'Prison Terminal' screens March 1 at 9:00 a.m. at IDA's DocuDay.
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'The Missing Picture' screens February 20 as part of IDA's The Art of Documentary screening series.
Over the last decade, there has been an explosion of music documentaries finding their way to both the big and small screens. Making one is in many ways not so different from making any other type of documentary, but there is something about music, and the films about it, that offer both unique challenges and rewards. One challenge is as basic as defining what a music documentary is. One might subdivide the genre into two categories. The concert/performance film—for which Michael Wadleigh's Woodstock (1970) is the basic template—may incorporate some interstitial sequences, but it's primarily
The panel "Music—The Forgotten Character in Documentary Storytelling," which took place at the Filmmaker Lodge during the 2004 Sundance Film Festival, came out of the work the Sundance Institute is doing with the Documentary Film Composers Lab. Established in 2003 as an outgrowth of the Feature Film Composers Lab, the lab brings together filmmakers and composers to work on music for documentary. This year, filmmaker Vikram Jayanti and composer Miriam Cutler were advisors at the lab and participated on the panel, along with filmmakers Jessica Yu, Catherine Tambini, Carlos Sandoval and composers
Documentary filmmakers have been blowing smoke—figuratively and sometimes literally—right from the beginning. For their 1898 re-creation of the Battle of Santiago Bay, J. Stuart Blackton and Albert E. Smith employed a tub of water, toy boats, sparklers and cigar and cigarette smoke, which was blown across the battle scene by Mrs. Blackton standing just off-camera. Robert Flaherty propelled documentaries into the popular imagination with Nanook of the North (1922) and has been blasted for his dramatic manipulations ever since. (Filmmaker Emile de Antonio once said of Flaherty's idealized hero,
AUTHOR'S NOTE: It is with a heavy heart that we announce Alice Herz Sommer's passing at the age of 110 on Sunday, February 23, 2014. My interview with director Malcolm Clarke was conducted on Tuesday, February 4, 2014. Alice was in good health and knew about the film's nomination for Oscar®. At 109, Alice Herz Sommer is the world's oldest pianist…and its oldest Holocaust survivor. At the heart of her remarkable story of courage and endurance is her passion for music. We spoke to director Malcolm Clarke over the phone about the making of his Academy Award-nominated documentary short, The Lady
Earlier this year, Cobalt Entertainment Technology, a Los Angeles-based firm that specializes in three-dimensional filmed entertainment, teamed up with NFL Films, which produces documentaries, feature films, television programs and commercial and corporate productions on behalf of the National Football League, to introduce a digital 3-D camera system called 3ality. Cobalt and NFL Films test-drove this system during the recent NFL playoffs and the Super Bowl, with the intent of producing a feature-length, 3-D IMAX documentary about the 2004 season. Documentary talked to Cobalt CEO Steve
Remember the days when the annual Realscreen Summit was an intimate little event with 500 or so of your best friends? Well, those days are long gone. The latest Realscreen, held at the end of January in Washington, DC, attracted more than 2,550 participants. This edition, the 16th, took over the entire Washington Hilton, and was sold out—even during a "polar vortex." What does this mean for documentary filmmakers? Surprisingly, there was some good news, and good discussions about documentary filmmaking. New outlets, such as Esquire, Pivot and Al Jazeera America, were there along with the usual
The idea of truth is problematic on many different levels. What we "see" depends on our perspective. What we understand is based on information we gather after it is processed through our predetermined biases. Truth in a court of law is one thing, and truth in the court of public opinion is another. In the world of documentary, these two truths often meet somewhere in the middle. We rely on documentaries to deliver "truth" to us. We want to know what a filmmaker thinks and we want to feel settled in a cocoon of conclusive truth when we leave the theater. Unfortunately, reality doesn't always
Nina Gilden Seavey, founder/director of The Documentary Center at George Washington University Editor's Note: Documentary magazine has devoted many issues over many years to education, whether at the undergraduate level, the graduate level, or the wide-open world of lifelong learning. Education is a core pillar of IDA's mission to serve the documentary community; as we've solidified our Doc U program over the years-both in our home turf in Los Angeles, and through Doc U Online, which is available to IDA members around the world, we also brought on Ken Jacobson to be our first full-time