‘Power and Glory’ doesn't evoke the well-known Christian formulation about the attributes of God, nor Graham Greene's book of the same name: it's a small showcase of the cinematography of three not necessarily similar authors, Roberto Rossellini, Éric Rohmer and Frederic Wiseman (the only one still alive). Almost all the films we'll be showing are documentaries, but different documentaries, just as the centrality of this genre in the work of the three filmmakers is different.

Wiseman made a name for himself as a documentarian, with very sporadic fiction, and achieved the status of a master in this field. His purpose and style are unmistakable: for decades he has dedicated himself to immersive investigations into institutions, in the broad or strict sense (legislative assemblies or courts, but also libraries, museums or ‘holidays in the snow’). Wiseman uses the method of attentive invisibility: he follows his subjects for a long time, until they hardly notice the camera, he forgoes testimonies and commentary, without ever giving up (in planning or editing) a point of view. Even if a documentary isn't ‘the truth’, Wiseman cultivates an ethic of non-manipulation and non-demagoguery that brings him closer to his compatriot Errol Morris, and totally distances him from a Michael Moore.

For Rossellini, whose ‘realist’ fiction films are familiar to all film lovers, documentaries were born out of giving up and starting again. Having abandoned cinema after critical disappointments and a certain disbelief in the direction of the seventh art, he had the intuition that he could turn television into a second cinema, one that was broader in terms of its audience. He multiplied himself in interviews, profiles, docudramas and even series, always with a pedagogical intention that he neither denied nor belittled. Visiting or revisiting political power figures of his time or of other times, as well as the intellectual glories of the West, this is an ‘impure’ documentarism, committed to the most demanding of exercises, ‘historical reconstruction’.

Finally, Rohmer was not usually a documentarian, although he did make historical, educational and cinematic programmes for television. But the important thing about Rohmer is that we realise that the documentaries function as notebooks or fieldwork (studying the new urbanism, the new and old social relations), material that he then used in his fiction films, to the point of taking ideas and conversations portrayed in non-fiction almost ipsis verbis, be it the debate between Marxists and Christians or the ‘games of society’, his favourite subject.

At a time when the boundaries between fiction and documentary are increasingly blurred, ‘Power and Glory’ presents the ‘variety of the documentary experience’: almost exclusive, alternative or, let's say, auxiliary. We can even conclude that all cinema, filming people and places, is a documentary.

— Pedro Mexia, September 2025