As a fan of the history behind otherwise mundane objects and work I have a soft spot for the newly emboldened genre of documentaries. They generally fall into two camps, the overtly political (Michael Moore films for instance) which attempt to highlight injustices and are highly partisan, and the well-researched and/or objective, such as Metallica: Some Kind of Monster. The latter usually feature minimal commentary and instead allow their subjects to tell the story. Helvetica, the story of the font, falls into this camp. What we mostly have is a series of interviews interspersed with hundreds of examples of the use of the Helvetica font throughout America and Europe. It's truly astonishing how integral this one simple font is to the public and corporate sphere, and how much we take it for granted.
Helvetica�s hands-off approach is both its greatest strength and most dulling weakness. It took several stop-start viewings before I watched it all the way through as I confess my attention wasn�t always focused on the screen. Surprisingly the interviews with graphic designers throughout the Western world was the most interesting part, as they all come across as being very well-read, very interesting and extremely passionate about their work and their feelings towards Helvetica. Erik Spiekermann especially was a blast as he railed off line after hilarious line in perfect English summing up his feelings towards it (he�s not a fan). The film cleverly gives us its timeline as an undercurrent, running through the modernists, post-modernists and eventually the young neo-modernists who are rediscovering Helvetica as a font with potential once more.
The documentary uses a very clean, sterilized approach with plenty of clean stabilized shots and well-lit interviews. In comparison with the shaky-cam anyone-can-do-it-approach of many new documentary makers, this feels very old school in its professionalism. Only once do the creators speak on camera, a barely-audible question to one of the many graphic designers they talk to. Instead we tend to see what little they intersperse in the form of short written fade-to-blacks introducing various segments. Obviously with something so mundane it is hard as a documentary maker to come across as too committed one way or another without seeming like an over-excited idiot.
The film itself is fairly smooth, and the music is excellent. Before I even checked the soundtrack listing I could hear El Ten Eleven, Four Tet and The Amber Leaf among others. These post-rock instrumentalists lend the perfect sound to what is a impressive study in modernist thought. Of course this can only go so far. The fact that all we have to watch is a group of people in a small, yet influential, section of marketing discussing their intense feelings to the most-used font of all time will leave you scratching you head as to how they managed to stretch this out to 80 minutes. After all, it�s just a font, right? |
