"Hey, did you hear that Martin Scorsese is making a film in Toronto?" "No, what is it?" "It's called Clean Streets." That's an appropriate joke for the neatest, spiffiest, shiniest megalopolis in North America. Newcomers to the annual Toronto Festival of Festivals (renamed in 1994 as the Toronto International Film Festival) can't help but express their astonishment at the spotlessness— and law-abidingness—of this lovely Canadian city. In response, Torontonians shudder and bow their heads in shame, wishing, alas, for more grime and more crime. In contrast, nobody shows anything but pride who is
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Many people ask, and rightly so: Of what use it is to spend the money and time schmoozing at festivals and markets? Whether one has a clearly defined goal, such as finding a distributor, or a more diffuse goal, such as meeting other members of the restless nomadic tribe known as filmmakers and their hangers-on, my advice is, GO! You may ask yourself, But what HAPPENS? All this buzz, fermentation, clash of personalities, and encounters with people with interests similar to yours causes you to produce more ideas and energy in a week than you usually generated in a month or two or three. If you
This October, Turner Broadcasting climaxes a company-wide initiative focusing on Native Americans with a comprehensive documentary presentation, The Native Americans. With a creative team of Native American directors, writers, field producers and advisors, the series comprises six segments, each focusing on a specific American region and its spiritual and cultural history. Anchoring each segment is the council, a group of tribal leaders who act as a chorus, bridging past and present and sharing values, ideals and culture among themselves and with viewers. The six-hour, three-part series is
When Ken Burns' monumental documentary miniseries The Civil War aired on PBS in 1990, no one anticipated the massive popularity and unanimous acclaim the film would generate. Hailed by critics as "heroic television," The Civil War captured the hearts and minds of an unprecedented number of viewers, launched a trend in documentary miniseries "event" programming, proved that still photographs and talking heads carry the power to fascinate, and catapulted the filmmaker to a level of public fame and private financial security virtually unheard of among contemporary American documentarians
Ever since the controversial and dramatic first appearance of Titicut Follies in 1967, Frederick Wiseman has steadfastly charted a unique course in documentary film. He has produced, directed, and edited 24 films in as many years, most recently the award-winning six-hour Near Death and his paean to New York City's Central Park. Working from within the cinéma vérité tradition of employing light-weight hand-held equipment to observationally explore situations with no intended interference, Wiseman re-modelled this tradition with a variation he frequently characterizes as "reality fictions" or
No doubt when most people hear the name Barbara Kopple they think of Harlan County, USA, her emotionally charged film on the struggle of a coal miners' union against exploitive management. However, in the 13 years since she made that Academy Award-winning documentary, Kopple has produced and directed a number of films, including Keeping On, a dramatic feature for American Playhouse; Winter Soldier, which won the Cannes Film Festival Critic's Choice Award; Civil Rights: The Struggle Continues, a video documentary about the commemoration of the deaths of three civil rights workers killed in
Reality Fictions: The Films of Frederick Wiseman By Thomas W. Benson and Carolyn Anderson Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989 $45.00 In a country where surviving as a documentary filmmaker is an art in itself, Frederick Wiseman has not only flourished but created a body of work more imposing than any other independent documentarian in American history. In more than 30 years of moviemaking, Robert Flaherty made only five major films. In contrast, Wiseman has already produced 23 documentaries since he began filming Titicut Follies in 1966, and a 24th, Aspen, will be released
Film and Reform: John Grierson and the Documentary Film Movement By Ian Aitken Routledge £30 "He was more concerned with the representation of fish than with the representation of a labor process." Thus wrote the American critic Harry A. Potamkin in 1930 of Grierson's Drifters. Is there anything more to be said about Grierson and the British Documentary movement? Ian Aitken thinks there is and has written a book which sets out to challenge the multifarious accounts of Grierson on the ground that they fail to take account of his intellectual formation. In Drifters, then, "the subordination of
The mutable, enigmatic nature of documentary films was never more apparent than at the Robert Flaherty Soviet American Seminar, held in Riga, Latvia in September 1990. A delegation of over 40 American film and video makers, critics, scholars, and programmers met with their Soviet counterparts for eight days of screenings and discussion in Jurmala, a resort town on the Baltic Sea. The Soviets, many of whom had attended screenings of the American Showcase documentaries which toured nine Soviet cities earlier in the year, had come to expect film journalism from Americans, what in their republics
There's a sense in which PC based editing systems represent a most unrevolutionary revolution. It's taken years of sophisticated science, trickling down from Silicon Valley, to design personal computers that, essentially, imitate some of the least high-tech devices. For many documentary editors that's quite enough, given that the equipment used to cut film is among the most low-tech and labor intensive imaginable. Several companies have introduced a new generation of computer-based offline editing systems, targeted for erstwhile and possibly dis enchanted flatbed or Moviola cutters. These