Albert Maysles, who, with his cohorts at Drew Associates pioneered the cinema vérité style in the early 1960s that would make a lasting impact on the art and craft of documentary making, died Thursday, March 5. He was 88. Together with Robert Drew, Richard Leacock and DA Pennebaker, Maysles helped to liberate documentary cinema—and the documentary practice. Their 1960 film Primary brought you up close and personal with then-candidate John F. Kennedy as he campaigned across Wisconsin in his bid to win that state’s primary. The lighter weight cameras and synch sound, which Leacock and Pennebaker
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While the Sundance Film Festival has earned its renown as a haven for discoveries and a launch pad for careers, its panels and discussions merit an equal dose of props for bringing together some of the best and brightest names in the business to chat in depth about issues and matters of concern to all of us. One of the more timely panels, "Bringing Truths to Light," assembled an all-star cast of Alex Gibney, at Sundance with Going Clear; Laura Poitras, in the midst of a stellar awards season with her film Citizenfour; Marc Silver, whose film 3 ½ Minutes received its world premiere at Sundance
From last year's GETTING REAL conference to Sundance's recent "Bringing Truths to Light" panel to the upcoming "Based on a True Story: The Intersections of Documentary Film and Journalism" three-day event held in conjunction with True/False, the issue of doc filmmakers and journalism has never been hotter. Our own Doc U panel "The Filmmaker as Journalist," held in San Francisco last month, weighed in with a fiery discussion of its own to confront the artistic and personal challenges of working in both the documentary and journalism spaces. The panel featured highly-regarded filmmakers Andrés
If it's a blustery and snowy January week in Washington, DC, then the annual Realscreen Summit must be in town. But the threat of a blizzard didn't stop nearly 2,700 people—the most ever—from attending the 17th edition, at the Washington Hilton. There were many hot topics to be found for the participants from 28 countries during the four-day event—from how to monetize programs, digital platforms and disruption, to new platforms available for content, to the nonfiction podcast sensation Serial. ( Serial was often cited as an old idea turned new that worked. Yes, people from the visual medium
Twelve years after making Spin (1995), the famous found-footage masterpiece created from pirated satellite feeds, Brian Springer released a dense, confounding feature documentary called The Disappointment: Or, The Force of Credulity (2007). I didn’t hear about it then. I don’t think many people did. A few years later, a friend had a DVD-R of The Disappointment on top of his TV, in one of those piles of "things to watch" that tend to accumulate. I asked, "What’s this? I love Brian Springer!" He grimaced. "I don’t know, dude. I couldn’t get through it. You’re welcome to borrow it, but it
Filmmaker Les Blank, the recipient of the IDA’s 2011 Career Achievement Award, was nothing if not a man at peace with his obsessions. By turns a folklorist and historian of vanishing and forgotten Americana, Blank, through his films, shared many connective fascinations and motifs such as Cajun and Creole music and cuisine, the everyday restorative powers of garlic, reclusive blues musicians and wily auteur Werner Herzog. Blank’s always-alert 16mm camera displayed as much somber respect in observing a New Orleans jazz funeral as it effused unrestrained joy at peeking into a simmering pot of
Dear IDA Community: As many readers of Documentary magazine may have already heard, I left IDA at the end of 2014 to accept a new position with the American Film Institute as the Director of AFI Docs, the Institute’s documentary film festival in Washington, DC. I’m looking forward to building on AFI Docs’ outstanding 13-year history to create a world-class showcase for documentary films in one of the world’s most important cities. But as I look back on six wonderful and productive years at the IDA, it isn’t easy to say goodbye. I’ve had the good fortune to work closely with the IDA’s dedicated
Filmmaker Ross Kauffman has worked in the film industry for more than two decades. His directing credits include the Academy Award-winning Born Into Brothels and, more recently, E-Team (along with Katy Chevigny), which was acquired at Sundance 2014 by Netflix and is currently streaming there. He is also a top documentary cinematographer, and his work has taken him to such war-torn areas as Syria, Libya and Kashmir. As part of IDA's GETTING REAL conference, Kauffman participated in sessions that focused on the documentary career and on ethics. We caught up with him by phone and email for a
Dear Readers, You can call this issue GETTING REAL: The Sequel. Or, Beyond GETTING REAL. But we felt strongly that a groundbreaking conference—for the IDA, at least—deserved a follow-up assessment here. So, we solicited a cross-section of our participants to not just give us a rundown of takeaways, but to go deeper and come back to us with a longer view of, say, Now that we've gathered as a community to really get into the most pressing and prominent issues, where do we go from here? In the wake of this deep, three-day exploration of Art, Career and Impact, what does this mean for the
Robert Kenner's stylish new documentary, Merchants of Doubt, is many things: an exposé of climate change debunkers; a clinical analysis of how cigarette companies hid the truth of their cancer-producing product for decades; and a searing indictment of how popular media operates, allowing untrustworthy people to appear on high-profile TV and radio shows as experts. Given all of these important topics, the choice of opening the film with a colorful treatment of how magician Jamy Ian Swiss plies his craft seems surprising—but not to Kenner. "This is a film about deceit and deception, so along the