Award-winning director Kirby Dick (Sick, Derrida, Twist of Faith) presents an interesting experiment in documentary filmmaking. Ten students at Los Angeles’ John Marshall High School (the location for the “high schools” in Grease and Buffy the Vampire Slayer) were given video cameras to record their lives—with no limitations on what they could shoot. After one week, the cameras were given to ten new students, and so on. Like chain letters, the cameras moved from student to student for an entire school year. Dick culls some of the best video diary footage of 16 students, illuminating a profound and surprisingly hopeful portrait of young America at the turn of the 21st century. Candidly riffing on everything from sexuality, drugs and eating disorders to parents and race relations, Chain Camera is poignant, hilarious and refreshingly real.

CRITIQUE

The idea behind Chain Camera is no doubt inspired by Michael Apted’s 7 Up Series, a documentary series in which cameras follow a select group of people from a young age to adult life. I’m not going to compare these two, because these are two different documentaries.

Chain Camera is often very involving and the majority of the teenagers represented in this documentary have interesting things to say and show to us. Several of the students, however, and I won’t name names, are not interesting at all, which brings down the movie just a little bit. Director Kirby Dick probably could’ve done a little better with that, but as I said the majority of the student segments (each only is only 5 minutes long since the movie’s running time is only 82 minutes – though if it were any longer I’d probably complain about it) are refreshing and interesting to watch. Naturally, several segments stand out among the rest and feel more distinguished.

In the end Chain Camera was a good experiment, but I would’ve liked to have seen more minutes of the interesting segments. Then again, if Kirby Dick had only selected the “interesting” segments and shown more of them, and discarded the average ones there’d be no balance – in reality not everything or everyone is interesting, and so it appears the documentary is like this, too.

THE VIDEO

Zeitgeist Video presents Chain Camera in fullscreen format. The video quality is decent (despite lots of grain) as one would expect from the cameras the students received.

THE AUDIO

Zeitgeist Video presents Chain Camera in Stereo. Dialogue is usually clear and good to understand. The optional English subtitles come in handy several times, but overall this is a decent presentation given the source of the audio.

THE EXTRAS

The audio commentary by director Kirby Dick and producer Eddie Schmidt is actually interesting for nearly all of the duration. Joining them on this track over their respective segments are students Cinnamon, Ethan, Amy and Jesse. Their comments are quite good as we learn a bit more about them and what they’ve been up to (in a nutshell) for the past few years.

Back to School with Kirby Dick is an approximately 8-minute interview featurette with the director. A few interesting tidbits pop up in here; it’s a good watch and I recommend viewing it after the movie.

Woman With a Movie Camera spends a few minutes with producer Dody Dorn as she turns the camera on herself and offers thoughts on making the movie. This featurette is nothing special.

Next are deleted scenes for Tim, Fernando, Winfred and Ethan. They’re nice to watch but that’s it. Also available are deleted sequences for three other students (not too interesting at 2-3 minutes each) and an extended prom sequence (a little better). Rounding out the extras is an alternate title sequence (different graphics) and the theatrical trailer.

FINAL THOUGHT

Chain Camera is an involving and refreshing look (despite very short segments that should’ve lasted longer for some of the subjects) at teenagers in their senior year in high school. The extras are quite nice, and therefore I’m recommending this DVD.