Although too few commentators recognize or acknowledge the fact, we are living in a great era of the documentary film. Especially since the inception of cable TV, the once competitive medium of television has become both motivator and repository of the cinema of fact - biographies, histories, magazine shows, extended news stories, investigative reports, true crime dramas, studies of prison life, nature films, etc. now fill the channels. The explosive technological advances of recent decades, including computers, cell phones, digital cameras, and of course, the camcorder, make everyone a filmmaker, with the Internet providing instant distribution to an international audience of millions.

Amidst all the amateurs with cameras, the professional documentarian faces challenges that his predecessors could not have imagined. Yet in our time a number of documentary filmmakers, among them Donn Pennebaker, the Maysles brothers, Frederick Wiseman, and Errol Morris, have achieved some outstanding work and some critical and financial success; Ken Burns and Michael Moore make motion pictures that draw large audiences and earn millions of dollars. Even a few contemporary commercial Hollywood directors, notably Martin Scorsese, find the form attractive and even profitable.

At least since the great film decade of the 1930's, however, the documentary also engages some of the social and political currents of its time, a tradition that influences "American Harvest," written, directed, and produced by Angelo Mancuso of Rochester. The film deals with the process of growing and picking fruit and vegetables in America, concentrating particularly on the immigrants who labor in the fields and make this country's abundance possible. Although it maintains a mostly objective approach reminiscent of cinema vérité, the movie exhibits a definite sympathy for the plight of those workers through its choice of subjects and themes.

Like far too many of its kind, the movie also demonstrates the further influence of those numerous, drearily familiar television documentaries. Although it promises to cover the harvesting of produce by in effect following the crops and the pickers northward, it tends to settle down in certain areas, mostly in Florida, and to lose its narrative impulse in scores of interviews with a great variety of people - the workers themselves, crew chiefs, farmers, produce brokers, farm market managers, and even an agricultural journalist. Those interviews tend to stall the film's movement and even obliterate its themes through their reiterated sameness - whatever the quality or content of their conversation, talking heads remain, alas, talking heads.

The film's subjects, however, retain their relevance and immediacy, so that their vividness overcomes some of its static approach. It shows the absolute folly and cruelty of the demagogues who demonize immigrants, spinning a tissue of lies about their theft of jobs from American workers - every single American who supervises or works with the mostly Central American immigrants emphasizes how hard they work at difficult tasks that no Americans care to attempt. All the interviewees know the politicians and commentators who spout the new nativism, including one who challenges Lou Dobbs to work in the fields so he can understand the reality of migrant labor.

In keeping with the methods of his form, the director generally stays outside the film, only occasionally asking a question and never offering any commentary, instead allowing the camera to show the subjects and the people he interviews to make the points. Although he covers a lot of territory, including several Southern states and some points on the Mexican border, he returns again and again to certain people and certain locations. He never allows the movie to descend into handwringing or sentimentality, even when he shoots some footage of a workers' cooperative right out of "The Grapes of Wrath."

The director spends a good deal of time on the watermelon harvest, and now and then shoots the produce department of a Wegmans supermarket, but neglects the opportunity to follow, say, a particular truckload of melons from the fields to the processing plant to the supermarket, from the hands of the workers to the food broker to the buyer to the consumer pushing the shopping cart. That journey would have stated better than the scores of speakers the full importance of those vilified immigrants to the average American.  

American Harvest

(Not Rated), written, directed, and produced by Angelo Mancuso

Now playing at The Little