Last month (i.e., April) the National Film Theatre in London ran a season featuring some of the best documentaries produced by British television in the Eighties. The animating spirit of the season, however, was as much valedictory as celebratory. Its title was "Goodbye To All This?" Concern about the future of the British television documentary is inextricably bound up with profound worries about the future prospects of British television as a whole. The cause of all this angst is the Broadcasting Bill which is at present passing through its various Parliamentary stages. Government media
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Satellite Cultures is an exhibition of videos made by both white and Aboriginal Australians that claims to look at the decolonization of images in 'postcolonial' Australia. The exhibition offers a rare chance to see Australian Aboriginal video art and television, but its display in the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City raises important questions about the reappropriation by the first world of images of, and by, indigenous peoples. If aboriginal videos are presented as art objects, divorced from their context and without the participation of their makers, isn't this, in fact, a
Modern artists have often discovered that negative publicity helps their careers by publicizing their works and winning them sympathizers as well as foes. Amos Gitai, a forty-year-old Israeli filmmaker, established a reputation with his first documentary, House (1980), in part because Israeli television, which had commissioned the fifty-minute work, refused to air it. "Israel is a very passionate place in which the significance of an event is always exaggerated, "Gitai told me in January in Paris, where he now lives. "When the film was not broadcast, there was an hysterical reaction. And since
At Appalshop the 1960s never died—they just grew up. Now celebrating adulthood at age twenty-one, Appalshop is a media-arts center in the small town of Whitesburg, Kentucky (population 1,500), dedicated to the empowerment of Appalachian people through their art and culture. From a rehabbed warehouse on Whitesburg's winding main street comes a steady stream of films, plays, music, books, exhibits, and festivals. Appalshop's work tours the country, plays on television, and wins awards at international festivals. But more important to the Appalshoppers, it reaches Appalachians at home. "When we
"'Tis the business of little minds to shrink," declared Tom Paine, extolling moral courage at the crux of the American revolt. If Paine were alive today and forced by the demise of pamphleteering to write columns on technology, he might instead declare: "'Tis big business for clever minds to shrink." Witness the Walkman, audio CD, 8mm video, Betacam, 3.5" micro floppy disk—each a runaway success, stamped with the hallmarks of miniaturization, new markets and flowing profits. So what possessed Sony to buck its own trend, to prop-up creaky old 3/ 4" U/matic, with its bulky cassette (too big for
If you are looking for documentary, there are worse places to go than Canada, where it is not a dirty word. This year, there were two good reasons to go north. One was the annual meeting of the University Film and Video Association, held this year in Toronto; and overlapping somewhat, the 50th anniversary of the founding of the National Film Board of Canada, the most illustrious documentary institution in the world. Although neither "documentary'' nor "Canadian film" bring a gleam to the eye of the average American academic, the UFVA was on Canadian soil, and so it was only fitting to have a
Gary Crowdus has the bearing of New York's film intelligentsia, and the credentials to support it. A graduate of New York University's Institute of Film and Television, he is founding editor of the magazine Cineaste, and Vice President of The Cinema Guild distribution company. But he comes to the fore of social issues with heartland roots. The Detroit-bred son of a Ford line worker and a housewife, Crowdus' love of movies was sparked by the fundamentally mainstream Lawrence of Arabia and The Miracle Worker, a far cry from the Third World and alternative film and video he has come to champion
Our television networks have made us familiar with documentaries that inform the public about technological inventions. What is less common is the artistic documentary that assumes we have assimilated cliches about technology and tries to expose them. Like most modern art, such films and videos often use shock techniques to disrupt our old patterns of thought. Irony in the narration, strange visual images, and startling juxtapositions in the realm of both sight and sound are the hallmarks of this style. Two West Berlin filmmakers in their mid-forties, Hartmut Bitomsky and Harun Farocki
"The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality." - Dante Alighieri BBC's chief of Documentary Features gives American filmmaker Allan Francovich the good news: BBC's TV documentaries regularly get higher ratings than Dallas! As evidence, Francovich searing three part/three hour masterpiece on Central America's agony, The Houses are Full of Smoke, airs on BBC-2—on prime time—for three successive Friday nights (May/ June) to very large audiences, hefty media attention and critical acclaim. A rural Englishman is so overcome he
Djinguereber Mosque, Timbuktu. 'There is a people called the Mericans ?' he asked. 'There is.' 'They say they have visited the Moon.' 'They have.' 'They are blasphemers.' Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines. When Apollo 16 astronaut Charles Duke went to sleep during his first night on the moon in 1972 he had a dream. In it he and mission commander John Young were driving on the moon in their lunar Rover when they discovered tyre tracks in the arid lunar dust. Following the tracks they came upon another Rover in which two astronauts were sitting... Charles Duke, and John Young. They spoke, and the