This is a one-of-a-kind documentary that has been coaxed and cut together by veteran film-maker Alan Berliner (Intimate Stranger, First Cousin Once Removed), who also serves as its narrator – but most of its graphics, footage and imagery were made by film-maker Benita Raphan, also the subject of the film. As such, it’s not exactly a collaboration since Raphan took her own life in 2021, for reasons the film gently tries to untangle. Nevertheless, Berliner commits to creating in this film something that limns the fragile spirit, startling originality and dogged, and indeed doggy, kindness of his canine-loving late friend.
In the process, Berliner has completed the unfinished film she was worrying over when she died but at the same time makes something entirely new; it might be called a tribute perhaps, or a bio-pastiche, or maybe a found-footage cinematic seance. Any way you slice and dice it, it’s a strangely entrancing work, an “irregular verb” like its subject, as she was described by her mother Roslyn in her New York Times obituary.
A maker of short, semi-animated experimental documentaries, Raphan wasn’t as well known as Berliner, but she had her niche in New York City’s film world and its adjacent realms, especially in art school academia where the untenured Raphan nurtured young talents, for example at the School of Visual Arts in the Lower East Side. Born in 1962, she was just the right age to enjoy the downtown post-punk scene centred on the Mudd Club and CBGB; she got her first break as a photographer shooting her then-boyfriend’s band. Peregrinations in Europe took her to the Royal College of Art and a spell in Paris where she built up a CV as a graphic designer, working with some big-name brands, though (as one friend recollects) she never managed to hold on to any job for long before being fired. Despite the precariousness of her employment situation, she found some success making intimate, flickering movies about troubled geniuses she clearly felt some kind of kinship with, like mathematician John Nash (also the subject of A Beautiful Mind), poet Emily Dickinson and architect Buckminster Fuller.
Utterly devoted to her rescued dog companions, she planned to make a film about canine cognition that morphed into a portrait of the loneliness and devastation brought about by Covid 19. Berliner and friends speculate that the isolation of that time, coupled with a lifelong struggle with depression and anxiety, are what led her to kill herself. The film is wise to leave some of the questions about Raphan unanswered, and what lingers is a portrait of a complex, creative woman who poured so much of herself into her work and yet who remains in death an evanescent, inscrutable mystery.
Benita is at Bertha DocHouse, London from 24 June.