Gestapo machine-gun fire and made their way to Ukraine, where they had spent a month hiding in the forest before reaching the relative safety of the ghetto. He breaks down, as he recalls his mother (who had saved 24 lives) saying goodbye for the last time, as she went along a sewage pipe to search for food. 

When they tour the camp the next day, Maron wonders whether he has made a mistake in bottling up his emotions for 70 yeas, as he states that the crime he witnessed are still vivid in his mind. Samuel tries to call Margo, but she's asleep. However, a cutaway shows her reliving the moment her work detail marched through the woods without the Germans making any attempt to stop them and they were greeted by some Russians in an autobus. 

Moving on to Sandomierz, Gottdenker explains how his mother had entrusted him to a Polish couple who had raised him as their own until she could come back and claim him. He wonders whether he would have the courage to take the same risk and is deeply grateful to them for their sacrifice (although, even though we see a photograph, he doesn't mention their names). Footage shows people being forced into the Warsaw Ghetto before a caption reveals that 300,000 residents were dispatched to the Treblinka extermination camp in the summer of 1942. A small band of those who remained attempted an uprising in January 1943, only for the ghetto to be razed to the ground and its inhabitants butchered. 

While this was going on, British and American delegates met in Bermuda in April 1943 to discuss what to do about the Jews Question at the end of the war. They reached no conclusions and didn't even issue a public condemnation of what they knew to be happening in Occupied Europe. The bikers light the Maccabiah flame at the memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto before motoring on to Lodz, where they visit the ghetto buildings in which inmates had produced goods for the Nazi war effort. They are moved by a long tunnel whose walls bear lists with the names of those who had perished having been crossed out in red ink. 

Crossing into the Czech Republic, the bikers reach Terezin, where the Germans had built the ghetto-cum-camp known as Theresienstadt. Among the occupants were 500 Danish Jews and, in 1943, when the Red Cross had requested access to them, the Nazis turned their visit to this `model' institution into a propaganda triumph by filming the occasion and its centrepiece football match in front of a cheering crowd. Within weeks, however, the majority of those who had been captured by Kurt Gerron's camera were dead. Captions note that of the 140,000 Jews who were held in the camp, 33,430 were murdered within its fences, while another 87,000 were transported to the death camps.

After 23 days and 2783 miles, the convoy reaches Berlin and rides to the Brandenburg Gate along roads that had once staged Nazi rallies. Dan Maron acknowledges his father as a hero for having come through so much and they ride into the Olympiastadion the next day with enormous pride. They pass the torch to Anne Stoller (the cousin of Sam Stoller), who hands it to Marty Glickman's daughter, Nancy, who lights the cauldron wearing her father's 1936 Team USA vest. 

This is a striking moment at the end of an often harrowing journey. But, as London-based journalist Caroline Lurie makes an appearance during the credit sequence to explain why she made the film, one feels torn between admiration and frustration. The concept is strong and Lurie rightly uses the expedition to draw parallels between the treatment of the Jews in the Holocaust era with that of the modern migrants who are also detained in camps with barbed wire fences, as right-leaning nationalist governments refuse to let them cross their borders. However, Lurie has a tendency to rush things, with the result that the full horror of some of the stories is lost and the audience is denied an opportunity to contemplate what they have learned before being whisked off to another scene of tragedy. 

She also presumes a good deal of pre-knowledge and doesn't always label sites that need identifying, such as the Shoe Memorial in Pest. It might also have been worth including any instances of overt hostility to the bikers and mentioning the fact that the Elie Wiesel lines read by newscaster Larry King come from the much-vandalised Holocaust memorial in Athens, as such desecration flies in the face of their sentiments about honouring the dead and saving them from `dying again, in oblivion'. 

Nevertheless, this is an informative and doughtily accusatory film that leaves one needing to know more about the Évian and Bermuda conferences (it really is time someone produced a Holocaust chronicle along the lines of The World At War). The footage is cogently edited by Andrew Quigley and Julian Rodd, while cinematographer Eyal Ben Yaish capably conveys the air of desolation that hovers over so many of the places en route. However, Michael Stevens's emotive score often feels intrusive at times when ambient silence might have been more effective.

In the 2005 `PTV' episode of Family Guy, Osama bin Laden is shown fluffing his lines while making a video message to the West. He fools around with a rubber chicken and dons a pair of outsize sunglasses while bantering with his cohorts behind the camera. At one point, he jokes that an unseen jihadist making him corpse had skipped a suicide bombing mission because he had a note from his doctor. The fun stops when Stewie Griffin appears to confound the terrorist cell and no one will ever be able to watch this amusing sequence in the same light again after seeing James Hacker's documentary, Path of Blood. 

Already respected for items like Britain's First Suicide Bombers (2006), Hacker expands on ideas explored in Path of Blood: The Story of Al Qaeda's War on the House of Saud (which he co-wrote with Thomas Small) by drawing on over 500 hours of footage captured from Al-Qaeda training units in Saudi Arabia, as well as recordings made by the Saudi police and special forces and the odd Al Aribiya news clip. The Balliol history graduate is well aware that his methodology will not meet with universal approval. But, with Mark Boal - the journalist who scripted Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker (2009) and Zero Dark Thirty (2012) - among the executive producers, this survey of terrorist activity in and around Riyadh between 2003-09 manages to humanise the fundamentalists and make them more understandable without ever glamorising them. 

The first extract highlights how ordinary and often uneducated the average recruit is. Surrounded by masked men brandishing Kalashnikovs and rocket launchers, twentysomething Ali is asked to justify his suicide mission by a voice off camera. As his superior is using long words and he hasn't been briefed about whether killing co-religionists is sinful, Ali stares blankly into the lens before shrugging. He proves equally tongue-tied when the question is rephrased and accuses others in the room of putting him off. Demanding another coffee in a clean cup, Ali is reprimanded for losing focus and, when the commander eventually loses patience after numerous aborted takes, he orders him to shut up and pose with his gun. 

In voiceover, Samuel West explains how the Saudi security forces filmed their raids on safe houses belonging to Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and we are given a guided tour of the base filled with weapons and bomb-making equipment where Yemeni Fahd Al-Saadi had accidentally blown himself up. We cut away to the interior of a minibus, as mujahideen fighters lark around while travelling to a boot camp in the desert. It's pouring down and dark when they arrive and one recruit jokes about the realities of martyrdom, as they settle down inside a cramped tent to their meagre rations. 

The next day, they boost morale by having wheelbarrow races and one youth asks the cameraman to lose the footage of his trousers falling down, as his comrades dispute the result of a relay. An instructor shows them how to tuck and roll from the front seat of a car so that they can still get a shot away before they practice firing from a moving vehicle. The recruits wisecrack as they maintain their weapons, with one being compared to the Masked Avenger because he insists on keeping his face covered. As they gather in a circle for tea, Rakan is asked how it feels to be preparing for war and his misgivings are betrayed by his fretful expression and hesitant pride at defending his faith. 

Following the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, Osama bin Laden orders Turki Al-Dandani, the leader of AQAP's Riyadh branch, to carry out a series of truck bomb attacks in order to shake faith in the Saudi royal family and spark an insurrection. This time the speech to camera is confident and abrasive, although one of his companions gives a wink and a grin that once again reveals the intellectual gap between the youthful volunteers and their older commanders. We see footage of the unit reccying a target before their lair is discovered by the security forces under Prince Muhammad bin Nayef. In May 2003, he orders a man hunt for the most dangerous men in the country and footage of the police operations is cross-cut with video speeches made by the men (of very different temperaments) they seek. However, as the reportage that follows makes chillingly clear, the terrorists succeeded in bombing three residential compounds and several locals and foreign nationals were killed, including some children.

Crown Prince Abdullah visits the injured and delivers a speech condemning the perpetrators for their anti-Islamic actions. But intelligence reports confirm the scale of the problem his government faces and footage of fire fights around the capital is interspersed with a sermon preached by radical cleric Abdullah Al-Rashoud in which he reminds jihadists that it is better to die than live in disgrace. The security forces make a point of recording the faces of the AQAP recruits they capture and kill, so that their families can add shame to their pain. But Al-Dandani remains at large until he is pinned down in a mosque in July 2003, where he huddles his bodyguards around a grenade and detonates it. Even the soldiers on duty at the scene find the carnage hard to take, but AQAP bury their dead and regroup under Abdel Aziz Al-Muqrin, who implements a more aggressive strategy.

Tom Hollander reads items from Al-Qaeda's Voice of Jihad website, as we see the Dandani Martyr Brigade having a kickabout while their vehicle is being camouflaged. They are proud that the Prophet's phrase, `I bring you slaughter' is daubed on the side and they give thumbs up to the support car filming their journey to the compound they are about to attack. The focus shifts away from the jihadists to their victims, as disfigured corpses are pulled from the rubble and the rescuers despair of ever being able to identify them. At the hospital where the survivors are taken, a doctor reveals that 20% of the victims are children, while an injured woman laments that the majority of those killed are Lebanese, Syrian and Palestinian and she wonders why anyone would want to murder their brothers. 

In an effort to discredit AQAP, Prince Abdullah forces clerics, intellectuals and tribal leaders to denounce the organisation on television and reminds them that anyone who refuses will be presumed to be a fellow traveller. Furious, Al-Muqrin orders an attack on the Department of Public Security and we see Ali and his pals readying to set off in a vehicle with a number plate reading `72 Virgins of Paradise'. As West reveals, the Public Security building was too well defended. So, the bombers drove into the neighbouring offices of the traffic police and we are shown footage the devastation and the funerals of the five victims. 

Responding to criticism for attacking Arabs and Muslims, Muqrin switches his ire to Westerners. He makes a masked appearance in a training video, showing would-be assassins how to do a forward roll into the firing position. Several of the recruits struggle with the technique and one is left wondering about its efficacy. But a combination of video footage and a report on Voice of Jihad reveals how easily an AQAP unit was able to infiltrate business premises in Khobar and lay low in a nearby hotel before butchering a number of guests (including a party of Hindus) before evading the security forces by slipping out of a back door. 

Despite a government crackdown and a policy of parading re-educated jihadists on television, AQAP continues its reign of terror. Among those kidnapped is Apache helicopter engineer Paul Marshall Johnson, Jr., whose interrogation and torture is filmed in excruciating close-up. Mercifully, Harker opts not to show the moment the American was decapitated, but he plays the audio, which ends soberingly with a small girl boasting that the knife used to behead Johnson belongs to her father. Moreover, he presents footage of young children in hoods and camouflage gear performing forward rolls while brandishing pistols and the laughter of their proud parents can be heard over a male voice encouraging them to show what they can do. 

A few days after Johnson was killed in June 2004, Muqrin is ambushed at a petrol station and the authorities capitalise on his death by broadcasting a programme in which AQAP prisoners discuss their experiences and how recruits tend to be impressionable, poorly educated young men with little grasp of Islamic Law. But volunteers continue to sign up and the camaraderie within the cells still operating is apparent from an extract from a training video. Thus, in December 2004, Al-Qaeda feels sufficiently strong to storm the US consulate in Jeddah. However, they fail to penetrate the inner sanctum and an attempt on the Ministry of the Interior is also thwarted. Buoyed by their success, the Saudi forces besiege a villa in the town of Al-Rass in April 2005. This turns out to be AQAP's headquarters and, after three attritional days, the authorities are able to announce that they have killed 14 militants and arrested five more. 

Sensing that AQAP's position has been weakened, Prince Muhammad urges citizens to report suspicious activity and a shootout involving a youth in Dammam leads to a mass attack on a cell sheltering in the town. He visits the army unit involved and the wounded make positive noises for the cameras. But, even though terrorist activity decreases dramatically, self-proclaimed leader Fahd Al-Juwayr refuses to buckle and plans a mission to the Aramco refinery at Abqaiq that will make the world sit up and take notice. We see the unit spend its last night in the open and there is much bombast and bravura on display, as the bombers show off the device that will sabotage oil supplies to the West. But, as they approach Abqaig, one of the bombers realises he doesn't have enough fuel to reach the target and has to fill up at the risk of his murderous cargo being spotted. 

As the command vehicle carrying Al-Juwayr veers off after a struggle to open a security barrier, the two bomb trucks approach the perimeter fence. We see CCTV footage of the lead car ramming the gate before a cutback to shows Al-Juwayr and his fellow passengers celebrating a plume of black smoke rising into the sky. However, security force images reveal that the bomb crater is some way from the refinery, while close-ups of the dead jihadists suggest that they have died in vain. The AQAP website begs to differ, of course, as it hails the courage of its martyrs. But a raid on the cell's safe house a few days later confirms that the Saudis have finally got the upper hand. 

West explains that hundreds of AQAP members handed themselves in after the failure of the insurrection and, over the next three years, many of the least radicalised were re-integrated into society. We see footage of the work being undertaken at a centre for religious re-education and there is a great sense of satisfaction that the authorities have prevailed. But remnants of the AQAP network have managed to flee to Yemen and, by August 2009, they are ready to lure Prince Muhammad into a trap. As he insists on greeting surrendering jihadists in person, a plan was hatched to smuggle a bomb into the meeting inside the rectum of Abdullah Al-Asiri. 

Even though he was searched on three occasions and bodyguards noticed how akwardly he moved and the care he took while praying and sitting, nobody suspected that he was a walking time bomb, as nobody had successfully implanted a remote-controlled grenade before. Although the device was detonated during a phone call between Prince Muhammad and Al-Qaeda operatives in Yemen, he survived with relatively minor injuries. As the footage of the recovery of Al-Asiri's body parts shows, he was not so fortunate. 

Although Hacker opts to show some of the blood-spattered aftermath of this near miss, he strives to keep grim footage to a minimum, as he recognises how too much carnage could distract from the underlying message of this deeply disconcerting documentary. In this regard, it has much in common with The Deminer, Hogir Hirori and Shinwar Kamal's found footage profile of Iraqi bomb disposal officer, Fakhir Berwari. But it also shares some of its flaws, as Samuel West's voiceover provides scant chronological context for those not already au fait with AQAP's terror campaign. It also struggles to pull off the conceit that the absence of expert analysis frees the film of editorialisation, as Hacker imparts a degree of comment through both image juxtaposition and the sometimes over-emphatic strains of Chad Hobson's score. 

Nevertheless, this remains essential viewing, if only for the offbeat moments amidst the cruel machismo that bring to mind Chris Morris's Four Lions (2010). Hacker spent over a year sifting through the material with editor Peter Haddon and their eye for a telling detail not only highlights the mundanity of the jihadists, but also the banality of their evil.

A former Vogue editor-at-large and America's leading black tastemaker, André Leon Talley has become a familiar face to British audiences through such fashion documentaries as Matt Tyrnauer's Valentino: The Last Emperor (2008), RJ Cutler's The September Issue (2009), Whitney Sudler-Smith's Ultrasuede: In Search of Halston (2010), CS Leigh's A Quiet American: Ralph Rucci and Paris (2012), Francesco Corrozzini's Franca: Chaos and Creation, Andrew Rossi's The First Monday in May (both 2016), Sandy Chronopoulos's House of Z and Michael Robert's Manolo: The Boy Who Made Shoes For Lizards (both 2017). Now, he has a profile of his own in the form of Kate Novack's The Gospel According to André, But, for all its sincerity, this scarcely does justice to either Talley's struggles or his success. 

`I don’t live for fashion, I live for beauty and style,' reveals André Leon Talley in the opening moments of the documentary. `Fashion is fleeting, style remains.' But, as we see clips of Talley in action between 1984-2016 and hear hyperbolic tributes from designers Marc Jacobs and Tom Ford, Vogue doyenne Anna Wintour and academic Eboni Marshall Turman, we also have to listen to musician will.i.am (in his sole contribution to the picture) making the ridiculously glib claim that Talley is `the Nelson Mandela of couture and the Kofi Annan of what you got on'. 

As Talley reminisces at his home in White Plains, New York, Chapter One, `Sunday Best', whisks us back to his childhood dwelling in Durham, North Carolina. Abandoned by his mother Alma into the care of grandmother Binnie Davis, Talley was surrounded by storytelling relatives who taught him the importance of a good narrative. He compares their relationship to the one depicted in Truman Capote's A Christmas Memory and school friends Bruce Weaver, Alexis Thomas and Anne Bibby remember them doting on each other. Talley claims that Binnie has an aristocratic attitude, even though she didn't have a bean. But she did have a lot of hats, which formed a crucial part of the Sunday Best ensembles she wore to church and these displays of humble finery were what attracted Talley to the art of dressing well.

As journalist Tamron Hall seeks out Talley's advice on the dress she is going to wear to the White House, he recalls seeing African-American models like Naomi Sims on the pages of Vogue in the local library and he states that his views on fashion, culture, poetry and beauty were formed during these moments of juvenile escape from reality. Another key influence was John Fairchild's book, The Fashionable Savages, from which he learned about Vogue's new editor in chief, Diana Vreeland (1963-71).

But daily life was tough and Talley recalls having rocks thrown at him by the white students on the campus at Duke University. He attended the all-black Hillside High School and teacher Wanda Garrett reflects on an era of segregation with dismay, as black kids didn't have to be good, they had to be better than their white counterparts. She smiles sadly, as she opines that success was the best form of revenge for black kids in this period. When Talley comes to visit, she is delighted to see him and praises his performance as the Duke in a production of The Mouse That Roared. 

Inspired to learn French by TV cook Julia Child, Talley also looked up to
Lady Ottoline Morrell and Martin Luther King and took to shopping in thrift shops after seeing Barbra Streisand singing `Secondhand Rose' on television.  Weaver fondly recalls going to baseball games with Talley's Washington cab-driving father, William. But he couldn't get out of the stadium fast enough to go shopping and he muses about the various capes, kaftans and turbans that became his trademark after he started to fill out in his forties. While walking to church one Sunday, Alma had ticked him off for his outré fashion sense, but Binnie had supported him every step of the way and Turman notes that Talley has defied standards of African-American masculinity throughout his life. 

On getting a French studies scholarship to Brown, Talley broke more chains and he speculates at the start of Chapter 2, `The Debutante', that he would still be in Durham as a nice churchgoing fellow if he hadn't moved away when he did. College friends Yvonne Cormier and Reed Evins remember him growing in confidence and start writing pieces for the nearby Rhode Island School of Design newspaper. 

Designer Norma Kamali also recalls their early days together in New York in 1974, when the kings of the fashion world were Yves Saint Laurent and Halston. However, he got his break when Diana Vreeland, who was then at the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, appointed him a special helper during the curation of a show entitled, `Romantic and Glamorous Hollywood Design', after he pieced together a metal costume that Lana Turner had worn in Richard Thorpe's The Prodigal (1955). Italian designer Valentino Garavani speaks warmly of their bond and Talley remembers Binnie being furious with him for not coming home for Christmas and accusing him of hooking up with a white woman. 

Moving up the ladder, Talley landed a job on Andy Warhol's Interview magazine, where he met columnist Fran Lebowitz, who was impressed by this black giant answering the phones on the reception desk. They would frequent Studio 54, but model Bethann Hardison backs his claim that he went to dance and people watch rather than indulge in sex and drugs. Friend Whoopi Goldberg suggests that the scene dwellers were taken aback by him because he stood out. But, as designer Diane von Furstenberg reveals, he also had the knowledge and the personality to ensure that people took him seriously. Among them was Karl Lagerfeld, who was so impressed by Talley's interview technique that he gave him clothes from the trunks in his hotel room and they remained good friends. 

Indeed, their relationship helped Talley land a job in Paris with Women's Wear Daily in 1978. He admits to having been nervous on his arrival, but he was welcomed with open arms and designer Ralph Rucci states that he quickly became the centre of the bureau's circle. Muse Betty Catroux introduced him to Saint Laurent and he wrote glowingly about a show inspired by George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess because it reminded him of the fashions he had known in the South. However, such was his immersion in his career that he never found time for romance and Talley confirms friend George Malkemus III's suspicion that this is a disappointment rather than a major regret.

Back in New York, Talley goes to visit Isabella Rossellini and watches her rubbing the tummy of a pig on her farm. They became friends when Talley moved to Vogue under editor Grace Mirabella (1971-88), who didn't always approve of some of his bolder concepts. However, he found a protector in Anna Wintour and she confides that she recognised his knowledge of fashion history could help her bluff her way through the daily routine. Comedian Sandra Bernhard admires the way Talley embraced being larger than life and Manolo Blahnik praises his sense of layout style, as his pages always conveyed his passion for the clothes and the models. Jacobs concurs that Talley became bewitched at runaway shows, but was drinking it all in and relating it to the art, fashion and cinema that had inspired the collection. 

He meets Vogue fashion director Tonne Goodman in the Condé Nast archive and looks back at stories involving Cindy Crawford walking around Monte Carlo in a black veil and swimsuit and Naomi Campbell playing Scarlett O'Hara in a race-inverted take on Gone With the Wind that also featured Manolo Blahnik as a gardener and fellow designer John Galliano scrubbing floors. Former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter and advertising executive Steve Stoute testify to his intelligence and influence as a black man in a very white world. 

Hall and Turman allude to his struggles down the years, while Wintour claims that he disliked discussing race. But he reveals being hurt by the nickname `Queen Kong' and the fact that people he admired were convinced that he must have slept with Vreeland and the major French designers to have risen so high. Dismissing the ignorance of such remarks, but pointing out their association with buck slaves, Talley states that he learned enough in the segregated South to know when to say his piece. But it saddens him that little has changed during the course of his lifetime, despite Barack and Michelle Obama getting to the White House. 

The 2016 presidential election comes closer in Chapter Four, `Precious Memories'. and Talley meets with Hall, Turman and designer Andre Walker to share his concerns that Hillary Clinton might get pipped at the post. He is devastated when Donald Trump wins and joins New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd to live blog the inauguration. He concedes that Melania looks regal and jokes that his social media accounts will be blitzed because of his honesty. But the oath stuns him into silence and friend Catie Marron reads an extract from a letter he had written her when Obama took office and he hoped he would become the black Abraham Lincoln. 

Returning to Durham, Talley pops into the Mount Sinai Baptist Church and embarks upon a six-week diet. He shows Novack around his home and admits that one room has been decorated to please both his grandmother and Diana Vreeland. On a trip to Duke, he watches Turman preaching in the chapel and he tells her that she reminds him of Binnie. His friends are delighted that he turned out to be the man he told them he would be and, as we see him having a facial in a beauty spa, Wintour suggests that the kaftans and the jewellery were a form of armour that allowed him to be so fearless in breaking down barriers. 

Perhaps because of the access that Novack had to her larger-than-life subject, this is less a hard-hitting biographical study of an African-American pioneer and the hurdles he had to overcome during his remarkable career than a leisurely colour supplement profile that touches on contentious topics without exploring them in what most viewers would see as the necessary detail. Nevertheless, the eloquence with which Talley reflects on the racial slurs he has had to endure says much about his passion and intelligence and it's a shame that Novack declines to show more of these qualities in seeking to mythologise Talley and demonstrate how much he is revered by his friends and fans. 

It would have been nice to hear him discuss a theory of style and go into more detail on his approach to fashion writing, as we learn little about his qualities as a journalist or his insights into what set the great designers apart from their peers. Lots of names are dropped and there are plenty of famous faces. But the effect is more gossipy than scholarly and, while Talley emerges as a fascinating and engaging character, Novack sells him and his achievement short. As with so many fashionista treatises, the sense of deferential awe is over-powering and Novack makes no attempt to explore the socio-economic aspects of couture or its connection to quotidian reality. Nevertheless, in making her first solo feature, she teams well with cinematographer Bryan Sarkinen in order to contrast Talley's backwoods origins with the metropolitan mayhem in which he has thrived against all the odds.