Playback

I was an undergraduate when I saw Mike Rubbo's Sad Song of Yellow Skin and decided to become a documentary filmmaker. I felt as if a truck had

I read a front-page article in The New York Times recently that stated that the US is currently buying millions of barrels of oil a year from Iraq

In the 1960s, when I had just arrived in New York City, I spent a year as an assistant to Willard Van Dyke, the renowned social documentary filmmaker

Every time I watch The Times of Harvey Milk, directed by Rob Epstein and produced by Richard Schmienchen, I am overcome with emotion. Call me a

One night, when I was about 16, living in suburban Long Island, The Weavers: Wasn't That A Time, a 1982 documentary film about the radical folk

Picture this: A gregarious, glad-handing Irish pol finds himself in front of a skeptical class of well off, unsmiling high school students. Asked to

Before I was a particularly seasoned documentary viewer, I had an epiphany. At the time, I thought it was about documentary in particular, but now I

Chris Marker’s Le Joli Mai was made in Paris in 1962, as France’s war with Algeria was finally coming to an end. This seminal work was greatly

Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl's fetishistic film about Hitler's 1934 Nuremberg rally, is a controversial choice for "Playback," but not a

When I first started making documentaries in the ’60s, it was in the midst of the Direct Cinema revolution in America. Suddenly, it had become