Jean-Pierre Gorin believes that "there is only one thing to do with the sophist, and that is to beat the shit out of him." Those who know Jean—Pierre Gorin have come to delight in the occasional oratorical drubbings of the pious and sophistic which he executes with characteristic style—funny, splenetic, passionate, excremental and Gallic. However, Gorin's importance for contemporary filmmakers is not because he coins bon mots in the cut and thrust of debate about films, politics and a variety of other things, but because his two American documentaries, Poto and Cabengo (1979) and Routine
Latest Posts
In his 1958 film Lettre de Siberie Chris Marker announced "I write to you from a far-off country" and in his films since then the inveterate wanderer has written from Cuba in Cuba Si (1961), from Paris in Le Joli Mai (1965) and La Jetee (1964), from America in the photo-essay L'Amerique Reve (1969) and in the remarkable film San Soleil (1982) from everywhere and nowhere in a flood of images and sounds. His films are about travelling and the traveller, and, like a relentless stream of postcards from abroad, they provoke questions about the distance between the reader and the writer, the writer
American Chronicles, David Lynch and Mark Frost's new half-hour documentary series on the Fox Network begins and ends with a huge unblinking grey eyeball. It's a memorable logo, perfectly suited to the Lynch-Frost Productions' concept that this show is about thirty minutes of non-judgmental videotape, about the alternative to investigative television journalism's quest to expose rather than record. Lynch and Frost have even come up with a term to define the form American Chronicles will be attempting. They call it "docu-poetry.'' The pilot, Farewell to the Flesh, is written and directed by
Several years back, Lee Grant, Barbara Kopple and Claudia Weill were guest speakers at a dinner meeting of the New York chapter of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. After their lively talks and answers to questions, one member of the audience rose and thanked them for a wonderful evening and saluted them for being "real pioneers." Considering their impressive backgrounds in so many aspects of film work (acting, editing, writing, camera and sound), and the major award-winning full length and short documentaries they had produced and/or directed, I would have called the three
“It would appear that in the entire history of Soviet art, no sector has made such a phenomenal leap in quality as the documentary cinema," wrote critic Alla Bossart in a 1989 issue of the Soviet journal Smena. Is this another example of Soviet hype? Perhaps not, when you consider that because of its transparent propaganda this genre has been one of the most discredited in the USSR. And yet, continuity with the pre-glasnost era can be seen. Soviet documentaries are still generally agitational works, though the policies they advocate in the Gorbachev era are very different. Often, they warn
Every year, when the Oscar nominations for Best Documentary are announced, the groans begin. How could they have nominated that? How could they leave out that one, the one the critics loved so much? lately the groans have been getting louder, and are being heard by the Academy itself. That doesn't mean that the Academy, or the members of the Documentary Committee, agree with all the complaints. But, for all its supposed faults, a case could be made that the Academy often ends up taking the longer, harder look. Admittedly, the Academy has never been known for honing the cutting edge of the
A distribution contract is a memorialization of the agreement between the owner of distribution rights in a film or video (usually the producer), and a company engaged in the business of marketing such works to users and purchasers (usually a distributor). What makes these agreements somewhat unique is that the product for sale is not a physical property, but rather intangible rights. For simplicity I will refer to film and video interchangeably as a "motion picture." In its intangible form a motion picture should be viewed as a collection of rights that may be sold or licensed in its entirety
Too many film students and their teachers think that preparing for a career in filmmaking has to do with learning how to manipulate interesting technologies—learning "hands on skills." Look at the average reel of student films and you can't help but notice that too many of them are really about the same thing: camera angles. Look at the music videos done as class assignments at any of several Western European film schools and you'll see that, like fast-food and blue jeans, technophilia knows no national boundaries. There are important exceptions but the concentration on technique as an end in
The First Annual Berlin International Film Festival opened forty years ago at the focal point of a Europe newly and conspicuously divided. By 1951, almost a dozen countries to the east had fallen under Stalinist control. This year at the Berlinale, things were different. In October, 1989, East Germany made the first big move in a game of democratic dominoes which rippled down through Czechoslovakia and across the Balkan states. Events happened with such astonishing rapidity that filmmakers and film festival directors alike were caught unprepared, as documents of revolution were rushed to their
The theory of documentary trickle-down holds that high technology may eventually dribble into the awaiting mouths of the hungry, but don't hold your breath. That's why the announcement of Arriflex's 535 Camera System, however innovative, exciting and incorporable, should be received as only possibly affecting dominant production methods in the future. There was, for instance, a two-decade gap between Arri's invention of the spinning mirror (1932), which first made possible through-the-lens reflex viewing of motion pictures, and the porting of that technology to the pin-registered 16St (1952).