By Desson Thomson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, December 9, 2006

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.

"As I give it," Alan declares. "I get it."

"Wide Awake" is -- for Berliner -- simply the latest in a career of films that have mined personal significance from a vast library of old-time film footage he owns, from personal home movies and interviews with his family, including his sister Lynn, his mother, Regina, and late father, Oscar.

"The Family Album," a 1986 film, was a composite portrait of the American family, culled from anonymous home movies from the 1920s through the 1950s. "Intimate Stranger," in 1991, probed his maternal grandfather's eccentric life as a cotton merchant 11 months of the year in Japan, away from his family. The 1996 "Nobody's Business" amounted to an Oedipal tussle, as Berliner attempted to interest Oscar in their family history. ("What do I care?" says his blase dad.) And for 2001's "The Sweetest Sound," he looked for everybody in the world named Alan Berliner and invited them to dinner.

And finally, we have Berliner's mother on -- you know.

When her son started making films in the 1980s, Regina recalls, "he'd stick me on the couch with a microphone and I would talk to him, never realizing that, one day, it would be up on the screen. Now I know better."

She'd rather not, for instance, have revealed she married Oscar just to get out of her controlling father's household -- a disclosure revealed in "Intimate Stranger." And she regrets talking about her loveless marriage and divorce in "Nobody's Business." But she acknowledges, "That's what makes him a good filmmaker." And she's also happy that, long after she has passed on, audiences "will see that I was an independent woman for many years, and I worked with Alan and tried to help him as much as possible with his career -- even though he delved into my guts all these years."

Wide Awake, with special guest Alan Berliner, will be shown at 9:45 p.m. Saturday at the D.C. Jewish Community Center, 1529 16th St. NW. It will also be screened at 4:15 p.m. tomorrow at the Avalon. Call 202-777-3248 or visit http://www.wjff.org.