Dear IDA Members, What will 2005 bring for the documentary world? I make no predictions, but it does look good. The year 2004 was impressive, no question. With a volatile election campaign and an increasingly partisan mainstream media, documentaries, as the new news, enjoyed an unprecedented success at the box office. Clearly, nonfiction films have provided something provocative and challenging for an eager public. Here in the United States we have many network and cable news channels. But a unique television program on CNN called Crossfire is known as one of the better "screaming heads" news
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Dear Readers, Twenty years ago, the IDA hosted a group of prestigious filmmakers and members of the documentary community, honoring them with the first IDA Awards. Pare Lorentz, whose lyrical, cinematic examinations of social conditions across America would inspire generations of filmmakers to come, received the first Career Achievement Award, while Erik Barnouw, the great scholar whose book Documentary: A History of the Non-fiction Film continues to be essential reading, earned the Preservation and Scholarship Award. The award-winning films included 28-Up (Michael Apted), America and Lewis
On the US presidential election...
Dear IDA Members: For the past three years, I've heard, "This is the Year of the Documentary." In a line of great documentaries including The Corporation, Riding Giants and Metallica: Some Kind of Monster , Fahrenheit 9/11 is the biggest documentary of the year, perhaps of this decade. Estimates indicate it could surpass the $100 million mark in worldwide sales. But what does this mean for us, the filmmaking community? After the box office receipts are counted, the DVD has hit the stores and a potential Oscar nod is anticipated, what happens to the rest of the documentary world? I believe this
On the mandated broadcast hour...
Dear Readers, Sports is a category, a section in the newspaper, a livelihood, an obsession. And it's also a genre in the rich world of documentary filmmaking. Films such as Baseball (Ken Burns, prod./dir.), Hoop Dreams (Steve James, dir./prod.; Peter Gilbert, Frederick Marx, prods.), When We Were Kings (Leon Gast, dir./prod.; David Sonenberg and Taylor Hackford, prods.) and The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg (Aviva Kempner, prod./dir) have enabled us to re-imagine sports in a new way-as a prism through which we try to understand the human experience. This summer brings Riding Giants, Stacy
Dear IDA Members: Giving your time.... As many of us punch through our day-to-day routines of phone calls, emails and FedEx deliveries, once in while there is a moment of contemplation: how to make the world a better place. Perhaps you're already doing something socially or politically; it is an election year, after all. For some people, the lightning bolt of personal inspiration or motivation just hasn't hit yet. Until it does, they just want to get involved in anything that has a greater good. Yes, I'm talking about volunteers. At the IDA we see quite a number of happy, motivated people come
Amalgam, combination, composite and compound are synonyms for hybrid. The identification of something by classification is as a way of understanding it, and different classifications of art or film embody particular, commonly accepted traits and traditions. A hybrid does not neatly fit into any classification, and the documentaries that were once labeled "hybrid" or avant-garde have emerged as a prevalent category. These films may incorporate essential qualities of traditional documentaries, but they typically question or expand many characteristics that are considered basic documentary traits
Dear Readers, Considering the frontiers and pioneers of nonfiction filmmaking is as much a consideration of the zeitgeist as it is of the art form. In this era of mashing, surfing, blogging, listserving and synthesizing in the vast, souped-up, multi-dimensional and multi-planed cyberverse of the third millennium, genres blur and collide into new forms. There's a certain legerdemain and trompe d'oeil to all of this—fiction and nonfiction, music video and music documentary, re-enactments and re-creations. It's irreverence and reverence at the same time, all in the service of truth-seeking and