A Filmmaker Whose Camera Gets No Shut-Eye

"I'm being rambunctious," says Alan Berliner of filming his wife. "But it's all coming out of profound love." (Washington Jewish Film Festival)

It's fine and dandy for moviemakers to explore their personal lives in documentaries -- we revere their courage and honesty. But what about all those family members caught involuntarily in the lights? Are they the camcorder's equivalent of secondhand smokers, forced to inhale the in-house moviemaker's giddy enthusiasm?

We pondered these and other questions as we watched Alan Berliner's "Wide Awake," a lively and moving chronicle of the New York filmmaker's 40-year struggle with insomnia that also features -- among some other domestic intrusions -- Berliner's very pregnant wife, Shari, sitting on the commode.

Do we even need to mention she yells at him to go away?

Alan's response in the film? "I like this wipe that you're making," he says, referring to the way Shari's repeated attempts to close the door between them resembles a movie's transitional "wipe" effect. "It's very visual."

We have Alan Berliner on the phone -- at home.

"The wipe? That's the filmmaker in me," says Berliner, whose film screens tonight and tomorrow at the Washington Jewish Film Festival. "And yes, Shari's admonishing me in a soft way. But we were in the ebullience and delirium of two people who have been told -- Shari's water broke -- to come to the hospital. . . . I don't film her in the shower. I don't violate her privacy, as it were, beyond what you see. I'm being rambunctious, for sure. But it's all coming out of profound love and in that moment of utter glee."

Okay, but where does shared privacy end and "art" begin?

"Whether to include that scene and how much, was something that Shari agreed to," Berliner says in the soft New Yorker's cadence we recognize from the narration in all of his very personal films -- perennial hits on the festival circuit and public television -- which have earned him three Emmy Awards. "We talked it through because it bespoke an intimacy between us, and that was important to represent."

We have Shari Berliner on the phone -- at work.

"When I married him I knew he made personal films," says Shari, who -- when her husband isn't filming her -- runs an economic think-tank at Columbia University. "And I didn't know exactly what that would be like. But I took that risk because I fell in love with him."

Nonetheless she was "surprised" when the bathroom incident, originally filmed as part of a personal record of the pregnancy and birth, wound up in early rushes of "Wide Awake." But "despite how incredibly annoying" the original moment was, it "showed an intimacy that's an important part of understanding our relationship," Shari says. "It happened, it was real and he's willing to put himself out there. So . . . "

Berliner, who jokingly refers to our telephone conversation as "your tour of the psychopathology of my relationship," points out that, in "Wide Awake," Shari, too, gets to bully with the camera. In one scene, she films herself jostling him awake (an insomniac, no less!) because he's snoring. And in another, she rouses her husband because it's his turn to get up with Eli, their newborn.