I believe I've gone through a half-dozen laptops since 2007, when I first saw Peter Watkins' film Edvard Munch. There's a pair of screenshots captured during that first DVD viewing that I've dragged across all these computers, while discarding so much else along the way. I think I've held onto these artifacts as a set of digital talismans, a desktop reminder of the exhilarating thing that Watkins manages in his unconventional portrait of the Norwegian painter. Namely, capturing the true, varied chaos of life— art-making and the very messy business of living—while simultaneously screaming
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The story of Oovra Music, the Los Angeles-based, composer-run music licensing company, began in 2014, after Emmy Award-winning film composer Joel Goodman sold his successful music licensing business to Ole Publishing. Having scored films for almost 20 years by then, Goodman realized that he still owned a lot of his own music. As he began to catalogue his personal library, he realized that there were many other composers out there in the same position. "I had always dreamed of having a jazz label, like Blue Note or ECM," Goodman explains. "You think of those labels as representing a certain
By Steven Beer, Jake Levy and Neil Rosini As attorneys at the New York City-based law firm of Franklin, Weinrib, Rudell & Vassallo, we work extensively with nonfiction filmmakers. In this new column, LEGAL FAQ, we will address legal issues of concern to the documentary community. To kick off this quarterly series, we will focus on music. Why are licenses from both the record label and music publisher needed for each pre-existing musical work used in a film? By Jake Levy A musical recording contains two distinct copyrights: the copyright in the sound recording, indicated by ℗ (which stands for
Dear IDA Community: Indulge me as I go off-script for a moment. For the last decade, I've been volunteering to transform our neighborhood's commercial corridor. Folks have complained about the blight and the need for new businesses for close to 50 years. But despite valiant efforts, the problems persist, and at times it all feels overwhelming and futile. How can we, as a group of committed local activists, change major systemic problems like freeway ramps and traffic safety? Without the buy-in of systems of leadership and power, how do individuals change things they don't have the power to
Dear Readers, Over the past several months, we at IDA have presented a series of master classes by individuals who are at the top of their respective games in the docmaking process. The wisdom they proffered in those sessions proved valuable to filmmakers of every stripe, from novices to veterans. Wherever you are on the professional continuum, it pays to stay curious, refresh the toolkit and fine-tune the craft. We approached two of these mavens to share their secrets with our readers. Adam Irving has learned through shooting and directing—and above all, from watching—what makes for a good
Thirteen years after Wesley Hogan received her doctorate degree in history from Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, in 2000, she returned to campus as the third director of the Center for Documentary Studies (CDS) since it was founded at Duke in 1989. An oral historian with an academic focus on the civil rights movement, Hogan was especially drawn to the Center's mission. "I think what really captured it for me was that they wanted to foster respect, break down barriers and illuminate social injustice," she maintains. "I just thought that was a really unusual academic mission."
Animation's history within the realm of documentary is a long and storied one, but to this day its origin is still a matter of contention. Although Winsor McCay's 1918 hand-drawn short, The Sinking of the Lusitania, is often cited as the first example of animation being used for documentary purposes, it could be argued that Eadweard Muybridge's use of stop-motion photography in 1877 to document The Horse in Motion not only heralded the birth of the motion picture, but was also the first instance of using cameras for motion capture, and a harbinger of the animation process to come. Any reader
An eye-opening documentary about restorative justice on the rez, Anne Makepeace's Tribal Justice should be required viewing for anyone involved in running the US court system, from local lawmakers to (especially) US Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The film follows two remarkable ladies, Chief Judges for tribes on either end of California, who are implementing traditional solutions (i.e. tackling criminal behavior's causes and not just its symptoms) to keep their community members out of jails and state foster care, and on a healthy, law-abiding path. So it's quite an honor that the Honorable
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Now streaming on Netflix is Michal Marczak's All These Sleepless Nights, a fiction/nonfiction hybrid in which two classmates roam the streets of Warsaw on a beat-fueled quest for self-discovery. IndieWire calls it an "unclassifiable wonder [that] obscures the divide between fiction and documentary until the distinction is ultimately irrelevant." Currently streaming on Fandor is Shirley Clarke's Ornette: Made in America, which captures the late jazz composer Ornette Coleman's
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 IndieWire, Roger Ross Williams shares his experiences with a new high school program addressing issues with race in the doc world. Full Frame director Deirdre Haj began the program in 2010 in an effort to improve access to documentary film for public school students and to diversify the documentary pipeline