For the documentary community, the big news from the 2004 Cannes International Film Festival this past May would seem to be Michael Moore, right? The story of Fahrenheit 9/11 and the desperate race to find distribution was the lead story in the trades almost every day of the festival. The press hounded Moore as though he were the hottest pop star on earth. And to have this documentary win the Palm d'Or on top of all that... Well, this story must be the big news from Cannes, right? Wrong. The significant story from Cannes for the documentary community is the acceptance—across the board—of
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For anyone who grew up in Canada in the 1960s and '70s, watching documentaries used to mean sitting in a darkened social studies class, while some National Film Board reel spooled you into deep slumber with the regular rhythm of the projector and the drone of a wheezy narrator. Thirty years on, however, I found myself lining up around the block on a spectacular Vancouver summer night for opening weekend of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11. Coming in at the number one spot for North America's opening weekend grosses, Moore's latest film has helped create another watershed moment in the history
Slowly the signs are going up. I saw the first one a few weeks ago. It said, "Due to new security regulations, there is no use of camcorders or cameraphones at this location." I was getting my driver's license renewed at DMV. The signs are at tunnels, bridges, nightclubs, the Subway. Lots of places that were thought of as "public" in past years. Somehow, using a video camera to record The Strip in Las Vegas can be construed as a terrorist surveillance. While these concerns are understandable, the result is a direct threat to what we all do. If observing the world is "documenting," and
Courtesy of Roadside Attractions While shooting my documentary Kings Point, I once said to a subject,"Just try to pretend I'm not here." Her response taught me a lot: "How can I pretend you're not here? You're here!" It's hard to imagine Sarah Polley, whose remarkable film Stories We Tell was released in May, ever asking the participants in her film to "pretend" she wasn't there. Her film, a complex tale of family secrets and the relationships between family members, inspires me because, in many ways, it defies the conventions—and the delusions—that documentary filmmakers traditionally revere
In the 1980s, with a global communications revolution raging in the cable television industry, everyone was keeping his or her eye on the year 1984. After all, who could forget the frightening vision of George Orwell's dystopian world so chillingly prophesized 35 years earlier: television screens in every home, with Big Brother's penetrating stare. But that same year, one media critic published an alternative and equally disturbing vision of our future based on Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. In his controversial treatise on "public discourse in the age of show business," Neil Postman
T3Media, Inc. and Discovery Communications Announce Expanded Short-Form Footage Licensing Deal Discovery Communications Iconic 25-Year Archive of High Quality HD Stock Footage Will Now Reach Larger Production Community via T3Media Global Library T3Media (formerly Thought Equity Motion), a leading provider of cloud-based video management and licensing services and generous sponsor of the International Documentary Association, announced an expanded agreement with Discovery Communications, the world’s number one nonfiction media company, to operate DiscoveryAccess.com, which houses more than 25
Filmmaker Richard Rowley talks about taking a man typically comfortable in the background and making him the star of his documentary.
The cultural plans for New York City's Ground Zero—the site of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001-calls for attractions that infuse life back into the site of so much death. For ten days in May, the Tribeca Film Festival did just that. Where else could you leave a post-screening party at 2:00 a.m. and walk two blocks for a $7 manicure? See smiles light up as a security guard refuses to back down from an arrogant film director trying to sneak into his own screening without a proper pass? Have greater access to film tickets by virtue of being a resident New Yorker? Or be treated to an
The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists Volume 4, Number 1 (Spring 2004) University of Minnesota Press 176 pps. Subscriptions, One Year $75 ISBN 0-8166-4530-2 Published twice a year, The Moving Image is a journal devoted to issues of preservation, archiving and presentation of historic motion pictures, whether on film or videotape. The current issue, devoted to programming of historic films, features a cover story that will be of interest to all students of documentary history. Titled "Lumière's Arrival of the Train, Cinema's Founding Myth," and written by
Documentary film winners David Aristizabal of the USC (left), Rachel Loube of the School of Visual Arts (center) and Daniel Kowhler of Elon University prior to the 40th Annual Student Academy Awards this past June in Beverly Hills. Photo: Matt Petit / A.M.P.A.S. Since the early 1980s, I have been examining and revisiting the subject of film education and training in numerous publications. In my article about documentary training programs that appeared in the September-October 2004 issue of Documentary magazine, I referenced a report in Daily Variety that stated that ten feature-length