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
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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
Barbara Kopple's success with American Dream in this year 's Sundance Film Festival documentary competition can only be described as a landslide victory. She won Best Filmmaker, the Audience Award, and shared Best Documentary with Jennie Livingston's Paris Is Burning. Five years in the making, and a million-dollar budget, American Dream follows the difficult decisions that workers and union leaders are forced to make in the one-company town of Austin, Minnesota when Hormel, a meat-packing company, drastically cuts its workers' wages. As an exploration of the effects of economic decline in
Events in the German Democratic Republic are moving fast and since I interviewed documentary filmmaker Helke Misselwitz last October, the Berlin wall has had large holes cut into it. Long-banned films are finally coming off the shelves, and will be featured at the Berlin Film Festival in February 1990. I met Helke Misselwitz at the Harvard Film archive where she presented her latest film, Winter ade, ( Goodbye to Winter), which was awarded both the Silver Dove and the International Film Critics' Prize at the 1988 Leipzig Festival. While much of the U.S. media jubilantly declares that the West
The lifting of certain restrictions in South Africa, namely the unbanning of anti-apartheid opponents, including the African National Congress, does not apply to visual material. To date this is still censored. The fists of the youths carrying the coffin punch the air as the they trot, chanting slogans, towards the police line. Left of frame, a news cameraman looms into view, backing off in front of the coffin-bearers. It is a familiar confrontation between militants in South Africa. We have seen it dozens of times before on the evening news— teargas, the shots, the screams of pain and rage
At the Mannheim International Film Week, non-fiction filmmakers don't have to feel like second-class citizens. Documentaries were well represented among the prize-winners at the 1989 festival, held from Oct. 2-7 in this mid-sized West German city. I was told that a seventeenth century ruler, inspired by the ideal of a rational order, gave central Mannheim its grid plan and a peculiar system of addresses: there are no street names, only ascending numbers and letters of the alphabet, which intersect. (For example, most screenings took place at P4, building 13, a modern multiplex cinema.) It made
If 16mm film production once seemed threatened to near extinction by small format video (and in news gathering, at least, this is indeed a fait accompli), three technical innovations promise to take the small format film robustly into the '90s. How does this sound for your next documentary: an inexpensive, well implemented film stock suitable for high-definition distribution, with machine readable code for easier posting, and digital stereo optical track? Like 16mm in the 1990's, perhaps. Not with standing already accomplished advances in 16mm film production—including Kodak 's tabular grain
by David Ehrenstein and Bill Reed The opening of Roger & Me was a few days away when we sat down to talk with its maker (his detractors might say perpetrator), Michael Moore. We were the last of 14 interviews Moore had held that day, but the filmmaker wasn't winded. For by this time, such pressure was par for the course with what had begun as a film and become a phenomenon. Picked by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association as the Best Documentary of 1989, this mordantly funny piece of investigative journalism centers on the the near-total economic collapse of Moore's hometown Flint, Michigan
Jacques-Yves Cousteau, best known as the man who first revealed the beauty and extraordinary life of the undersea world, is also a pioneering documentary filmmaker, inventor, innovator and environmentalist. Co-inventor of the aqua lung, he and his teams began the science of undersea archeology, made the first ocean floor search for petroleum, created the first small submarine for scientific work, carried out the first successful experiments in living under the sea, and invented the first underwater television system. Cousteau's love of film came early. At sixteen he was directing fast paced
The fifth annual IDA Awards presentation was held last November 17th in Los Angeles. The awards were handed out at luncheon ceremonies to honor personal achievement and outstanding documentary productions. Jacques-Yves Cousteau was presented with the 1989 IDA Career Achievement Award. Cousteau, the noted French ocean explorer, environmentalist and inventor, has produced more than 100 theatrical films and television programs, which have been seen by hundreds of millions of people throughout the world. The award to Cousteau was presented by David L. Wolper, last year's recipient, who called