Picture this: A gregarious, glad-handing Irish pol finds himself in front of a skeptical class of well off, unsmiling high school students. Asked to define leadership, he stumbles for words. Never finished high school, he says. What about his past indictments, they ask. They were all dismissed—opponent's ploys, he says. Then he begins to tear up, describing his wife’s suicide, a consequence of his legal troubles. After he leaves, the kids let loose, and oblivious to the camera’s eventual audience, they mimic the class bias of their parents: “He looks like a crook.”…”Appeals to most little
Latest Posts
I’ve been an IDA member for a fifteen years, sat on the board for nine of them, and served as president in 1996. Looking back at the documentary world during that time could give you a case of whiplash. One of the biggest changes since then is that digital video has become pervasive. Small cameras, affordable and unobtrusive, are making documentary filmmaking a possibility for those who rarely had access to making media in the past. I realized digital video was here to stay when I saw some of the pioneers of cinéma vérité—Bob Drew, Ricky Leacock, Al Maysles and DA Pennebaker among them—fall in
The seed for an in-depth look at the relationship between cable companies and filmmakers came as the result of some startling words from a legend in documentary. Past IDA President Robert Guenette blasted the cable industry for treating today’s filmmakers like, as one IDA member put it, “tenant farmers.” “We toil, they own,” he said in his acceptance speech last December of the IDA’s Pioneer Award for Distinguished Lifetime Service to the Documentary Community. Guenette pointed to cable company policies—including low licensing fees, the demand for matching funds, and the claiming of ownership
Congratulations! You’ve just hung up with your favorite development executive at your favorite cable network, and she’s confirmed that the network wants to proceed with the project you’ve been pitching. She tells you that you’ll be hearing from the network’s business affairs people, softens you up a bit for that process by reminding you that this is standard cable (translation: “ We don’t pay much. We’re not like the broadcast networks or those big, rich premium cable channels.”), and leaves you feeling a combination of pleased to have sold the project and braced for the worst on the business
When on any given day of the year, two film festivals are taking place, it’s easy to imagine the time when people will say, “Enough is enough.” Luckily, the organizers of the long-running Thessaloniki Film Festival didn’t think so when considering whether to spin off the documentary strand into its own festival. Four years on, the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival has become a high profile, hugely popular, and rewarding addition to the Southern Europe cultural calendar. As little sister to the Thessaloniki Film Festival, held every November, the documentary festival has been able to hit the
Robert Rosen said it all: “Moving images are vital to our culture. They are a pre-eminent popular art form characteristic and distinctive to this century. They represent our history and our cultural development, and even more, they represent our collective memory, the legacy of who we were and what we thought.” Rosen shared those sage observations several years ago when he accepted the International Documentary Association Preservation and Scholarship Award on behalf of The Film Foundation in his capacity as chair of the Archivists Advisory Committee. Rosen arrived on the UCLA campus in 1974
Before I was a particularly seasoned documentary viewer, I had an epiphany. At the time, I thought it was about documentary in particular, but now I realize it’s about extraordinary filmmaking in general. It is an idea that informs my own filmmaking, and is a standard by which I judge others. It came about 30 minutes into Errol Morris’ superb film, Gates of Heaven. Upon watching this five-minute scene in the film, I realized that while great documentaries usually purport to be about something specific, they are often about something very different than their narrative pretext. Nominally, Gates
Dear IDA Members; When we last left off, we reported on the fact that Discovery Communications planned to eliminate artistic credits on broadcasts of newly commissioned documentaries, except for a five-second card at the end of the program; the credits would be listed on a Discovery website instead. Well, I am happy to report that Discovery has listened to the concerns of the documentary community. As we were going to press last month, Discovery announced that it would give producers two alternatives—end-credits as they currently exist, or a new credit plan, consisting of front-end credits
DearReaders, William Faulkner once wrote, “The past is not dead. It’s not even past” to underscore the ineluctability of history and the looming presence of the past. We might arguably say the same about our art form—how we capture what unfolds before us, how we turn that raw material into a story, then history, and how we can keep it all alive for future generations to behold. The Young and the Dead, the new film by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini that premieres on HBO on May 12, profiles the Hollywood Forever Cemetary, where an enterprising young team of cemeterians has fashioned a
Dear Readers, Monthly publications such as ours are often encumbered by long lead times, and late breaking news can wreak havoc on the production schedule—and the editorial calendar. But sometimes news flashes and long-in-the-pipeline articles can strike a magical confluence, as with this issue, in which we take a look at the relationship between the cable industry and the documentary filmmaking community. The news of Discovery Communications’ proposed policy to eliminate end-roll credits from broadcasts of newly commissioned documentaries arrived in time for IDA President Michael Donaldson to