MUHAMMAD ALI THROUGH THE EYES OF THE WORLD: THE TELEGRAPH REVIEW

Last week I spent four and a half hours on the BBC World Service's Newshour programme, adding commentary to Muhammad Ali's memorial service, which they were broadcasting live from Louisville. While I was going through my thoughts, some of which I'd posted here, or written for Newstalk.com and the London Review of Books LRB Blog, I remembered reviewing the aptly-named Muhammad Ali Through The Eyes Of The World, for the Daily Telegraph back in November 2001, when the film aired on ITV after a debut at the Sheffield Documentary Film Festival;  I was writing quite a bit for them on documentary film at that point. Grabsky's film was trying to do the same thing we were trying to do 15 years later, provide elements of context for this great man's life, so I dug up my original draft of the article, which is slightly different from what appeared in the Telegraph on 10 November; it had been cut a bit for space. I found it moving that I'd concluding with Ali's message of peace--it took only two days after his memorial for America to taste murderous hatred again. And I was pleased that although Grabsky did indeed set a high bar, in the wake of Ali's death, there was a great deal of surpassing that bar. But here's what I wrote in 2001...

“I shook up the world,” yelled Cassius Clay on February 25, 1964, after beating Sonny Liston to become heavyweight champion. “The world changed,” agrees a new documentary, Muhammad Ali: Through The Eyes Of The World.

Ali has already been analysed by heavyweight authors. On film, William Klein’s Muhammad Ali: The Greatest was made in 1974; Leon Gast's exceptional smash hit When We Were Kings, about the Rumble In The Jungle, followed two decades later 1996. Will Smith will impersonate Ali soon in a feature film directed by Michael Mann. With the turn of the millennium, Ali has been acknowledged as the past century’s greatest sportsman. So do we really need another documentary? 

“I asked myself the same question,” says ThroughThe Eyes Of The World's director, Phil Grabsky. “What could I add to the canon? I felt what didn’t exist was a film made for people who weren’t boxing fans, and I thought we could add something for those who didn’t necessarily remember the era.” Judging by the response of audiences when the film opened the Sheffield Documentary Film Festival, where extra showings had to be laid on, the answer is emphatically yes. 

Grabsky’s film is built from interviews. Celebrities are a selling point, of course, yet far from stealing the spotlight, stars get transformed into fans when faced with idea of Ali. Richard Harris refused to talk about the Burtons or Oliviers he’s worked with, says Grabsky. “He said ‘that’s just tossers talking about tossers, but I want to talk about Ali, because he’s really significant.' 

“I was fascinated when highly successful people made grandiloquent claims for a guy who, in his own words, ‘beat people up for a living’, Grabsky explains. “Big stars tend to isolate themselves from their communities. Today how many of them would dare support political ideas like Ali did?”

The film speaks eloquently the American apartheid from which Clay emerged, and of his stand against the Vietnam war, but inevitably the boxing footage steals the show. And celebrities may be celebrities, but people from the boxing world not only tell the best stories, but prove the most adept at supplying the wider context. When contrarian author Mark Kram claims Clay ‘didn’t change a thing’, Ring Magazine’s Burt Sugar explains exactly what Ali sacrificed when he gave up his title by refusing to be drafted, and younger boxer Howard Davis explains what that meant to those who followed him into the ring. When critic Stanley Couch characterises Ali’s embrace of ‘a gaggle of lunatics’, the Black Muslims, as ‘insane’, sports writer Dick Schaap says he believes ‘only half-kidding’ that Ali was so malleable he, Schaap, probably could’ve converted Ali to Judaism had he tried. Another sports writer, Jerry Izenberg speaks movingly of how with him Ali transcended the ‘white devil’ message of the Nation of Islam.

Grabsky is balanced and exposes bits of Ali’s dark side, his womanising and his capacity for viciousness in the ring (as when Ernie Terrell refused to call him ‘Ali’). But what stands out is the way he uses boxing footage not only to portray the beauty of the fighter in his prime, but also to show the conscious strategy, the intelligence that lay behind Ali’s seemingly natural ability. Yet this footage has its own dark side, as we see Ali’s incredible ability to absorb a punch, popping back up after killer blows from Joe Frazier and Henry Cooper, the punishment he took long before 'rope a dope'. 

Today, the man who floated like a butterfly and stung like a bee is bloated by Parkinson’s Disease, his spark as lively as ever but his ability to speak almost gone. Grabsky reveals that towards the end of his career, Ali fought while taking thyroid medicine which robbed him of the very last shreds of his ability. Yet Ali regrets nothing. One friend speaks for the audience: “he doesn’t regret it, I don’t know why I do.”

For Ali always came back. Izenberg reminds us that when he won his draft case in the US Supreme Court, the ultimate ‘beat the man’ verdict; the stand which had made him a hero to the young, now made him the idol of ‘the limo crowd’. Did he really change the world? Like the JFK assassination, or the Beatles’ invasion of America (and don't forget the Fab Four made a pilgrimage to Ali’s camp before the first Liston fight) Ali helped usher in the Sixties; but forty years later he still makes a difference. Were there any doubt about his importance, you could see the man Presidents beg for autographs visiting the World Trade Towers, living his role as America’s leading Moslem, standing up for peace. 

Is there still more to say about Muhammad Ali? Grabsky convinces us that there is. But this film has set the bar just a little bit higher for the next one.

WHEN KATE MET ROBERT: SOUTHERN COMFORT, THE DOCUMENTARY

Note: I wrote this piece ten years ago for the Financial Times, having seen Southern Comfort at the Sheffield Festival, and then interviewed Kate Davis after the film played at the NFT. It aired that spring in the BBC's Storyville series. Seek it out; it's a brilliant documentary. I came across the article as I was going through some files, and thought, since May is supposedly Movie Month here at IT, I'd run it again here....
 

WHEN KATE MET ROBERT

“It’s not what you have down there that determines your sexuality,”says Robert Eads. “It’s what’s here,” pointing to his heart, “and here,” to his head, “that determine who you are.” Kate Davis’ documentary Southern Comfort charts the last year in Eads remarkable life, but that wasn’t what she set out to do.

The director of the award-winning Girltalk, a study of runaway teenagers, had turned to producing for an American cable network. “I found more opportunity to give a voice to people who aren’t usually heard much,” she explains. But while working on a programme about the struggle for civil rights by people who’ve undergone sex change operations, Davis attended a conference of female to male transsexuals. Standing out from the crowd was Eads, a bearded, pipe-smoking man in cowboy hat and boots.

“He broke all the stereotypes, so completely." she explains, "He was a prototype Georgia 'bubba'. But this redneck had been the mother of two children."

Born into a girl’s body, Robert always felt male. He’d tried marriage, but found childbirth “both the best and worst experience of my life.” The joy of life inside him was countered by his despair at feeling it was all wrong, because he was a man. He got divorced, lived for a time as a lesbian, but finally began hormone treatments and surgery to remove his breasts, transforming his body to match his mind.

When Davis met him, Eads, only 52, was dying of ovarian cancer; betrayed, as it were, by the part of his body that remained female. When he first noticed the symptoms, some two dozen doctors made their excuses and declined to treat him, avoiding the awkwardness of a man in their OBGYN surgeries. Eades' lack of bitterness made an deep impression.

“I couldn't get him out of my mind," says Davis. "All the way back to New York, I was thinking 'I've got to make a film about Robert. This is such a bizarre story, I've got to tell it myself'.' When I got home and called him he said 'I thought you'd call'. Robert, knowing he was dying, wanted to reach out to as many people as he could."

But even as Davis began filming, the story began to change. Robert fell in love with Lola, a male-to-female transsexual. As their relationship blossomed, he became determined to stay alive long enough to attend Southern Comfort, Atlanta's annual transgender convention, one last time.

The film opens in spring, with a sense of emotional rebirth as Robert speaks of coming to terms with dying just as he finally found peace in life. As Robert shows Lola pictures of himself as a little girl, we see just how far he has come. Davis works with all the intimacy of a home movie, allowing the audience to become part of Robert's world. "Yes, you could say it's close to subjective camera work," she says. "It gets the audience into the people's heads, so you can't objectify them."

Documentaries often do objectify. Davis studied with the masters of fly-on-the-wall techniques: Frederick Wiseman, Ricky Leacock, and Ross McElwee. The unwritten law of such films was that the camera is a silent observer. Not so this time. "I found the camera disappeared." Davis says, "In a sense I crossed the line. It became totally a labour of love. Where it might have been shocking, there was just so much normality."

In fact, what is amazing is how quickly the audience accepts a new definition of normality. The film's saddest moment comes when Robert's father explains why he now tells friends Robert is his nephew. "I didn't want the neighbours realising this is something different," he says. At the same time, when one of Robert's own sons tells us, "If I were to remarry I'd want Mom to be the best man," it is uplifting, and it doesn't sound at all strange.

Using digital video enabled Davis to work unobtrusively, and to move quickly to emphasise emotional reactions that larger equipment, or crews, might miss. Having Robert's trust enabled her to gain quickly the trust of is surrogate family, a pair of younger transexual men, and their partners. These are people whose first instinct is to remain inconspicuous. They appear to have chosen backwoods Georgia specifically for the privacy it affords. And they had real fears.

"Some were scared they'd lose their jobs, if not their lives,” Davis says. “But they wanted to believe they could change people's hearts and minds.” She laughs. “Of course, no one liked the way they looked on film! But seriously, some have attended public screenings, and when they see audiences react positively, they've been amazed."

Southern Comfort won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Festival. Its UK premiere came at the 2001 Sheffield International Documentary Festival. I spoke to Davis after a February 2002 screening at the National Film Theatre, part of the Sheffield Festival's national tour. She too was overwhelmed by audience reaction.

"This was what he wanted. I think Robert would have approved," she says, and her eyes begin to fill. She still feels the loss. "I just couldn't break away," she tells me. "Usually after you finish a film you may stay in touch, but you re-establish your distance from your subjects. This was a real friendship. Frankly, it took me almost a year before I could begin editing. I miss him so." She stops again, distracting herself by rounding up her two children. "That year was necessary, because I was still caught up in the injustice of Robert's death. I needed distance to cool down, to see that the story was simpler, deeper than that. I'd actually interviewed two doctors for the film, but I cut them out. I didn't want an investigative report."

Instead, it is a moving portrait of one man's difficult struggle to simply be accepted as the man he wanted to be. Robert Eads brought dignity to the film himself. Kate Davis might finally bring him acceptance.