Turn on a television and you inevitably find images of athletics. The sport changes, depending on the season and the continent. But the fascination for bodies in motion, exercising and competing against each other, endures. It has endured since the prehistory of cinema. One of the key predecessors of motion picture cameras was designed explicitly to study an athletic event—albeit one featuring horses rather than humans. As early as 1878, Eadweard Muybridge developed prototypical film technology in order to discover whether at any point running horses lift all four hooves off the ground at the
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It was 6:30 a.m. I knew because I threw my alarm clock across the room trying to squeeze an extra two minutes before the morning wake-up call. Before I could think, I rushed out to my car, lacking that all-too-crucial first cup of coffee. I picked up my partner, Jeffrey Lerner, who I am sure got the few extra minutes of rest I craved. Our mission this early Sunday morning was both simple and complex. First, we had to catch our plane to New Orleans—and without leaving the car in short term parking. Second. and more importantly, we had to pull out all the right stops, bust a few moves, call in a
Not only is the Los Angeles Independent Film Festival emerging as a hot venue on the festival circuit, but its slate of documentaries has captured the attention of audiences and critics alike. Acclaimed films like Colors Straight Up, The Cruise, Better Living through Circuitry and The Lifestyle made their debuts here, and the Audience Award for Best Feature has gone to documentaries three out of the past four years. "As far as documentaries go, that's the strangest part of LAIFF," says programming director Thomas Ethan Harris. "Here we are in Hollywood, a narrative town, yet when people look
The IDA's move to the Los Angeles Center Studios has been long and hard for both board and staff, but we are very excited to make this quantum leap. We will miss our good friends at the Production Center, who have been more than generous in providing a home for IDA from the first moment the idea of an association was voiced by Linda Buzzell. There is too much history, too many fond memories of IDA in the Production Center to recount them all here. We do have to thank a special few of our colleagues there who kept the Association going through its ups and downs at that location since its
For the past three years Marina Goldovskaya, renowned documentarian and professor at the UCLA School of Film and Television, has organized—in association with the IDA—a forum for documentary-makers called The Documentary Salon Series. This program has shown documentaries from around the world to both the public and students. Historically, artists and great thinkers have met for hundreds of years in salons to share ideas and discuss their new works. The salons of Europe were particularly well-known for the brilliant minds that participated and helped each other in their artistic efforts
While on a worldwide trek, I suddenly came up with the idea that I wanted to start producing documentaries when I returned home to Germany in September 2000. After New Zealand, the USA was the next country on my list; more precisely, Hollywood. I was sure that there I could get an internship and gain knowledge aboul creating documentaries. After applying to several organizations, I received word from back home in Germany that a letter from an organization called the International Documentary Association had arrived for me. My sister read it to me over the phone. Merely a week afier I had a
THE BIZ: THE BASIC BUSINESS, LEGAL AND FINANCIAL ASPECTS OF THE FILM INDUSTRY by Schuyler M. Moore Los Angeles: Silman-James Press, 2000. ISBN: I -879-505-53-3 364 pp. $26.9-5 (paper), 7"x9" As a media professor, I am always on the lookout for books and writings that effectively convey useful information about entering and surviving the "real world" media industry maze. My top-most criteria for determining the "effectiveness" of such works are accessibility of language, depth of explanation and, above all, refusal to play into the self-promoting rhetoric and hype of industry-speak. It has been
Dear IDA Members: IDA depends on volunteers to accomplish our goals and carry out our programs throughout the year. During any given year, we call on members and non-members alike to participate as seminar panelists, awards jury members, screening Q&A moderators, contributing writers to the magazine and the like. We have volunteer committees that serve in an advisory capacity and work with staff to implement our programs. A member of the board of directors chairs each committee. Committee members offer flesh voices, experience and varied perspectives to help guide our programs and services
After some 35 years of filming exotic wildlife in remote corners of planet Earth, Wolfgang Bayer has turned the camera on himself. He is producing Wolf 's World, a feature length assessment of what the future holds for the bears, butterflies, manta rays, bats and the other living things he has recorded for posterity. He says that the mass killings of animals that was commonplace 20 to 30 years ago has lessened because the public has become much more conscious of the issue. At the same time, their habitats are being destroyed, leaving them no place to roam. The 35 mm film features Bayer, his
The country is Portugal, as it enters the 21 st century with its relatively newfound democracy. At the invitation of the 10th Encontros Internacionais de Cinema Documental (International Encounters in Documentary Cinema) in Lisbon, I showed up at the festival and the preceding documentary conference in November 1999, not quite knowing what to expect since it was my first visit. The warmth, energy and passion at both events was infectious, and although my hosts kept me busy from 9 A.M. to 2 A.M. for six days, I felt refreshed and rejuvenated by the people I met and the films I saw. The three