RiP: A Remix Manifesto, the controversial new doc by Montreal filmmaker Brett Gaylor, opens with a startling scene. A musician is prepping backstage for a club date, donning shades and putting on his hoodie.
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Filmmaking is a constant struggle between creative vision and budgetary restraint. In the production of our documentary, Bigger Stronger Faster, no issue better demonstrated this tug-of-war than our use of archival footage.
Grappling with structure on a documentary about President-Elect Barack Obama, Sam Pollard took a break to talk about his life as an editor. For him, great storytelling is not so uch a gift as the end result of hard work. Mentoring and consulting on many films, he is a gift to many filmmakers. As a full-time professor at New York University since 1994, Pollard says, "I think in some ways, it saved my career as an editor and keeps me inspired as a filmmaker; I'm constantly in the orbit of young people who have such imaginations and creative ideas." He is one of the few successful African
There is a lesson to be learned from Charles Guggenheim's Academy-Award-winning documentary eulogy, Robert Kennedy Remembered, shown to an invited audience on the final night of SilverDocs this past June. It is this: Let the viewers see the person. Give us the visual evidence and let us make up our own minds. That's what Guggenheim did brilliantly in this film and in a series of political spots shown before it. The notion of a 40th anniversary showing at SilverDocs started when a clip from the film was shown to young South African filmmakers during a cultural exchange visit that festival
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A growing sub-genre of documentary film, the animated documentary poses a network of challenging, existential questions for the form. And while purists might cling to traditional, sanctioned mores, a healthy re-evaluation of our inventory is inspiring filmmakers to experiment and push the boundaries. The use of animation and other abstract and connotative forms in documentary is not new; some even cite Winsor McCay's Lusitania (1918) as the first animated documentary, while the Hubleys' (John and Faith, and later daughter Emily) pioneering work and shorts like Chris Landreth's Oscar-winning
'A President to Remember: In the Company of John F. Kennedy' airs January 20 on HBO.
On October 28, 2008, one week before the US Presidential Election and three decades following the rise and assassination of Harvey Milk, the Gus Van Sant-directed biopic of San Francisco's first openly gay, democratically elected politician premiered at the historic Castro Theater, just a few doors from where Milk had owned a camera shop. The film's cast and crew and many of the original activists who had worked with Milk during his short but crucial term as Supervisor of District 5 walked the red carpet, amid signs reading "No on Prop 8" (the proposition seeking to ban same-sex marriage in
So you think you know music documentaries? Welcome to the inventive works of Larry Weinstein, a wonderfully quirky filmmaker, whose career has been spent documenting the lives and works of composers Kurt Weill, Beethoven, Schoenberg, Ravel, Shostakovich, Weinzweig, Mozart and many more. But not in the normal way. A doctor wearing his lab coat is sitting behind a desk in a nicely appointed 1930s-style office. You expect to hear a formal prognosis and you do--sung in the beautiful deep voice of an opera singer. The patient, Maurice Ravel, is diagnosed by his singing neurosurgeon with "aphasia or