Alan Berliner’s BENITA

Excavating the Archive to find the Unspoken in BENITA

By Michael Jacobsohn

Recently, the 16th annual DOC NYC was held in Lower Manhattan where more than 300 documentaries were showcased. I was fortunate to see Alan Berliner’s BENITA, a feature-length documentary directed by the veteran New York City filmmaker. Berliner is an acclaimed American independent filmmaker known for his deeply personal and innovative essayistic documentaries, such as Nobody’s Business, The Sweetest Sound, and First Cousin Once Removed. Berliner’s forte has been to focus on his family’s mishegoss (craziness). Through that process, he has been able to reveal bits of himself.

 In BENITA, Berliner for the first time documents a protagonist outside his inner family circle. BENITA’s narrative may have a sad ending, but the journey to that end exposes us to Benita Raphan, a caring and gifted New York City filmmaker and visual artist. Berliner’s documentation of her creative life is a wonder to behold.

A few days after the screening, I interviewed Berliner at his downtown Manhattan studio. He generously shared his motivation and techniques for making this engrossing film. Berliner describes his relationship with Raphan as one of dual dimensions: “We were colleagues, and we were friends.” Though their filmmaking approaches differed—Raphan favored short, experimental portraits of artists and innovators; Berliner favors long-form personal films—they both occupied the boundary-pushing experimental side of the documentary space. After Raphan’s death by suicide, Berliner’s initial decision to make the film arose from a deeply felt obligation, born from the grief and reflection that follows such a shocking and inexplicable loss.

The Obsession of the Archive
The making of BENITA became an act of archival excavation, a meticulous search for the subject’s soul within Raphan’s creative remnants. Berliner spent a full year immersed in her files, reading “every word she ever wrote…and looking at every photograph or QuickTime video she ever took.” He was confronted by the chaotic nature of the archive, which was “a vast, unfiltered collection” of files…“hundreds of folders…with countless photographs labeled with just numbers for names.” Berliner realized he had to “suffer the patience it took to look at every single one of them, which took a lot of time, a lot of obsessive energy, but I did it.”

 The crucial breakthrough—the “aha moment” that framed the entire film—came when he found a numbered QuickTime file buried in one of her hard drives. Raphan had recorded herself saying she no longer wanted to pursue a film about canine cognition (the one she had received a Guggenheim fellowship for). Instead, she wanted to make a film about how COVID had impacted people struggling with mental illness.

 “When I found that digital file, I understood how I could structure the film,” Berliner explained, “and how COVID would become a character in the story.” This discovery gave him a profound sense of permission—but also a responsibility—to honor and finish the project Raphan started before she took her life: a film about mental health.

 This realization presented a searing irony. “Had Benita not taken her life and told me that she was going to make a film about how COVID had impacted people with mental health struggles…guess who would have been the creative advisor on that film? I would have been the first person she came to for advice,” said Berliner.

The Stylistic Role of the Translator
In navigating the stylistic difference between his structured editing and Raphan’s abstract, layered visuals, Berliner embraced the role of “translator.” He made the conscious decision that almost everything in the film must come from Raphan’s own archive—conceiving of the film as a collaboration. This voluntary limitation “pressurized the creative decisions in a constructive way,” ensuring the film honored her unique visual language. Berliner viewed his process as an act of translation, one that required him to feel as if he was “channeling Benita” in making his creative choices. He concluded that to omit the darkest, most difficult material from her journals “would be like making a portrait of Benita without using the color black or dark gray.”

His ultimate goal was to make a film that is “real, that’s honest… that’s transcendent,” giving the artist an enduring posthumous legacy.

The Uncharted Territory of Illness
The commitment to making the film took an unforeseen, deeply personal toll on the filmmaker. Berliner reveals that he got cancer in the middle of making the film. His subsequent battle with chemo and radiation put him in “a very dark space.” He explains that his personal ordeal provided a terrible, unique empathy. “I understood in a different and more profound way what hell was, or what Benita’s experience of hell might have been like, and it impacted my level of understanding and empathy.” This experience, he says, “changed the way I look at life and the world,” lending an unparalleled honesty to the final portrait.

 I admire the commitment and the success of Alan Berliner. He started his career as a freelance sound editor and became an independent filmmaker who has created several personal documentaries that have been screened around the world. To my amazement, his films, to a great extent, are a one-man band. And for four decades, he has managed to stay independent as he continues to create marvelous and engaging documentaries. I look forward to more in the future.

 To find out where you can see BENITA, visit Alan Berliner’s appealing website: https://alanberliner.com/

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Michael Jacobsohn is an independent New York City filmmaker. He recently completed the “Cornelia Street Cafe In Exile” which is a full-length documentary on the venerated Cornelia Street Cafe. In addition, he curates and hosts a bi-monthly screening of short films by New York Metropolitan filmmakers at New Plaza Cinema.