PAPER CLIPS — ** — Documentary feature about a Tennessee middle school's Holocaust memorial project; with subtitles; rated G (nothing offensive).

Throughout its history — in particular, during the past decade — filmmaking has seen several epidemics of bad filmmaking, where directors let their supposed artistic aspirations get in the way of good storytelling.

It's bad enough when that malady muddles narrative features, but when it occurs in a documentary, it's downright tragic. And that's one of the main problems with "Paper Clips."

It would be easier to forgive first-timers Elliot Berlin and Joe Fab for their offenses against good documentary filmmaking if they weren't messing up such sure-fire material. But they somehow lose their focus along the way.

The film examines a community project that was spun out of a Tennessee school's social studies class. In 1998, the teachers and students at Whitwell Middle School began trying to find a way to symbolize the vast human toll taken by the Holocaust.

As an object lesson of sorts, they began collecting an equal number of paper clips, to represent the 6 million Jews who were killed by the Nazis during World War II. (It was also meant as a tribute to citizens of Norway who wore paper clips on their clothing to show their opposition to Adolf Hitler's policies of ethnic extermination.)

At times you have to wonder how much cooperation Berlin and Fab got from the community and from the parents of the students who were involved in the project. Far too few of them are interviewed, and as a result, the film feels incomplete.

To fill things out, the filmmakers throw in endless shots of pastures and farms (which could be interpreted as a sort of patronizing commentary, a digression to comment on middle America). They also have Charlie Barnett's obnoxiously sappy musical score playing over every scene — including much of the commentary.

"Paper Clips" is rated G and contains nothing offensive. Running time: 84 minutes.

---

E-mail: jeff@desnews.com