Dear IDA Community, I’m sad to say that this will be my last time filling this little corner of Documentary magazine. After nine years of service on the IDA Board, six of them as president, I have fulfilled my term limit and will be cycling off the board at the end of the year. Our resident historian, Tom White, editor of this publication, tells me that I am the longest-running president in IDA’s herstory. I can hardly believe it. The time has flown by, and this remains one of the things in my life of which I am most proud. I took on this role from Eddie Schmidt with some trepidation, to tell
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Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Newly streaming at Independent Lens is Raoul Peck's Oscar-nominated and IDA Award-winning I Am Not Your Negro, which envisions the book James Baldwin never finished, a radical narration about race in America, using the writer's original words, as read by actor Samuel L. Jackson. Premiering Friday, January 19 on American Masters is Tracy Heather Strain's Lorraine Hansberry: Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart, the first in-depth presentation of the Raisin in the Sun author's complex
When she was a teenager in the late '70s growing up in the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania suburbs, filmmaker Tracy Heather Strain was taken by her grandmother to see the play To Be Young, Gifted and Black, based on the unpublished writings of Lorraine Hansberry. That experience deeply affected Strain and stayed with her as she sought, over the course of many years, to give Hansberry the feature-length film treatment that she felt she deserved. A creative journey that was inspired four decades earlier reaches its conclusion with the upcoming broadcast premiere of Strain's new documentary, Sighted
Essential Doc Reads is a weekly feature in which the IDA staff recommends recent pieces about the documentary form and its processes. Here we feature think pieces and important news items from around the Internet, and articles from the Documentary magazine archive. We hope you enjoy! At Slate, Frederick Wiseman explains to Sam Adams why he's finally making his entire film catalog available for streaming. "The honest answer is that I think any movie looks better on a big screen. But I'm excited to have the movies available, because not everybody can watch them on a big screen, and they're not
This past October, the Brooklyn-based nonprofit UnionDocs convened a weekend workshop called "Speculations in the Archive," a sold-out gathering that explored the archive's potential to spur imagination and invention. The idea was to widen the parameters of archival filmmaking by considering "multiple practices of truth-making," including the sorts of speculation that cross over into fiction. Though conventional documentary makers have diversified the range of materials used in docs since the days of the newsreel, many would be taken aback by more openly speculative use of archives. But in
In 2000, I was a young filmmaker on my way to my first Sundance Film Festival. If I didn't already know everything there was to know about filmmaking, I was at least well on my way. And then I wandered into a screening of a film called Well-Founded Fear. I didn't have high hopes; it was described, un-promisingly, as "an inside look at the Immigration and Naturalization Service." Ninety minutes later, I walked out of the theater inspired and humbled. The film opens in a drab waiting room, not unlike the DMV. On one side of glass partitions are the asylum seekers, sitting nervously in small
Archival images often form part of our collective memories. Whether it be Leni Riefenstahl's footage of the Nuremberg Rallies, Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, the Tank Man at Tiananmen Square, the 2001 terrorist attacks or the toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue, how history is remembered is partly shaped by how it was captured. The greater the event and the impact, the more iconic the image, the more ingrained it becomes as a touchstone for collective reference. But archive doesn't have to index a global event to be important. As the human propensity to capture moving images has
Matthew White was a founder, first president, and is currently executive director of the Association of Commercial Stock Image Libraries (ACSIL), a nonprofit trade association that represents the interests of the stock footage community. He ran his own stock footage library, the White Production Archives (WPA), from 1987 to 2000. His latest venture, Sutton Hoo Studios was, as White describes it, "built to create films from distressed archives." But in between those two endeavors, he served as executive director of the American Archive at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) and before
Over the past few years, the documentary form has seen a creative sea change in depictions of history: how it's rendered, what it represents and how it changes our perceptions of time. Films like What Happened Miss Simone?, I Am Not Your Negro, Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck and LA 92 are just a few examples of documentaries that have transformed how we engage the past and how we consider history, history-makers and icons. With a plethora of archival and stock footage available to license, archivists play a crucial role in the documentary production process. Like seasoned miners panning for gold
To create a portrait of an individual—movie producer Robert Evans, say, or musician Kurt Cobain—director Brett Morgen abides by an austere tenet. "I don't start working on a film until we have collected every single piece of media in existence on a subject," Morgen reveals. "That's when I know it's time for me to go to work." The approach may sound tortuous, but it can make the difference between a good film and a definitive one, as in the case of Morgen's 2015 documentary Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck. "When we got ahold of [previously unknown] footage of Kurt and Courtney for Cobain, we knew