**½/****
directed by Nick Broomfield
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Of interest to pupils of documentary–and no one else–is Driving Me Crazy, a film in which Nick Broomfield, for better and for worse, reveals his own machinations on camera and upstages his ostensible subject. Hired by producer friend Andrew Braunsberg to document an Austrian stage production on African-American music, the director shamelessly inserts himself into the scene, recording the financial and political transactions that allow him to continue with his work. In so doing, he antagonizes many who work on the production and doesn't seem to care, concerned only with continuing the film and dodging the various interests who would like to interfere. Students will want to see this film to see how the fabled transparent documentary–where one can see how the interference of a film crew affects the subject being documented–can have its own pitfalls. To his credit, Broomfield is supremely unimpressed by the various producers, financiers and hangers-on who are using the play as a series of business transactions, and his befuddlement at their lame ideas for altering the film is admittedly hilarious. But he doesn't acknowledge his own collusion in such parasitism (he is, after all, on a job), and he doesn't seem to care about the play that should be the main event. In the end, the film is a sterile cross between an academic exercise and The Nick Broomfield Show, serving no discernable purpose.
