Some absorbing and compelling reads floatin' around the blogosphere this past week. Here are a few pieces to kick-start your Monday.
David Poland has an interesting post last week over at The Hot Blog on what he calls "Doc Layering:"
...the explosion in films being made, thanks to cheaper production opportunities – though a film like The Cove can cost over $2.5 million to produce and bring to market (Roadside/Lionsgate) – is leading to film being more and more like books, in that you read many to gather insight, taking valuable information from each one, synthesizing the ideas into some sort of personal coherence. None is definitive. In fact, in this era, being definitive may be something left only to long view historians like Ken Burns. 100… 200 years later, the history tends to have rolled out and then someone can come along and try to be comprehensive.
In the piece, he talks specifically about the group of environmental documentaries he saw while up at the Seattle International Film Festival. I had a similar "Layering" experience this year at Sundance. Each eco-doc that I saw gave me a different part of the story about our planet's health, whether it was because of the information presented or the manner in which the filmmaker chose to communicate his or her information.
Jason Bellamy and Ed Howard focus on Werner Herzog in this month's "The Conversations", a monthly feature on The House Next Door Blog in which the two go in-depth on a variety of cinematic subjects. In this month's installment, they use the book Herzog on Herzog (Ed. Paul Cronin) as a jumping off point to talk about everthing from the idiosyncratic director's relationships with his subjects to the autobiographical nature of his films.
Ted Hope has posted his provocative May 28th address to the New York Foundation for the Arts over on his blog Truly Free Film. Here's a tidbit from the speech, entitled "Towards the New Model: Filmmaking as an Ongoing Conversation With Your Audience", to whet your appetite:
The discussion/rant was a bit of a mash up of my positive and negative lists, both the hope for the future and the fear of the present as we live it in Indieville It is commonly understand that change only comes when the pain of the present outweighs the fear of the future. I would like to have some change -- so be warned, I may have slanted it a bit in hopes of that change.