Essential Doc Reads is our curated selection of recent features and important news items about the documentary form and its processes, from around the internet, as well as from the Documentary magazine archive. We hope you enjoy!
Discussing the new documentary Framing Britney Spears, IndieWire’s Kristen Lopez addresses the conservatorship issue surrounding the pop icon, and how the documentary fails to mention how conservatorship is a key element of disability rights.
Let’s be real, did I expect Framing Britney Spears to bring up disability issues? Sadly, no. But it’s something that, I think, would expand the Spears conservatorship saga away from the #FreeBritney movement and into something tangible. The disability community is a massive, untapped resource, and having Spears’ issues framed as indicative of how a group of marginalized people is being controlled regularly could expand the conservations far beyond Instagram-coded messages.
The New Yorker’s Sam Knight talks to filmmaker Adam Curtis about his new six-part series for the BBC, Can’t Get You Out of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World.
“I’m fundamentally an emotional journalist,” Curtis said. “The mood my films create—and possibly the reason why people like that mood—is because it somehow feels real, even though it seems dreamy and odd. It actually gets at what’s going on in people’s heads, which is sort of what realism always is. People in the nineteenth century did not think and feel like we do today.”
Writing for Filmmaker, Anthony Kaufman discusses the buying landscape at the recent virtual edition of the Sundance Film Festival.
The festival’s virtual viewing platform also allowed for a broader range of critics, armchair reviewers and audiences to watch the films, which “for better and for worse, meant that you’re getting feedback from a wider audience who normally wouldn’t be on the ground at Sundance,” says one producer with a film at this year’s festival
Prior to the impeachment trial and acquittal of former President Trump for incitement, Just Security’s Jason Stanley offered an analysis of the video that played after the January 6th rally at Ellipse Park, and before the insurrection, underscoring the video’s intrinsic echoes of fascist propaganda.
Each of us can decide what moral responsibility Trump personally has for a video to rouse his supporters at the rally. How much of a role the White House or Trump himself may have played in deciding to show the video and sequencing it immediately after Giuliani’s speech, we don’t know. But it is worth noting that The New York Times recently reported that by early January, “the rally would now effectively become a White House production” and, with his eye ever on media production, Trump micromanaged the details. “The president discussed the speaking lineup, as well as the music to be played, according to a person with direct knowledge of the conversations. For Mr. Trump, the rally was to be the percussion line in the symphony of subversion he was composing from the Oval Office,” the Times reported.
In the latest edition of Senses of Cinema, Lukasz Mankowski presents his translation of an interview he conducted with the great Japanese documentary maker Kazuo Hara.
Everybody was trying to find answers: where they belong, how we should live. Finding the right way was on everybody’s mind. Making documentaries is searching for the “right way” with the camera. This is the motor that drives my films. The most important thing is finding the right protagonist, pointing a camera towards them and always thinking: who do I want to be? I sacrifice myself to the film and focus on portraying their way of life. In Japan, and the world at large right now, we have horrible politics. The cabinet of Shinzō Abe has made it more and more difficult to keep on living. Even though we’re trying to catch up economically, we waste our money on wars, corrupt our institutions with nepotism while taking taxes from the poor. This is the politics of cruelty, here and now! Japanese filmmakers are trying to show the real Japan, how we live and what we do. We show reality, how we really see it. But we also challenge it, this is the truth of film.
Writing for MUBI Notebook, Aaron E. Hunt discusses the L.A. Rebellion, a coalition of Black filmmakers at UCLA from the 1960s through the 1980s who defined a cinematic aesthetic true to the revolutionary times.
Most discourse surrounding the L.A. Rebellion embraces its economy and cultural significance while prevaricating the filmmakers' contributions to form. Western art criticism mostly maintains that art, life, and politics exist in separate vacuums and often fails to recognize the cumulative potential of a movement that acknowledges all three intersect. Like the Black Arts Movement and the many kindred movements from the 1960s on, the L.A. Rebellion came to stand for a body of work that accounted for the outside world. These movements propounded that words, sounds and images have innate political implications, and that mainstream art and media have denied, neglected, and manipulated them to our collective peril.
On Feb. 5, the Center for Media & Social Impact, in conjunction with IDA, University Film and Video Association’s Documentary Working Group, D-Word, Dallas Videofest, and American University's School of Communication, hosted a webinar, “What Does the CASE Act Mean for Filmmakers and Fair Use?” CMSI published a summary of that webinar.
The CASE Act is one of many potential ways to address that problem. It proposes a new venue to bring claims of copyright infringement. Instead of a judicial process, through the courts, it creates a new place, at the Copyright Office. What that place will look like exactly isn’t clear. The law basically punts all the implementation decisions to the Copyright Office, which is part of the Library of Congress–and which, as you might guess, reports to Congress.
From the Archives, March 2002 issue: Playback: "Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will"
Perhaps Evil is not some other force from Middle Earth, but something right here, lurking among us. The idea made our hair stand on end, and this is why Triumph of the Will, while certainly not our favorite documentary, is perhaps one of the most important—a record of a nation enthralled by spectacle at the dawn of the media age, and a witness and a warning from the past.
In the News
Motion Picture Academy Unveils Doc Short Lists
Sundance Announces Record Audience in 2021: Over Half a Million Views
SXSW Announces 2021 Lineup
DuPont-Columbia Awards Winners Announced
IFFR Announces Award Winners
Goteborg Film Festival Names Winners
AIDC Unveils Inaugural Award Nominees
Array President Tilane Jones Honored with Slamdance Founders Award
Oscars Will Be Broadcast from Multiple Locations
Loira Limbal, Zialing Zhang, Cristina Ibarra Among 2021 Chick & Egg Award Recipients
Reel South, Firelight Media, CAAM Collaborate on Hindsight Project
POV Engage Launches New Impact Initiatives For Educators and Community Partners
CPB Data Shows Growing Racial Diversity Across Public Media Stations
Discovery Unveils Doc Slate for First Half of 2021
Netflix Orders GameStop Docuseries From Liz Garbus and Dan Cogan’s Story Syndicate
CPH:DOX Festival Director Tine Fisher To Step Down
Full Frame Festival Director Deirdre Haj To Exit
Free Solo Directors Set Four Unscripted Titles at National Geographic