The failure of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to nominate Errol Morris' The Thin Blue Line continues to raise serious questions about Academy voting procedure. One of the most recurrent criticisms levelled at the Academy focuses on the fact that, unlike other categories, documentarians are not nominated by their peers, but by a committee made up of made up of members from all other branches of the Academy. Former IDA President Robert Guenette addresses this in a new column for letters, and we are interested in readers opinions on the subject. In this rich double issue Nicholas
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When I read Nicholas Webster 's article "How Robert Flaherty Changed My Life" ( International Documentary Winter/Spring 1988), I vividly remembered the Soviet Cinema of the 60's; the joyful discovery of the western film world, it's great films and geniuses. This period came after the long Stalinist period which removed the Soviets from its contact with the rest of the world. Now a selected circle of filmmakers, students, and members of the Union of Soviet Filmmakers were allowed to watch western films. Filmmakers, especially students, chose their film mentors. These filmmakers protested
Marcel Ophuls' moral passion and cinematic methods have been renovating documentary film for over 20 years. From the renowned The Sorrow and the Pity (1970) to Academy Award winner Hotel Terminus (1988), his films are acts of "discovery," using boldly innovative techniques to explore human behavior under extreme situations. Through the interplay of brilliant research and creative interviewing, Ophuls rescues our nearly forgotten wartime/postwar past to discover its living impact on the present. And as "research probes," they raise potent, disturbing questions about filmmaking as well as
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
British-born Nicholas Broomfield has been a part of some of the more interesting and controversial American and British documentaries of the past decade. As he explains in the following interview, his and Joan Churchill's Soldier Girls (1980) not only was widely shown and praised, it also caused consternation among U.S. Army brass. Their 1978 Tattooed Tears, filmed in a California maximum security prison for juveniles, won a Dupont award; and Broomfield and Sandi Bissell's 1982 Chicken Ranch had a legalized brothel in Nevada as its subject matter. Broomfield studied law at Cardiff University