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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

Twilight City, the latest work from the British-based Black Audio Film Collective, is a profound meditation on Lon­don and on the city, on being black, on the savagery unleashed by the Thatcher government, on exile and on abandonment. The film is a tapestry woven from interviews, glimpses of historical footage, stylized dream sequences, and images from the contemporary city. Holding it together is the fictional device of a daughter's (Olivia's) beautiful and poetic letter to her long absent mother (Eugenia), a letter whose text we hear as we watch her writing. Eugenia left London for Dominica

Bruce Weber's latest film, Let's Get Lost , documents the low-life style of Chet Baker from young trumpet god of 1953 to the time-ravaged jazz foot soldier who fell to his death from a hotel window last May. Let's Get Lost, Bruce Weber's second feature-length documentary in two years, begins unassumingly, calmly offering rather than enticing you to step behind its inscrutable black and white surface. By the time you've reached a rapport with the film and with its raison d'etre—the legendary jazz trumpeter and vocalist Chet Baker—it has turned introspective, and the inscrutability has given way

Whatever the final outcome of the Helms Amendment, significant damage has already been done. Arts institutions will now think twice before funding potentially controversial material, many no doubt opting out, a la Corcoran. (The Helms Amendment would restrict Federal grants for art that is deemed "obscene or indecent" or that "denigrates, debases, or reviles a person, group or class of citizens on the basis of race, creed, sex, handicap, age or national origin.") These provisions are, of course, vague, difficult to interpret, and ultimately leave the door wide open for the completely arbitrary

The failure of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to nominate Errol Morris' The Thin Blue Line continues to raise serious questions about Academy voting procedure. One of the most recurrent criticisms levelled at the Academy focuses on the fact that, unlike other categories, documentarians are not nominated by their peers, but by a committee made up of made up of members from all other branches of the Academy. Former IDA President Robert Guenette addresses this in a new column for letters, and we are interested in readers opinions on the subject. In this rich double issue Nicholas

When I read Nicholas Webster 's article "How Robert Flaherty Changed My Life" ( International Documentary Winter/Spring 1988), I vividly remembered the Soviet Cinema of the 60's; the joyful discovery of the western film world, it's great films and geniuses. This period came after the long Stalinist period which removed the Soviets from its contact with the rest of the world. Now a selected circle of filmmakers, students, and members of the Union of Soviet Filmmakers were allowed to watch western films. Filmmakers, especially students, chose their film mentors. These filmmakers protested

Marcel Ophuls' moral passion and cinematic methods have been renovating documentary film for over 20 years. From the re­nowned The Sorrow and the Pity (1970) to Academy Award winner Hotel Terminus (1988), his films are acts of "discovery," using boldly innovative techniques to explore human behavior under extreme situations. Through the interplay of brilliant research and creative interviewing, Ophuls rescues our nearly forgotten wartime/postwar past to discover its living impact on the present. And as "research probes," they raise potent, disturbing questions about filmmaking as well as

Nina Rosenblum's Female High Security Unit looks like it will be one of 1989's most important examples of the investigative documentary form. The director of America and Lewis Hine, a much-heralded documentary of 1983, Rosenblum is currently completing a feature-length expose of how selected women prisoners in the United States have been held in permanent underground isolation under conditions of extreme sensory deprivation. The severity of their conditions has been denounced by organizations including Amnesty International, The American Civil Liberties Union, The Center for Constitutional

On January 17, 1989, Kodak introduced four extended range motion picture films at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles and at their regional headquarters in New York. All four new films incorporate advanced use of tabular grain emulsion technology, augmented by breakthroughs in chemistry and design. One common denominator is that all are designed to provide a wide range of underexposure latitude. This gives cinematographers the freedom to shoot in low-light situations and where there is fast-moving action, without sacrificing image quality. All Eastman EXR films are

Let me begin by stating the obvious: images in U.S. media—not just images of Black people, but all images—are highly influenced by the political conditions of the times. Moreover, Black images have not been and still are not con­trolled by Black producers, and, therefore, these images were created to serve the psychic purposes of those that do control them. Because Europeans originally brought Africans here as slaves to provide service and labor and nothing more, the represen­tations of these slaves were used to rationalize and reinforce their intended place in society. Thus, racial