DOCUMENTARIES WITH A POINT OF VIEW
craft
This past week was a busy one in the doc world. The Full Frame Documentary Festival took place in North Carolina; Young@Heart, the first documentary acquired by distribution company Fox Searchlight in a decade was released to wide acclaim; and the upcoming release of his Standard Operating Procedure has Errol Morris all over the news.
First, to Full Frame. Our own Yance Ford was in Durham for the festivities, and she filed reports for us on the films she saw and the career award presentation to director William Greaves. Elsewhere, Still in Motion blogger Pamela Cohn offered in-depth re-caps of the festival (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3, as did AJ Schnack of All These Wonderful Things, who, in addition to writing about the films, offered photos from the festival. Chuck Tryon of the Chutry Experiment was at Full Frame too, and he offers long, thoughtful reviews of many of the films he saw, including Bigger, Stronger, Faster, American Teen, At the Death House Door, and Trouble the Water. Overall, the Full Frame Festival wrapped up another successful year, its first without founder Nancy Buirski at the helm. The big award winners of the festival were Tia Lessin and Carl Deal's Hurricane Katrina film Trouble the Water, and James Marh's Man on Wire, about a man who tightrope walked between the Twin Towers in 1974.
Our own Doc Soup columnist Tom Roston called Stephen Walker's Young@Heart "the tear jerker of 2008!" The film, which chronicles a senior citizen choir that sings music originally performed by the likes of Sonic Youth, Coldplay and The Clash, opened this week, and many critics were just as smitten as Tom was. The Los Angeles Times says that to see "these men and women having the time of their lives near the end of their lives couldn't be more refreshing." And although indieWire takes issue with the frequently "ingratiating" filmmaking, it points out that "what's good about the film comes through in spite of the filmmaking." The New York Times devotes a review and an article to the film in the same week, with the former lauding the film for offering "...an encouraging vision of old age in which the depression commonly associated with decrepitude is held at bay by music making, camaraderie and a sense of humor." The article, on the other hand, reports on sitting down to tea with the octogenarian singers, who are described as having "irrepressible goofiness," and who manage to "negotiate the sometimes barren landscape of old age with consummate grace."
Finally, seminal documentarian Errol Morris has been all over the internet. As his film about Abu Ghraib and photography, Standard Operating Procedure, gets ready for its limited release on April 25th, Morris is set to make appearances at Apple stores in San Francisco and New York. The Believer also published a conversation between Werner Herzog and Morris in the March/April edition of the magazine; the two masters talk about cinema verité, when they first met and took a trip to visit a serial killer in prison, and how to capture spontaneity on film. In consideration of Morris and his filmmaking techniques, Slate offers a lengthy article on his use of superslow motion in Standard Operating Procedure, and ArtForum offers an article criticizing the film's lack of insightful political discourse. Morris himself, meanwhile, considers the technique of re-enactments in his blog for the New York Times: specifically, he writes about his use of re-enactments in The Thin Blue Line, and considers the controversy around re-enactments in documentary films overall. Finally, for those who can't get enough of Errol Morris, word comes from The Hollywood Reporter (via Spout Blog) that his next project will be a fictional film: a comedy he is writing titled The End of Everything.
Yance Ford, P.O.V.'s series producer, attended the inaugural Cinema Eye Awards on March 18th. She writes in with some of her thoughts on what she liked and didn't like about the awards. For a complete list of winners, visit the website of the Cinema Eye Honors.
Gathered in decidedly more casual attire than the Academy Awards, the docuratti (the non-profit version of the gliterratti) celebrated the inaugural Cinema Eye Honors on Tuesday night at the IFC Center in NYC. Launched by filmmaker AJ Schnack and documentary programmer Thom Powers this past year, and sponsored by distributor Indie Pix, the Cinema Eye Honors were born out of frustration over many industry awards (like the Oscars) giving short shrift to documentary films that pushed the craft envelope.
Thom Powers strode to the podium to the Jackson Five to open the evening's festivities. He was followed shortly by AJ Schnack singing a brief song about Manda Bala, one of the nominated films, to the tune of Oklahoma by Rodgers and Hammerstein. Powers and Schnack, co-chairs of the Cinema Eye Honors, were ebullient as they welcomed many of documentary films' greatest names to the virgin outing of Cinema Eye. Working in partnership with the folks at Indie Pix and producer Pamela Cohn, Schnack and Powers pulled off a minor miracle (they planned the event in just a few months), and our congratulations go out to them.
The ceremony was energetic and punctuated by tributes to St. Claire Bourne and Tony Silver, documentary pioneers who died unexpectedly in recent months. The pre-ceremony gathering was jovial (and smartly lacked alcohol) as documentary folk from far and wide turned out in an enormous show of support for the new awards. The knowledge and experience in the IFC theater last night was incredible. Presenters included Sam Pollard, Barbara Koppel, Ross Kauffman, Molly Thompson, Joe Berlinger, Bruce Sinofsky, Marshall Curry, Alex Gibney and Alan Berliner; the groundbreaking documentaries represented by those names are astounding, never mind the rest of the audience.
For its first time out, Cinema Eye has done a tremendous service to the documentary community in the same do-it-yourself spirit that gets films made. I overheard the phrase "well, next year" often, and I'm sure that in the coming months, AJ, Thom and Indie Pix (with lots of input, no doubt) will improve upon their model for the 2009 Cinema Eye Awards. My personal suggestion would include a discussion about how films with a limited festival life that go straight to TV might be included in the awards. I'd also like to see the list of craft categories expanded to include composition, writing and sound. I know that these questions and others are on the minds of everyone at Cinema Eye, and I look forward to hearing and contributing to the coming conversations.
I know Thom Powers to be a thoughtful, passionate programmer and a great filmmaker in his own right. But his opening remarks included a remark that I found troubling. He said that "distributors don't get it, critics don't get it and the general public doesn't get it. We wanted to fill [this auditorium] with people who get it." I'll be the first to agree that independent documentary does not get the recognition it deserves, but I don't think that the problem is the fact that the general public doesn't "get it." The problem is that the general public doesn't get to see it. And as long as the documentary community prioritizes theatrical release and festival runs over broadcast, the public will continue to miss a large and dynamic body of work. I say this not just because P.O.V. is a broadcast outlet. I say this because when I looked around the IFC last night and saw the amazing collection of people in that theater, I wanted to ask everyone, what comes next? What do you do after tonight? How to you capture this energy and turn it into something sustainable?
More after the jump...
Earlier this month, I headed to Austin for my first SXSW festival. I attended both the interactive and film portions of the festival, and found myself quickly overwhelmed by all the panels, conversations and parties that transform this college town into a creative mecca every March. I kept thinking, if I were ten years younger, I would be in heaven right now. My twenty-something self would have fit right in with the crowd attending this year's festival. The interactive crowd, in particular, was flamboyantly dressed, friendly, intelligent and passionate about the Web. By Saturday, I knew I had to pace my thirty-something self, or I would find myself slumped over my keyboard twittering ZZZzzz's to the world.
Trying to hit the right balance between the frenetic pace of the interactive offerings and the (somewhat) slower pace of the film fest, I headed to the movies on Sunday to see the doc that piqued my personal interest the most. Beautiful Losers had its world premiere in Austin to a nearly packed house at the Paramount Theater on Congress Street. The film by Aaron Ross and Joshua Leonard was billed as a "collective portrait of ten artists" who sparked the "most influential cultural movement of our generation."
The artists documented included some favorites of mine — Margaret Kilgallen, Barry McGee, Mike Mills, Shepard Fairey — and others I wasn't as familiar with, so I was very excited to learn more about the early days of the D-I-Y movement, their inspiration and the story of how they became who they are today in the art world.
More after the jump...
I finally saw the much hyped, wildly-acclaimed independent fictional film Once last weekend. Once, which follows an Irish musician and a Czech immigrant around Dublin as they meet, make music, record an album and maybe fall in love, was one of the hot tickets of Sundance '07, and ended up on many best-of lists at the year's end. Though I was at Sundance in '07, I didn't make it to a single screening of this or any other narrative film. Now, I can finally watch it on my own couch! Another reason why I love Netflix.
Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová star in the fictional film Once
I liked the film. I liked the characters and the scenes where the female lead pulls a Hoover vacuum around the streets of Dublin, but it took me a while to get into the film. I spent the first thirty minutes begging the DP to keep the camera steady.
I'm not the first to take note of the shooting style of Once, and it has been noted by many critics that the film was shot in "documentary style." I suppose "documentary style" refers to uber-handheld shooting and shaky framing. In Once, I found this shooting style very distracting — especially when the two lead characters are singing together for the first time in a music store. The camera is in constant motion around the piano, and when the camera finally keeps still and fixes on lead actor Glen Hansard's face, I shouted "Finally - a tripod!"
Read more after the jump...
