If you are looking for documentary, there are worse places to go than Canada, where it is not a dirty word. This year, there were two good reasons to go north. One was the annual meeting of the University Film and Video Association, held this year in Toronto; and overlapping somewhat, the 50th anniversary of the founding of the National Film Board of Canada, the most illustrious documentary institution in the world. Although neither "documentary'' nor "Canadian film" bring a gleam to the eye of the average American academic, the UFVA was on Canadian soil, and so it was only fitting to have a
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Gary Crowdus has the bearing of New York's film intelligentsia, and the credentials to support it. A graduate of New York University's Institute of Film and Television, he is founding editor of the magazine Cineaste, and Vice President of The Cinema Guild distribution company. But he comes to the fore of social issues with heartland roots. The Detroit-bred son of a Ford line worker and a housewife, Crowdus' love of movies was sparked by the fundamentally mainstream Lawrence of Arabia and The Miracle Worker, a far cry from the Third World and alternative film and video he has come to champion
Our television networks have made us familiar with documentaries that inform the public about technological inventions. What is less common is the artistic documentary that assumes we have assimilated cliches about technology and tries to expose them. Like most modern art, such films and videos often use shock techniques to disrupt our old patterns of thought. Irony in the narration, strange visual images, and startling juxtapositions in the realm of both sight and sound are the hallmarks of this style. Two West Berlin filmmakers in their mid-forties, Hartmut Bitomsky and Harun Farocki
"The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality." - Dante Alighieri BBC's chief of Documentary Features gives American filmmaker Allan Francovich the good news: BBC's TV documentaries regularly get higher ratings than Dallas! As evidence, Francovich searing three part/three hour masterpiece on Central America's agony, The Houses are Full of Smoke, airs on BBC-2—on prime time—for three successive Friday nights (May/ June) to very large audiences, hefty media attention and critical acclaim. A rural Englishman is so overcome he
Djinguereber Mosque, Timbuktu. 'There is a people called the Mericans ?' he asked. 'There is.' 'They say they have visited the Moon.' 'They have.' 'They are blasphemers.' Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines. When Apollo 16 astronaut Charles Duke went to sleep during his first night on the moon in 1972 he had a dream. In it he and mission commander John Young were driving on the moon in their lunar Rover when they discovered tyre tracks in the arid lunar dust. Following the tracks they came upon another Rover in which two astronauts were sitting... Charles Duke, and John Young. They spoke, and the
Twilight City, the latest work from the British-based Black Audio Film Collective, is a profound meditation on London and on the city, on being black, on the savagery unleashed by the Thatcher government, on exile and on abandonment. The film is a tapestry woven from interviews, glimpses of historical footage, stylized dream sequences, and images from the contemporary city. Holding it together is the fictional device of a daughter's (Olivia's) beautiful and poetic letter to her long absent mother (Eugenia), a letter whose text we hear as we watch her writing. Eugenia left London for Dominica
Bruce Weber's latest film, Let's Get Lost , documents the low-life style of Chet Baker from young trumpet god of 1953 to the time-ravaged jazz foot soldier who fell to his death from a hotel window last May. Let's Get Lost, Bruce Weber's second feature-length documentary in two years, begins unassumingly, calmly offering rather than enticing you to step behind its inscrutable black and white surface. By the time you've reached a rapport with the film and with its raison d'etre—the legendary jazz trumpeter and vocalist Chet Baker—it has turned introspective, and the inscrutability has given way
Nina Rosenblum's Female High Security Unit looks like it will be one of 1989's most important examples of the investigative documentary form. The director of America and Lewis Hine, a much-heralded documentary of 1983, Rosenblum is currently completing a feature-length expose of how selected women prisoners in the United States have been held in permanent underground isolation under conditions of extreme sensory deprivation. The severity of their conditions has been denounced by organizations including Amnesty International, The American Civil Liberties Union, The Center for Constitutional
On January 17, 1989, Kodak introduced four extended range motion picture films at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles and at their regional headquarters in New York. All four new films incorporate advanced use of tabular grain emulsion technology, augmented by breakthroughs in chemistry and design. One common denominator is that all are designed to provide a wide range of underexposure latitude. This gives cinematographers the freedom to shoot in low-light situations and where there is fast-moving action, without sacrificing image quality. All Eastman EXR films are
Let me begin by stating the obvious: images in U.S. media—not just images of Black people, but all images—are highly influenced by the political conditions of the times. Moreover, Black images have not been and still are not controlled by Black producers, and, therefore, these images were created to serve the psychic purposes of those that do control them. Because Europeans originally brought Africans here as slaves to provide service and labor and nothing more, the representations of these slaves were used to rationalize and reinforce their intended place in society. Thus, racial