Ever since the controversial and dramatic first appearance of Titicut Follies in 1967, Frederick Wiseman has steadfastly charted a unique course in documentary film. He has produced, directed, and edited 24 films in as many years, most recently the award-winning six-hour Near Death and his paean to New York City's Central Park. Working from within the cinéma vérité tradition of employing light-weight hand-held equipment to observationally explore situations with no intended interference, Wiseman re-modelled this tradition with a variation he frequently characterizes as "reality fictions" or
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No doubt when most people hear the name Barbara Kopple they think of Harlan County, USA, her emotionally charged film on the struggle of a coal miners' union against exploitive management. However, in the 13 years since she made that Academy Award-winning documentary, Kopple has produced and directed a number of films, including Keeping On, a dramatic feature for American Playhouse; Winter Soldier, which won the Cannes Film Festival Critic's Choice Award; Civil Rights: The Struggle Continues, a video documentary about the commemoration of the deaths of three civil rights workers killed in
Reality Fictions: The Films of Frederick Wiseman By Thomas W. Benson and Carolyn Anderson Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989 $45.00 In a country where surviving as a documentary filmmaker is an art in itself, Frederick Wiseman has not only flourished but created a body of work more imposing than any other independent documentarian in American history. In more than 30 years of moviemaking, Robert Flaherty made only five major films. In contrast, Wiseman has already produced 23 documentaries since he began filming Titicut Follies in 1966, and a 24th, Aspen, will be released
Film and Reform: John Grierson and the Documentary Film Movement By Ian Aitken Routledge £30 "He was more concerned with the representation of fish than with the representation of a labor process." Thus wrote the American critic Harry A. Potamkin in 1930 of Grierson's Drifters. Is there anything more to be said about Grierson and the British Documentary movement? Ian Aitken thinks there is and has written a book which sets out to challenge the multifarious accounts of Grierson on the ground that they fail to take account of his intellectual formation. In Drifters, then, "the subordination of
The mutable, enigmatic nature of documentary films was never more apparent than at the Robert Flaherty Soviet American Seminar, held in Riga, Latvia in September 1990. A delegation of over 40 American film and video makers, critics, scholars, and programmers met with their Soviet counterparts for eight days of screenings and discussion in Jurmala, a resort town on the Baltic Sea. The Soviets, many of whom had attended screenings of the American Showcase documentaries which toured nine Soviet cities earlier in the year, had come to expect film journalism from Americans, what in their republics
There's a sense in which PC based editing systems represent a most unrevolutionary revolution. It's taken years of sophisticated science, trickling down from Silicon Valley, to design personal computers that, essentially, imitate some of the least high-tech devices. For many documentary editors that's quite enough, given that the equipment used to cut film is among the most low-tech and labor intensive imaginable. Several companies have introduced a new generation of computer-based offline editing systems, targeted for erstwhile and possibly dis enchanted flatbed or Moviola cutters. These
Some of the most significant revolutions in the history of film and video have been sparked by the appearance of small and inexpensive camera—new equipment that granted individuals access to “the means of production.” Cinéma Vérité in France and Direct Cinema in the United States emerged in the 1950’s and 60’s as lighter, smaller, and less obtrusive 16mm cameras became available. These movements created a new film vocabulary based upon handheld cinematography that revolutionized the non-fiction form. The now mythic Sony Portapak video camera, introduced in 1969, became the weapon of choice for
Almost every review I've seen of Stephanie Black's exceptionally moving 70- minute film concerning the labor abuses suffered by Jamaican men brought to Southern Florida to pick sugarcane, mentions the way the picture looks. This is fairly unusual for a new documentary, but particularly for one in which most of the footage was shot clandestinely. For her work on H-2 Worker, Maryse Alberti, the director of photography, was awarded the 1990 Sundance Film Festival Award for Best Cinematography. Access to the heavily guarded camps is severely restricted; after sneaking inside, Alberti was often
While many documentary makers struggle to create the illusion of objectivity in their films, Ross McElwee has celebrated the inevitable subjectivity of the form. He has experimented with a highly personal style of filmmaking, working as a one-person film crew and using his ideas and curiosity, his dry, ironic humor and even his libido as primary motivating forces within his films. His two-and-a-half-hour autobiographical epic, Sherman's March, which landed him offers from nearly every major studio after its release in 1986, is already considered an American classic. McElwee turned Hollywood
Paris Is Burning opens with a dramatic entrance by a magnificent creature named Pepper Labeija. Wearing immense puffs of gold lame, gloves up to her elbows, and a feather headdress, Pepper glides into a Harlem Elks lodge as though the place is her own special kingdom, and in a sense it is, since she is a legendary drag queen. She walks the floor amid a throng of admirers until the emcee of the event orders them to clear the floor. Sexy and defiant, she struts to a disco beat and blithely sheds her headdress and sleeves to reveal a somewhat more sedate ensemble. If the spectacle looks a bit