Face the Face

VISITORS (B) - Godfrey Reggio, the guru behind the beloved "Qatsi" trilogy of mind-benders, trains his elegant digital camera on faces and buildings for 87 minutes. Yep, that's the movie.

It's a bit of a slog, not exactly perked up at all by a Philip Glass soundtrack, but an interesting experiment. A fellow moviegoer afterward recognized scenes from New Orleans and drew a Katrina connection. That's as good an analysis as any.

Among the faces (the first one, actually) is a gorilla's. Message? Don't know. Most of the younger faces were apparently captured while the people were watching television or playing video games. Noted. Occasionally we get group shots of folks watching a stage or a movie screen, like in those old shots of audiences in the '50s, though they were wearing the 3-D glasses. One of those group shots at the end suddenly makes the audience realize the mirror effect at work between us viewers and the images on the screen.

Did I mention the shots of the surface of the moon (presumably)? Indeed, there are those.

But, yeah, mostly close-ups of faces and buildings. In black and white.

FREE ANGELA AND ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS (B-minus) - A faithful and mostly fawning chronicle of the odyssey from radical professor to fugitive to revolutionary icon in the late 1960s and early '70s never finds traction.

This one-sided documentary goes beyond sympathetic and thus skims the surface of Angela Davis the person. Writer/director Shola Lynch previously created a documentary about Shirley Chisholm's 1972 presidential run, so she certainly has a unique niche. (She also starred in "Sesame Street" back in the day.)

Lynch chooses to focus entirely on Davis' murder trial (the guns used in the courthouse siege were registered in her name) and the events leading up to it. The depiction of Davis' romance with jailed Black Panther George Jackson has an odd Harlequin Romance innocence to it.

Lynch's narrow focus is unfortunate. A more comprehensive study of Davis, her politics and her life after her legal ordeal would have been much more interesting. Or a more balanced look back at the Black Panther movement and the developments that enveloped Davis and others. Even recollections by Davis (along with her sister and others involved in the movement) fail to enlighten or add much perspective.

This is by-the-numbers storytelling. It falls short of "Black Power Mix-Tape" and its collection of archival footage.