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Essential Doc Reads: Week of October 31

By Akiva Gottlieb


 

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 the POV blog, Tom Roston reports on documentary filmmakers directing political ads.

Super PACs are by nature partisan, and Local Voices' opposition to Donald Trump might just be creating a new model for future elections to come, channeling what feature documentary filmmakers do best: create impactful storytelling. This year, an all-star cast of directors (Marshall Curry, Heidi Ewing, Liz Garbus, Rachel Grady, Amir Bar-Lev, Amy Berg, Roger Ross Williams, among others) have fanned out across the nation to shoot 1-minute ads in support of Hillary Clinton.

At Virginia Quarterly Review, Michelle Orange considers the way two recent docs treat the concepts of disgrace and infamy.

Disgrace is a public phenomenon, defined by public measures - of perception, opinion, consensus. To suffer disgrace is to arouse a collective sense of betrayal, bounds demolished, moral or social compacts violated. Reprieve from disgrace is also a public phenomenon, something a certain kind of documentary makes plain. Having suffered disgrace, occasionally a public individual will sit for a documentary portrait, as both former New York congressman Anthony Weiner and Laura Albert, the writer behind the literary persona JT LeRoy, have recently done. Weiner and Author: The JT LeRoy Story apply documentary means to restorative ends, where a kind of suspense attends the effort to marry a frayed reputation to a private self, disgraceful behavior to mitigating context, image to some more tangible thing.

At Docs On Screens, Carol Nahra speaks to the directors of two British documentaries about America and its guns.

Indeed, like so many films about the US, Unarmed Black Male offers up a vision of dysfunctional race relations. What did Jones himself make of racial tensions? "The divide felt very stark. As an English person who lives in London where you are surrounded by people from all over the world and there are very few ghettoised neighbourhoods, it's all a kind of melting pot, going to the south of America was a culture shock. You'd go into neighbourhoods and you're the only white person there. And you're viewed with great suspicion at first because white people usually spell trouble in that neighbourhood. So I was shocked that the legacy of segregation was so visible."

At Filmmaker Magazine, Penny Lane takes a close look at the documentary Under The Gun, the subject of a defamation lawsuit from the Virginia Citizens Defense League.

Embedded in the VCDL complaint is the assumption that a reasonable viewer would interpret the contested scene as a true representation of what happened in that interview. (I can't see how it could be conceived as defamatory unless it clearly purported to be a true statement - a matter of fact.) But these eight seconds didn't happen in a void; they happened somewhere inside a nearly two-hour film. Was the edit constructed to be read as literally true? I figure the only way to judge how a reasonable viewer would answer that question would be to learn for myself how the film teaches you to watch it. So I watched it.

At Indiewire, Michael Schneider reports on the shutdown of Pivot TV, Participant Media's millennial-focused cable network.

Even in 2013, it was clear millennials weren't interested in traditional linear TV, even if Pivot's intentions were noble. Internally, Participant staffers debated the best distribution option for Pivot, and insiders confirm that even in 2012 (right as the Netflix and over-the-top revolution was getting underway), there was internal discussion about programming Pivot as an on-demand OTT app, or finding a partner like Xbox and avoiding linear cable all together. But Pivot was perhaps a year or two ahead of its time.

From the archives, September 2016, "The Truth is Deceitful: 'Author' Tells a Story about a Story"

"Since the LeRoy story has been something of a phoenix, in the press, one of the common descriptions of Albert is as a mother, or housewife, from Brooklyn, in contrast to the youthful, iconic image she masterminded. In Author, Feuerzeig shows a recording of Albert at one of the first readings of her books in San Francisco. Albert sits amidst the crowd, anonymous, thrilled at the reaction to her book and her words, entirely convinced that the writer of this fiction had to be the opposite of who she was: "I would have died if anyone knew because I'm big and I'm not comfortable in my skin and everyone's coming to hear this really hip, cool, new writer and I'm not it." When JT LeRoy becomes a Warhol-esque icon, celebrated far beyond the page, it is stirring and surreal, no matter what designs Albert may have had."

 

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