A well-told story ends when the credits roll, but not so documentaries. There, in most cases, the lives of the people depicted on-screen continue on, transformed by the fact of being filmed — and even more by whatever attention the project ignites in the culture at large. That’s why, in the hundreds of post-screening Q&As I’ve seen for docs over the years, the same questions come up virtually without fail: What’s happened since? How are the movie’s subjects doing now?
In “Subject,” co-directors Jennifer Tiexiera and Camilla Hall catch up with the people at the center of several major documentaries — from “Hoop Dreams” and “The Wolfpack” to “Capturing the Friedmans” and “The Staircase” — to see how their involvement in such projects changed their lives. That may be the hook that lures in audiences, though the film is far more than just a years-later epilogue to those high-profile docs.
In “Subject,” co-directors Jennifer Tiexiera and Camilla Hall catch up with the people at the center of several major documentaries — from “Hoop Dreams” and “The Wolfpack” to “Capturing the Friedmans” and “The Staircase” — to see how their involvement in such projects changed their lives. That may be the hook that lures in audiences, though the film is far more than just a years-later epilogue to those high-profile docs.
- 11/6/2023
- by Peter Debruge
- Variety Film + TV
While HBO Max is undergoing a sea change behind the scenes, the streamer still boasts an impressive catalog of films. Its documentary line up is particularly strong, thanks to partnerships with TCM, the Criterion Collection, and HBO itself, as well as the inclusion of several HBO Max originals. On the service, you'll find everything from groundbreaking classics that defined the genre, like "Nanook of the North," to docuseries that dive into seminal artists and cultural icons, like "George Harrison: Living in the Material World," to investigative films that probe the human condition, like "Mommy Dead and Dearest."
Whether you're looking to learn more about an overlooked moment in history or dive into the dark underbelly of true crime, there's something for every kind of documentary fan on HBO Max. From the countless hours of material to choose from, we've gathered the best documentaries streaming on HBO Max right now.
20 Feet From Stardom...
Whether you're looking to learn more about an overlooked moment in history or dive into the dark underbelly of true crime, there's something for every kind of documentary fan on HBO Max. From the countless hours of material to choose from, we've gathered the best documentaries streaming on HBO Max right now.
20 Feet From Stardom...
- 9/13/2022
- by Molly Turner
- Slash Film
Four documentary filmmakers were invited to participate in the Sundance Institute’s newly created Indigenous non-fiction intensive program that concludes July 29.
The three-day program was created to identify Indigenous artists creating formally bold and personal work and to uplift them with a small grant and mentorship on a current edit of their short-form documentary films.
The four filmmakers selected to partake in the new initiative are: Sarah Liese (“Coming In”), Sean Connelly (“A Justice Advancing Architecture Tour”), Olivia Camfield and Woodrow Hunt (“If You Look Under There You’ll Find It”). The advisors for the inaugural program include Emmy award-winning filmmaker Colleen Thurston, filmmaker-editor Maya Daisy Hawke (“Cave of Forgotten Dreams”), and filmmaker Darol Olu Kae (“I Ran From It and Was Still in It”).
Each participant will receive year-round creative support from Sundance’s Indigenous program staffers as they work to complete their films.
Indigenous program director Adam Piron...
The three-day program was created to identify Indigenous artists creating formally bold and personal work and to uplift them with a small grant and mentorship on a current edit of their short-form documentary films.
The four filmmakers selected to partake in the new initiative are: Sarah Liese (“Coming In”), Sean Connelly (“A Justice Advancing Architecture Tour”), Olivia Camfield and Woodrow Hunt (“If You Look Under There You’ll Find It”). The advisors for the inaugural program include Emmy award-winning filmmaker Colleen Thurston, filmmaker-editor Maya Daisy Hawke (“Cave of Forgotten Dreams”), and filmmaker Darol Olu Kae (“I Ran From It and Was Still in It”).
Each participant will receive year-round creative support from Sundance’s Indigenous program staffers as they work to complete their films.
Indigenous program director Adam Piron...
- 7/29/2022
- by Addie Morfoot
- Variety Film + TV
Once upon a time, asking audiences to watch a documentary was like asking them to do their homework or eat their broccoli — sure, it’d be good for ’em, but they probably wouldn’t have a ton of fun doing it.
Early docs were often weighed down by heavy topics (a lot of war content) and dry, straightforward presentations (think newsreels). Eventually, filmmakers began introducing cinematic touches and more dynamism to documentary storytelling, though progress was slow. In 1922, “Nanook of the North,” the first feature doc, incorporated staged and fictionalized elements. The Sixties brought direct cinema and cinema verité, the fly-on-the-wall style of the Maysles brothers, Robert Drew, D.A. Pennebaker, and so many others. In the Eighties and Nineties, cable expanded documentary’s reach to wider audiences, and in the early 2000s films like “Fahrenheit 9/11,” “March of the Penguins,” and “An Inconvenient Truth” became legitimate box-office breakthroughs. Still, the...
Early docs were often weighed down by heavy topics (a lot of war content) and dry, straightforward presentations (think newsreels). Eventually, filmmakers began introducing cinematic touches and more dynamism to documentary storytelling, though progress was slow. In 1922, “Nanook of the North,” the first feature doc, incorporated staged and fictionalized elements. The Sixties brought direct cinema and cinema verité, the fly-on-the-wall style of the Maysles brothers, Robert Drew, D.A. Pennebaker, and so many others. In the Eighties and Nineties, cable expanded documentary’s reach to wider audiences, and in the early 2000s films like “Fahrenheit 9/11,” “March of the Penguins,” and “An Inconvenient Truth” became legitimate box-office breakthroughs. Still, the...
- 9/2/2021
- by Addie Morfoot
- Variety Film + TV
I first learned that “Roadrunner,” Morgan Neville’s documentary about the life and death of Anthony Bourdain, contains three sentences spoken by Bourdain that he never actually spoke out loud in the same way that you learn about a lot of things these days: by seeing an eruption of outrage about it on Twitter. The eruption immediately sent me to the New Yorker article in which Neville, the award-winning director of “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” and “20 Feet From Stardom,” first explained how he used AI technology to feed 10 hours of Bourdain voice recordings into a computer, which then simulated Bourdain’s reading of those sentences — every one of which he had, in fact, written.
The words weren’t faked; the sound of him speaking them was. This was characterized, on social media, as an ethical lapse, and my first reaction is to say that I don’t necessarily disagree.
The words weren’t faked; the sound of him speaking them was. This was characterized, on social media, as an ethical lapse, and my first reaction is to say that I don’t necessarily disagree.
- 7/18/2021
- by Owen Gleiberman
- Variety Film + TV
Variety highlights a selection of Spanish titles being moved at this year’s Cannes Marché du Film.
All The Moons
(Arcadia Motion Pictures, Kowalski Films, Pris & Batty, Ilargia Films, Noodles Production)
A period drama about an orphan girl rescued by a mysterious woman who grants her immortality as a vampire.
Sales: Filmax
The August Virgin
(Los Ilusos Films)
A Karlovy Vary Fipresci Prize winner, film revolves around a woman who spends the summer in Madrid. Jonás Trueba’s latest movie, already bought for the U.S. by Outsider Films.
Sales: Bendita Film
Between Dog And Wolf
(El Viaje Films, Autonauta Films, Blond Indian Films)
Berlinale Forum player portrays soldiers from Castro’s Cuban Revolution still training, nearly 60 years later, in Cuba’s Sierra Maestra. Directed by Irene Gutiérrez.
Sales: Bendita Film
The Consequences
(Sin Rodeos, N279 Entertainment, Potemkino, Érase Una Vez)
Writer-director Claudia Pinto Emperador’s follow-up to her 2013 feature debut,...
All The Moons
(Arcadia Motion Pictures, Kowalski Films, Pris & Batty, Ilargia Films, Noodles Production)
A period drama about an orphan girl rescued by a mysterious woman who grants her immortality as a vampire.
Sales: Filmax
The August Virgin
(Los Ilusos Films)
A Karlovy Vary Fipresci Prize winner, film revolves around a woman who spends the summer in Madrid. Jonás Trueba’s latest movie, already bought for the U.S. by Outsider Films.
Sales: Bendita Film
Between Dog And Wolf
(El Viaje Films, Autonauta Films, Blond Indian Films)
Berlinale Forum player portrays soldiers from Castro’s Cuban Revolution still training, nearly 60 years later, in Cuba’s Sierra Maestra. Directed by Irene Gutiérrez.
Sales: Bendita Film
The Consequences
(Sin Rodeos, N279 Entertainment, Potemkino, Érase Una Vez)
Writer-director Claudia Pinto Emperador’s follow-up to her 2013 feature debut,...
- 6/23/2020
- by Carole Horst
- Variety Film + TV
The documentary-maker is locked down with a seven-year-old which means that family films edge out Citizen Kane
Read all the other Lockdown watch choicesThe best arts and entertainment during self-isolation
I wish I could send over a list of all the great films I am catching up with during the lockdown: Citizen Kane, Nanook of the North, Battleship Potemkin … However my reality is very different. I am locked down with Charlie, my seven-year-old son, so my viewing consists of The Secret Life of Pets 2, which I’ve watched at least 10 times (and highly recommend); The Lion King, brilliant; Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle, wonderful; How to Train Your Dragon, Charlie loves it, me less so; Spider-Man, way above my head; The Grinch, brilliant. Occasionally I try to sneak in Planet Earth; Serengeti, though, was a complete bust.
Related: Nick Broomfield: 'I was a rebel, causing as much trouble as possible'
Continue reading.
Read all the other Lockdown watch choicesThe best arts and entertainment during self-isolation
I wish I could send over a list of all the great films I am catching up with during the lockdown: Citizen Kane, Nanook of the North, Battleship Potemkin … However my reality is very different. I am locked down with Charlie, my seven-year-old son, so my viewing consists of The Secret Life of Pets 2, which I’ve watched at least 10 times (and highly recommend); The Lion King, brilliant; Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle, wonderful; How to Train Your Dragon, Charlie loves it, me less so; Spider-Man, way above my head; The Grinch, brilliant. Occasionally I try to sneak in Planet Earth; Serengeti, though, was a complete bust.
Related: Nick Broomfield: 'I was a rebel, causing as much trouble as possible'
Continue reading.
- 4/13/2020
- by Nick Broomfield
- The Guardian - Film News
D.A. Pennebaker had already been making documentaries for 12 years when he got a historic assignment in 1965 to document Bob Dylan at his most mercurial. Once “Dont Look Back” was released in 1967, followed a year later by “Monterey Pop,” Pennebaker’s path as popular music’s preeminent documentarian was set — or at least the biggest part of his legacy was, since he continued to take on dozens of socially conscious, non-musical subjects, to not always quite as much attention.
For decades, the patina of those two films attracted musicians from John Lennon to Depeche Mode. Some were shorts or made for television, and many got held up over issues that saw them being released years or even decades after they were shot. Pennebaker was famous for skewing toward the grittiest, least slick end of the scale in his concert coverage, favoring spontaneous 16mm shoots that were the very opposite of the...
For decades, the patina of those two films attracted musicians from John Lennon to Depeche Mode. Some were shorts or made for television, and many got held up over issues that saw them being released years or even decades after they were shot. Pennebaker was famous for skewing toward the grittiest, least slick end of the scale in his concert coverage, favoring spontaneous 16mm shoots that were the very opposite of the...
- 8/4/2019
- by Chris Willman
- Variety Film + TV
Cinereach announced the four recipients of 2019’s Producer Award, a $50,000 filmmaking prize as part of the Cinereach Producers Initiative, on Friday.
The indie film company has selected Jessica Devaney (“Always in Season”), Alexandra Lazarowich (“Fast Horse”), Kishori Rajan (“Random Acts of Flyness”) and Jamund Washington (“Tramps”) as independent producers that have demonstrated vision and integrity, contributed to the film community as mentors and leaders, and enriched the culture through their films.
“This year’s group of recipients is particularly exciting because Jessica, Alexandra, Kishori and Jamund have each created poignant, culturally thoughtful work that breaks down barriers on a multitude of platforms. Their commitment to this type of work is shifting our industry in meaningful ways,” Merrill Sterritt, head of partnerships and creative initiatives at Cinereach, said in a statement.
Also Read: How to Be a 'Real' Producer: Know Your Audience and 'Fight for Your Life'
“We are proud to...
The indie film company has selected Jessica Devaney (“Always in Season”), Alexandra Lazarowich (“Fast Horse”), Kishori Rajan (“Random Acts of Flyness”) and Jamund Washington (“Tramps”) as independent producers that have demonstrated vision and integrity, contributed to the film community as mentors and leaders, and enriched the culture through their films.
“This year’s group of recipients is particularly exciting because Jessica, Alexandra, Kishori and Jamund have each created poignant, culturally thoughtful work that breaks down barriers on a multitude of platforms. Their commitment to this type of work is shifting our industry in meaningful ways,” Merrill Sterritt, head of partnerships and creative initiatives at Cinereach, said in a statement.
Also Read: How to Be a 'Real' Producer: Know Your Audience and 'Fight for Your Life'
“We are proud to...
- 6/7/2019
- by Brian Welk
- The Wrap
Mubi's retrospective, The Groundbreaking Ethnography of Jean Rouch, is showing December 2018 – February 2019 in the United States.Jean RouchWhen asked by Robert Gardner, on his TV interview program “Screening Room,” whether he primarily considered himself a filmmaker or an anthropologist, Jean Rouch gave a customarily playful answer. “Anthropologists consider me as a filmmaker. When I’m with filmmakers they consider me as an anthropologist . . . you see I’m a Gemini by birth, which means I’m in two places [at] the same time.”1 To understand how Rouch could stand so completely between chairs, one should have a bit of background in the state of ethnographic film before Rouch, and for that matter, a bit of context for his impact on the larger world of cinema. Ethnography has, of course, been primarily a written form, an adjunct discipline to anthropology, its humanistic or literary side, if you will. Nevertheless, ethnographers, like anthropologists generally,...
- 1/2/2019
- MUBI
Every two years or so, there comes a new Robert Greene film whose beautiful images, fascinating subjects, and thorough investigation of both immediate and surrounding concepts become overrun by the true-false question — what control Greene wields, where the spontaneous and constructed do or don’t collide. His latest, Bisbee ’17, sometimes plays like a provocation towards those assumptions, heavily relying on the reenactment of a horrific, little-known strike against working-class citizens (as our admiring review handily summarizes), parlaying the filmmaker’s strengths for documentary portrait and narrative whats-it into what may be his densest work to date.
Catching up with Greene a few weeks before Bisbee ’17 opened at Film Forum –where it just began a theatrical run in advance of an ambitious, cross-country tour — I found myself, as usual, in a long, long conversation that easily branched from the work at hand to the conversation that’s surrounded it. In his world,...
Catching up with Greene a few weeks before Bisbee ’17 opened at Film Forum –where it just began a theatrical run in advance of an ambitious, cross-country tour — I found myself, as usual, in a long, long conversation that easily branched from the work at hand to the conversation that’s surrounded it. In his world,...
- 9/6/2018
- by Nick Newman
- The Film Stage
Discussing the Other, race, and privilege in documentaries is no straightforward task. Who can tell whose story to whom using whose story-telling techniques have been questions since before 1922’s Nanook of the North, and when we toss in why, and whose paying for it, it doesn’t get simpler. At a panel on perspective and point of view in storytelling at Doc NYC Pro, filmmaker Renee Tajima-Peña deftly moderated as five award-winning filmmakers who present as non-white grappled with some of the issues around representation, the white gaze, and what we as individuals can do to support each other, act authentically […]...
- 12/12/2017
- by Lauretta Prevost
- Filmmaker Magazine - Blog
By Jacob Oller
Truth needs a little creativity sometimes. n the early 1920s, director Robert Flaherty decided to film the incredible and different society of Inuits that he’d stumbled upon. He ruined the first draft, then went back and reshot what later became 1922’s Nanook of the North, a feature-length docudrama that became the controversial catalyst for a […]
The article Birth, Death, and Dramatization: The Invention of the Modern Documentary appeared first on Film School Rejects.
Truth needs a little creativity sometimes. n the early 1920s, director Robert Flaherty decided to film the incredible and different society of Inuits that he’d stumbled upon. He ruined the first draft, then went back and reshot what later became 1922’s Nanook of the North, a feature-length docudrama that became the controversial catalyst for a […]
The article Birth, Death, and Dramatization: The Invention of the Modern Documentary appeared first on Film School Rejects.
- 11/30/2017
- by Jacob Oller
- FilmSchoolRejects.com
Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Robert Flaherty's Moana with Sound (1926 / 1980) is playing August 30 - September 29, 2017 on Mubi in most countries around the world.Slowly, slowly, the tufunga taps his comb of bone needles into the young man’s lower back. His movements are practiced and precise, each tap marking the young man for the rest of his days. The young man winces in agony, sweat pouring down his face as his relatives wipe away the blood and excess ink with tapa cloth. A witch-woman stokes a fire and burns candlenut stalks to make more soot for the tufunga’s ink. The infernal tapping continues, now on his upper back, now on his flanks, now on his knees—the most painful part of the ceremony. Outside the hut, a crowd of men dance and sing. “Courage to Moana,” they cry, “Courage to Moana!
- 8/30/2017
- MUBI
IFC’s “Documentary Now!” has always gone for more than the cheap laugh. While it’s a mockumentary of public-tv programming and the documentaries they feature, the real pleasure lies in watching how it will create homages to great nonfiction filmmaking.
“We really wanted you to be clicking through the channels, landing on our show and thinking that it is a real documentary, and then suddenly say, ‘Hey, hold on for a minute — that’s Fred Armisen, what’s he doing in this documentary?'” said Alexander Buono, the executive producer who has co-directed and served as cinematographer on every episode of the show’s two seasons.
Buono and his fellow co-director, executive producer Rhys Thomas, started their collaboration on “Saturday Night Live” where every week they were charged with creating send-ups of everything from a suspense drama to a pharmaceutical commercial to a music video.
Read More: How ‘The...
“We really wanted you to be clicking through the channels, landing on our show and thinking that it is a real documentary, and then suddenly say, ‘Hey, hold on for a minute — that’s Fred Armisen, what’s he doing in this documentary?'” said Alexander Buono, the executive producer who has co-directed and served as cinematographer on every episode of the show’s two seasons.
Buono and his fellow co-director, executive producer Rhys Thomas, started their collaboration on “Saturday Night Live” where every week they were charged with creating send-ups of everything from a suspense drama to a pharmaceutical commercial to a music video.
Read More: How ‘The...
- 6/7/2017
- by Chris O'Falt
- Indiewire
Close-Up is a column that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place (1950) is playing June 2 - July 2, 2017 on Mubi in the United Kingdom as part of the series The American Noir.Although mostly remembered now by the public for his 1955 classic Rebel Without a Cause, Nicholas Ray left behind him a legacy of over twenty feature films. A veritable cinematic explorer, Ray traversed genres ranging from noir, western (most notably his 1954 gender-bending cult Trucolor extravaganza Johnny Guitar), melodrama, epic and experimental film. He dared as few would to shoot in remote and forbidding locations such as the Arctic and Everglades National Park. What are Ray’s films about? As in his signature piece Rebel, despite Ray’s wide-ranging endeavors in genre and subject matter we are often met with anti-hero protagonists who struggle and rail against authority while lamenting their meaningless and circumscribed existences.
- 6/2/2017
- MUBI
It’s still hard to believe that Carrie Fisher is no longer with us. But at least now, we can finally see the final role the iconic Star Wars actress filmed before her sudden passing last December: her hilarious work as Rob’s prickly mother Mia on Season 3 of Amazon’s Catastrophe.
RelatedFamily Guy Honors Carrie Fisher With Winter Premiere Dedication
Fisher played Mia in all three seasons of the U.K.-based comedy, starring Sharon Horgan and Rob Delaney as a mismatched married couple — she’s Irish, he’s American — raising kids in London. Season 3 debuted on Amazon last Friday,...
RelatedFamily Guy Honors Carrie Fisher With Winter Premiere Dedication
Fisher played Mia in all three seasons of the U.K.-based comedy, starring Sharon Horgan and Rob Delaney as a mismatched married couple — she’s Irish, he’s American — raising kids in London. Season 3 debuted on Amazon last Friday,...
- 5/1/2017
- TVLine.com
Over the last decade or so, non-fiction and documentary cinema has been the breeding ground for some of cinema’s most interesting films and film-makers. However, for many cinephiles the history of this world of cinema has been vastly undervalued and works vastly underseen. Be it the earliest days of silent cinema to the importance of documentary films in global conflicts, non-fiction directors have crafted some of the greatest and most influential works in all of the art form.
And thankfully two great, if light, histories of some of the great films are finally available on DVD.
From Icarus Films comes the release of three films, across two DVDs, that take a direct look at the early days of documentary cinema, ostensibly from the beginning with films like Nanook Of The North to the work of German propagandists like Leni Riefenstahl and Us news reels which would see names like...
And thankfully two great, if light, histories of some of the great films are finally available on DVD.
From Icarus Films comes the release of three films, across two DVDs, that take a direct look at the early days of documentary cinema, ostensibly from the beginning with films like Nanook Of The North to the work of German propagandists like Leni Riefenstahl and Us news reels which would see names like...
- 3/22/2017
- by Joshua Brunsting
- CriterionCast
Episode Links Past Wish List Episodes Episode 63.9 – Disc 3 – Top Criterion Blu-ray Upgrades for 2011 Episode 110 – Criterion Collection Blu-ray Upgrade Wish List for 2012 Episode 136 – Criterion Collection Blu-ray Upgrade Wish List for 2013 Episode 146 – Criterion Collection Blu-ray Upgrade Wish List for 2014 Episode 154 – Criterion Collection Blu-ray Upgrade Wish List for 2015 Episode 169 – Criterion Collection Blu-ray Upgrade Wish List for 2016 DVD to BluRay Wish Lists Aaron: The Shop on Main Street Pickup on South Street Arik: Cleo from 5 to 7 Berlin Alexanderplatz Mark: Taste of Cherry Sisters David: Do the Right Thing Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters Ld to Blu-Ray Wish Lists Aaron: Blue Velvet (Announced as Ld Spine #219 but never released) Early Hitchcock Box (Sabotage, The Secret Agent, Young and Innocent, The Lodger, The Man Who Knew Too Much) Arik: A Night at the Opera Singin’ in the Rain Mark: 2001: A Space Odyssey The Producers David: I Am Cuba Letter From an Unknown Woman...
- 12/30/2016
- by David Blakeslee
- CriterionCast
Otto Bell’s documentary mixes the traditional and modern to thrilling effect
Related: The Eagle Huntress review – Kazakh falconry was never so family-friendly
At first glance, Otto Bell’s The Eagle Huntress looks like one of those archetypal ethnographic documentaries with which Robert Flaherty kicked off the whole history of documentary film-making a century ago. Just like in 1922’s Nanook Of The North, Bell tackles a vanishing way of life – an ancient people in a harsh, unforgiving climate – and one might be forgiven for thinking it celebrates a wilful anachronism as it slides over history’s horizon. But you’d be wrong: there is enough of the new and the now to make this enthralling viewing.
Continue reading...
Related: The Eagle Huntress review – Kazakh falconry was never so family-friendly
At first glance, Otto Bell’s The Eagle Huntress looks like one of those archetypal ethnographic documentaries with which Robert Flaherty kicked off the whole history of documentary film-making a century ago. Just like in 1922’s Nanook Of The North, Bell tackles a vanishing way of life – an ancient people in a harsh, unforgiving climate – and one might be forgiven for thinking it celebrates a wilful anachronism as it slides over history’s horizon. But you’d be wrong: there is enough of the new and the now to make this enthralling viewing.
Continue reading...
- 12/13/2016
- by John Patterson
- The Guardian - Film News
Lupita Tovar, the 1930s film actress who starred in the acclaimed Spanish-language version of Dracula and the first Mexican talkie, Santa, has died. She was 106.
Born the oldest of nine in a poor and very religious household in a small town in the southernmost part of Mexico, Tovar moved with her family to Mexico City in the later years of the Mexican Revolution. It was there, as a teenager studying dance and gymnastics, that she was discovered by Robert Flaherty, the docu-fiction film pioneer who directed Nanook Of The North and Man Of Aran. At the time, Flaherty was preparing his collaboration with F.W. Murnau, Tabu: A Story of the South Seas, and he wanted Tovar for the lead role. However, after coming to Hollywood, she ended up signing a contract with Fox; Tovar would later claim that this was an attempt by the studio to get back ...
Born the oldest of nine in a poor and very religious household in a small town in the southernmost part of Mexico, Tovar moved with her family to Mexico City in the later years of the Mexican Revolution. It was there, as a teenager studying dance and gymnastics, that she was discovered by Robert Flaherty, the docu-fiction film pioneer who directed Nanook Of The North and Man Of Aran. At the time, Flaherty was preparing his collaboration with F.W. Murnau, Tabu: A Story of the South Seas, and he wanted Tovar for the lead role. However, after coming to Hollywood, she ended up signing a contract with Fox; Tovar would later claim that this was an attempt by the studio to get back ...
- 11/14/2016
- by Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
- avclub.com
Disney’s animation roster has a history of playing with culturally insensitive fire, from the “siamese” cats in “Lady and the Tramp” to the savage Middle Eastern stereotypes in “Aladdin.” The same directors of that movie, Ron Clements and John Musker, reteam for “Moana,” the tale of a young Polynesian woman who commands the high seas to save the world. But the movie has two other co-directors, Don Hall and Chris Williams, whose credits include more recent Disney efforts such as “Big Hero 6.” While the quartet of credits may contribute to the movie’s uneven tone, it also suggests a merging of Disney’s past and present.
Visually dazzling and loaded with charm, the movie is also blatant in its quest for cultural sensitivity: It has memorable songs by “Hamilton” phenom Lin-Manuel Miranda and a first-rate mystical soundtrack by Samoan composer Opetaia Tavia Foa’i, in addition to a...
Visually dazzling and loaded with charm, the movie is also blatant in its quest for cultural sensitivity: It has memorable songs by “Hamilton” phenom Lin-Manuel Miranda and a first-rate mystical soundtrack by Samoan composer Opetaia Tavia Foa’i, in addition to a...
- 11/7/2016
- by Eric Kohn
- Indiewire
A Tribute to King Kong takes place as part of the The St. Louis International Film Festival Sunday, Nov. 6 beginning at 6:00pm at Webster University’s Moore Auditorium. The first film screened will be the new documentary Long Live The King, which explores the enduring fascination with one of the biggest stars — both literally and figuratively — in Hollywood history: the mighty King Kong. Produced and directed by Frank Dietz and Trish Geiger, the creative team behind the award-winning “Beast Wishes,” the documentary devotes primary attention to the 1933 classic, celebrating the contributions of filmmakers Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, stars Fay Wray, Robert Armstrong, and Bruce Cabot, writer Edgar Wallace, and especially stop-motion innovator Willis O’Brien. But Kong’s legacy is also fully detailed: the sequel “Son of Kong,” the cinematic kin “Mighty Joe Young,” the Dino DeLaurentis and Peter Jackson remakes, even the Japanese versions by Toho Studios.
- 11/2/2016
- by Tom Stockman
- WeAreMovieGeeks.com
The most impressive thing about “Documentary Now,” the Bill Hader/Fred Armisen/Seth Meyers collaboration that’s just launched its second season on IFC, is the attention to detail. In creating these stand-alone tributes to iconic docs like “Jiro Dreams of Sushi” and “Grey Gardens,” the team prides itself on accuracy beyond compare for all elements of production, even going so far as using 1920s camera lenses for the first season’s “Nanook of the North” homage, or traveling to Tijuana to capture that edgy “Vice” feel.
Read More: ‘Documentary Now!’ Exclusive First Look at ‘Globesman’ & ‘Parker Gail’s’ Posters
That stunning ability to recreate the look and feel of the original documentaries is of course accompanied by jokes. But to some degree, it’s the basic act of recreating the docs with Hader and Armisen in the lead that serves as the primary gag — and it’s now clear...
Read More: ‘Documentary Now!’ Exclusive First Look at ‘Globesman’ & ‘Parker Gail’s’ Posters
That stunning ability to recreate the look and feel of the original documentaries is of course accompanied by jokes. But to some degree, it’s the basic act of recreating the docs with Hader and Armisen in the lead that serves as the primary gag — and it’s now clear...
- 9/16/2016
- by Liz Shannon Miller
- Indiewire
Four episodes were provided prior to broadcast.
Returning to IFC this fall is one of the most peculiar, inventive comedies on TV, the veritable documentary spoof factory Documentary Now! Created by SNL MVPs Fred Armisen, Bill Hader, Seth Meyers, and their ever-loving godfather Lorne Michaels, the show found its niche on the “always on, slightly off” cable network by spoofing some of the most popular documentaries of all time, appealing to the indie-minded set while providing enough surface-level humor to appease fans of their famous late-night shenanigans. The show’s first season goofed on classics like The Thin Blue Line, Grey Gardens and Nanook of the North, and now the comedy triumvirate is back with a new lineup of 20-minute spoofs.
The new one-off episodes each have unique charms, from “Globesman,” a take on Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin’s Salesman, to “Bunker,” a timely homage (considering the...
Returning to IFC this fall is one of the most peculiar, inventive comedies on TV, the veritable documentary spoof factory Documentary Now! Created by SNL MVPs Fred Armisen, Bill Hader, Seth Meyers, and their ever-loving godfather Lorne Michaels, the show found its niche on the “always on, slightly off” cable network by spoofing some of the most popular documentaries of all time, appealing to the indie-minded set while providing enough surface-level humor to appease fans of their famous late-night shenanigans. The show’s first season goofed on classics like The Thin Blue Line, Grey Gardens and Nanook of the North, and now the comedy triumvirate is back with a new lineup of 20-minute spoofs.
The new one-off episodes each have unique charms, from “Globesman,” a take on Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin’s Salesman, to “Bunker,” a timely homage (considering the...
- 9/14/2016
- by Bernard Boo
- We Got This Covered
The funniest fake documentary show on television now has a trailer for its second season.
Read More: ‘Documentary Now!’ Season 2 First Clip: Watch The Twisted & Morbid Spin on ‘The War Room’
Season two of IFC’s “Documentary Now!” starring “Saturday Night Live” alums Bill Hader and Fred Armisen will parody films including Albert and David Maysles’s “Salesman,” Jonathan Demme’s Talking Heads music documentary “Stop Making Sense,” D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus’ presidential election doc “The War Room,” and David Gelb’s “Jiro Dreams of Sushi.”
For anyone who hasn’t seen the show, every episode is shot in a unique style of documentary filmmaking to honor “some of the most important stories that didn’t actually happen.” The seven-episode first season earned a Primetime Emmy nomination for Outstanding Variety Sketch Series. The new season will have a total of six episodes.
Season one parodied films including “Grey Gardens,...
Read More: ‘Documentary Now!’ Season 2 First Clip: Watch The Twisted & Morbid Spin on ‘The War Room’
Season two of IFC’s “Documentary Now!” starring “Saturday Night Live” alums Bill Hader and Fred Armisen will parody films including Albert and David Maysles’s “Salesman,” Jonathan Demme’s Talking Heads music documentary “Stop Making Sense,” D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus’ presidential election doc “The War Room,” and David Gelb’s “Jiro Dreams of Sushi.”
For anyone who hasn’t seen the show, every episode is shot in a unique style of documentary filmmaking to honor “some of the most important stories that didn’t actually happen.” The seven-episode first season earned a Primetime Emmy nomination for Outstanding Variety Sketch Series. The new season will have a total of six episodes.
Season one parodied films including “Grey Gardens,...
- 8/26/2016
- by Graham Winfrey
- Indiewire
Though Fred Armisen, Bill Hader, and Seth Meyers are no longer on “Saturday Night Live” together, they still work closely together on the IFC mockumentary series “Documentary Now!” Hosted by Helen Mirren, the series parodies celebrated documentary films by adopting its style and focusing on a fictitious subject. In the first season, the team parodied the Maysles brothers’ “Grey Gardens,” Robert J. Flaherty’s “Nanook of the North,” Errol Morris’ “The Thin Blue Line,” and the recent rock doc “The History of the Eagles.”
Read More: IFC’s ‘Documentary Now!’: Bill Hader and Fred Armisen Break Down the Docs Spoofed in Season 2
The series will return this fall, but before then, they have released a teaser of their first episode back which parodies Chris Hegedus and D. A. Pennebaker’s 1993 political documentary “The War Room,” about Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign for President. “The War Room” mainly follows lead strategist...
Read More: IFC’s ‘Documentary Now!’: Bill Hader and Fred Armisen Break Down the Docs Spoofed in Season 2
The series will return this fall, but before then, they have released a teaser of their first episode back which parodies Chris Hegedus and D. A. Pennebaker’s 1993 political documentary “The War Room,” about Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign for President. “The War Room” mainly follows lead strategist...
- 8/1/2016
- by Vikram Murthi
- Indiewire
The Great FortuneNot many festivals grant you the privilege of being personally welcomed by its director with a bottle of home-brewed liquor, not very many set that as their standard of hospitality: Beldocs, the Belgrade International Documentary Film Festival, is one of them. The composite beauty and disinterested generosity of the city and its people are the ideal environment for a festival genuinely close to its etymological roots, that of festivity, of an uplifting moment of reciprocal discovery and exchange. Big enough to explore, small enough to elaborate, Beldocs is what a festival is meant to be: a place where films are not only consumed but also convivially dissected. The size and schedule of the festival, but most crucially its comradery dimension, allow for the kind of space cinema needs in order to be cultivated, not only watched. The constitutive elements of the seventh art in Beldocs coexist organically side by side,...
- 7/14/2016
- MUBI
Spliced together from interviews, establishing shots, and dramatic reenactments, its subjects’ homegrown aphorisms set against the forceful tinkling of the score, “The Eye Doesn’t Lie” might’ve been made by Errol Morris himself.
Inspired by “The Thin Blue Line,” the fourth episode of IFC’s inventive, erudite “Documentary Now!” — from the frenzied imaginations of director Rhys Thomas and “Saturday Night Live” alumni Fred Armisen, Bill Hader, and Seth Meyers — mimics the filmmaker’s work so precisely that it comes to resemble an X-ray, showing the bone structure of his distinctive style while (gently) poking fun at it. In this sense, to describe “Documentary Now!” as a parody is to undersell: It’s a wildly funny act of criticism, deconstructing the mechanics of nonfiction in an age defined by the slippage between “reality” and the real.
Starring Armisen and Hader in an ever-changing series of roles—in a pungent send-up of Vice Media, they even play three indistinguishable pairs of plaid-clad, ne’er-do-well correspondents on the trail of a Mexican drug kingpin — “Documentary Now!” is designed with an in-depth knowledge of the form, down to the title sequence. A clever nod to public television, replete with evolving logo, synthesized theme music, and Helen Mirren’s refined introductions, the homage to the likes of “Pov,” “Frontline,” and “Independent Lens” is telling. Though tough, at times, on the familiar tropes of Morris and the Maysles, the creators’ treatment of documentaries is affectionate; their approach is closer to Christopher Guest’s warm, playful comedies, from “Waiting for Guffman” to “For Your Consideration,” than to the sharp satire of “Drop Dead Gorgeous” or “Tanner ’88.”
This is born, it seems, of their interest in the power of nonfiction narratives, and in the process by which such stories take shape. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, “Documentary Now!” is lavish in its praise — Hader’s version of Little Edie Beale, in the series’ tribute to “Grey Gardens,” replicates several memorable moments in the film almost exactly — but it’s when the series turns toward exaggeration and hyperbole that its understanding of the form’s fakery is on fullest display. Against the “direct cinema” aesthetic of the Maysles, “Documentary Now!” depicts the siblings, here known as the Feins, eliciting performances from their subjects, searching the shadows of “Sandy Passage” for the most compelling variant of the truth. (It comes back to bite them, in a way that acknowledges the elements of Gothic horror in “Grey Gardens” by blowing the original to bits.)
Understanding documentaries as a set of narrative techniques, and not simply as a reflection of “the facts,” “Documentary Now!” is at its most astute in the first season’s “Kunuk Uncovered.” Based on 1988’s “Nanook Revisited,” itself an investigation of the stagecraft in Robert Flaherty’s 1922 silent, “Nanook of the North,” “Kunuk” renders explicit the series’ animating principle: “Was the first documentary a documentary at all,” the narrator intones, “or was it something else?” As William H. Sebastian (John Slattery) attempts to mold his subject, Pipilok (Armisen), into the “Eskimo” of his ethnocentric assumptions, mounting dog sledding and spear fishing scenes, he loses control of the project to its central figure. “Kunuk” becomes an artful farce, part Hollywood excess and part careful craft.
Pipilok first demands compensation, securing the managerial services of a local pimp, and then displaces Sebastian altogether, transforming into a tortured auteur. (At one point, he curses out the cast in his native tongue, a true diva of the directing chair.) His aesthetic innovations — recording sound, building sets, developing “point of view” and new forms of movement — are those, roughly speaking, of realism, and “Kunuk” is, in essence, a reminder that the style that doesn’t seem like a style is no less fabricated for convincing us otherwise. In “Documentary Now!” nonfiction is always “something else”: A performance, a manipulation, a construction, adjacent to “the real” but not a mirror image of it.
In fashioning a new short film for each installment—with the exception of the two-part “Gentle and Soft: The Story of the Blue Jean Committee” — the series is an outlier in the Emmys’ nascent Variety Sketch category. Last year’s inaugural field featured five nominees on the traditional “sketch” model, including “Saturday Night Live” and winner “Inside Amy Schumer,” and all, including the final season of the excellent “Key & Peele,” are among this year’s twenty eligible series (up from 17). But given the TV Academy’s tendency to settle into firm patterns, to the point that one might call them ruts, it would behoove voters to honor the heterodox, learned, distinctly non-topical comedy of “Documentary Now!” while the contours of the category are still in flux.
If there’s one aspect of the series we know Academy members can appreciate, it’s the brilliant impression: Schumer and Ryan McFaul were nominated last year for directing the dead solid perfect satire “12 Angry Men Inside Amy Schumer” as if inhabited by the spirit of Sidney Lumet, a feat “Documentary Now!” manages many times over, and in myriad registers. Its sketches succeed, in the end, because they’re not sketchy at all, but rather fully realized, remarkably savvy reconsiderations of their subject, which is the creative, sometimes-deceptive act of documentary filmmaking itself.
“The Eye Doesn’t Lie” recalls not only “The Thin Blue Line,” then, but also, by dint of its title, the filmmaker’s examination of visible evidence in “Standard Operating Procedure.” “The pictures spoke a thousand words,” as Army Special Agent Brent Pack says in the latter of photographs of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, launching into the kind of Morris-esque paradox that IFC’s series so beautifully distills. “But unless you know what day and time they were taken, you wouldn’t know what story they were telling.” The eye does lie, of course, and the brilliant “Documentary Now!” is always catching it red-handed.
Related storiesHow 'Mike Tyson Mysteries' Season 2 Pushed Wacky Retro Designs Even Further (Emmy Watch)Taraji P. Henson's 'Empire' Highlight Reel Has to Be Seen to Be Believed'You're the Worst' Star Aya Cash Explains Why You Shouldn't Vote For Her at the Emmys (But You Really, Really Should)...
Inspired by “The Thin Blue Line,” the fourth episode of IFC’s inventive, erudite “Documentary Now!” — from the frenzied imaginations of director Rhys Thomas and “Saturday Night Live” alumni Fred Armisen, Bill Hader, and Seth Meyers — mimics the filmmaker’s work so precisely that it comes to resemble an X-ray, showing the bone structure of his distinctive style while (gently) poking fun at it. In this sense, to describe “Documentary Now!” as a parody is to undersell: It’s a wildly funny act of criticism, deconstructing the mechanics of nonfiction in an age defined by the slippage between “reality” and the real.
Starring Armisen and Hader in an ever-changing series of roles—in a pungent send-up of Vice Media, they even play three indistinguishable pairs of plaid-clad, ne’er-do-well correspondents on the trail of a Mexican drug kingpin — “Documentary Now!” is designed with an in-depth knowledge of the form, down to the title sequence. A clever nod to public television, replete with evolving logo, synthesized theme music, and Helen Mirren’s refined introductions, the homage to the likes of “Pov,” “Frontline,” and “Independent Lens” is telling. Though tough, at times, on the familiar tropes of Morris and the Maysles, the creators’ treatment of documentaries is affectionate; their approach is closer to Christopher Guest’s warm, playful comedies, from “Waiting for Guffman” to “For Your Consideration,” than to the sharp satire of “Drop Dead Gorgeous” or “Tanner ’88.”
This is born, it seems, of their interest in the power of nonfiction narratives, and in the process by which such stories take shape. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, “Documentary Now!” is lavish in its praise — Hader’s version of Little Edie Beale, in the series’ tribute to “Grey Gardens,” replicates several memorable moments in the film almost exactly — but it’s when the series turns toward exaggeration and hyperbole that its understanding of the form’s fakery is on fullest display. Against the “direct cinema” aesthetic of the Maysles, “Documentary Now!” depicts the siblings, here known as the Feins, eliciting performances from their subjects, searching the shadows of “Sandy Passage” for the most compelling variant of the truth. (It comes back to bite them, in a way that acknowledges the elements of Gothic horror in “Grey Gardens” by blowing the original to bits.)
Understanding documentaries as a set of narrative techniques, and not simply as a reflection of “the facts,” “Documentary Now!” is at its most astute in the first season’s “Kunuk Uncovered.” Based on 1988’s “Nanook Revisited,” itself an investigation of the stagecraft in Robert Flaherty’s 1922 silent, “Nanook of the North,” “Kunuk” renders explicit the series’ animating principle: “Was the first documentary a documentary at all,” the narrator intones, “or was it something else?” As William H. Sebastian (John Slattery) attempts to mold his subject, Pipilok (Armisen), into the “Eskimo” of his ethnocentric assumptions, mounting dog sledding and spear fishing scenes, he loses control of the project to its central figure. “Kunuk” becomes an artful farce, part Hollywood excess and part careful craft.
Pipilok first demands compensation, securing the managerial services of a local pimp, and then displaces Sebastian altogether, transforming into a tortured auteur. (At one point, he curses out the cast in his native tongue, a true diva of the directing chair.) His aesthetic innovations — recording sound, building sets, developing “point of view” and new forms of movement — are those, roughly speaking, of realism, and “Kunuk” is, in essence, a reminder that the style that doesn’t seem like a style is no less fabricated for convincing us otherwise. In “Documentary Now!” nonfiction is always “something else”: A performance, a manipulation, a construction, adjacent to “the real” but not a mirror image of it.
In fashioning a new short film for each installment—with the exception of the two-part “Gentle and Soft: The Story of the Blue Jean Committee” — the series is an outlier in the Emmys’ nascent Variety Sketch category. Last year’s inaugural field featured five nominees on the traditional “sketch” model, including “Saturday Night Live” and winner “Inside Amy Schumer,” and all, including the final season of the excellent “Key & Peele,” are among this year’s twenty eligible series (up from 17). But given the TV Academy’s tendency to settle into firm patterns, to the point that one might call them ruts, it would behoove voters to honor the heterodox, learned, distinctly non-topical comedy of “Documentary Now!” while the contours of the category are still in flux.
If there’s one aspect of the series we know Academy members can appreciate, it’s the brilliant impression: Schumer and Ryan McFaul were nominated last year for directing the dead solid perfect satire “12 Angry Men Inside Amy Schumer” as if inhabited by the spirit of Sidney Lumet, a feat “Documentary Now!” manages many times over, and in myriad registers. Its sketches succeed, in the end, because they’re not sketchy at all, but rather fully realized, remarkably savvy reconsiderations of their subject, which is the creative, sometimes-deceptive act of documentary filmmaking itself.
“The Eye Doesn’t Lie” recalls not only “The Thin Blue Line,” then, but also, by dint of its title, the filmmaker’s examination of visible evidence in “Standard Operating Procedure.” “The pictures spoke a thousand words,” as Army Special Agent Brent Pack says in the latter of photographs of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, launching into the kind of Morris-esque paradox that IFC’s series so beautifully distills. “But unless you know what day and time they were taken, you wouldn’t know what story they were telling.” The eye does lie, of course, and the brilliant “Documentary Now!” is always catching it red-handed.
Related storiesHow 'Mike Tyson Mysteries' Season 2 Pushed Wacky Retro Designs Even Further (Emmy Watch)Taraji P. Henson's 'Empire' Highlight Reel Has to Be Seen to Be Believed'You're the Worst' Star Aya Cash Explains Why You Shouldn't Vote For Her at the Emmys (But You Really, Really Should)...
- 6/15/2016
- by Matt Brennan
- Indiewire
Employing an outsider to disarm subjects deep in Bubba Texas, Booger Red turns to writer/director/actor/provocateur Onur Tukel as its conduit into this world, asking the absurd questions at the heart of a scandal that involves swingers, foster parents and a “sex kindergarten.” Inspired by Michael Hall’s 2009 Texas Monthly article, director Berndt Mader (Five Time Champion) constructs his own documentary/narrative hybrid with Tukel as a reporter named Onur Tukel (although not as himself) in his most restrained role yet.
Playing an Austin-based investigate reporter, he’s dispatched to the small town of Mineola, Texas where the neighborhood swinger’s club is conveniently located across from the town’s newspaper. It’s here where the mysterious Booger Red apparently brought kids he trained in his “sex kindergarten” to perform — an allegation made by a profiteering set of foster parents.
Rather curiously, Mader has insisted many real players...
Playing an Austin-based investigate reporter, he’s dispatched to the small town of Mineola, Texas where the neighborhood swinger’s club is conveniently located across from the town’s newspaper. It’s here where the mysterious Booger Red apparently brought kids he trained in his “sex kindergarten” to perform — an allegation made by a profiteering set of foster parents.
Rather curiously, Mader has insisted many real players...
- 5/12/2016
- by John Fink
- The Film Stage
Every year, The Hollywood Reporter pulls back the veil by allowing a few Academy members to anonymously reveal their Oscar ballots and the reasons for those votes. Every year, it's illuminating and maddening. This year is no exception. The Oscars will be handed out this Sunday, February 28 on ABC, and voting is now closed. It seems like Leonardo DiCaprio is a lock to win Best Actor for "The Revenant" but at least one Academy member openly voted against him.
This particular Oscar voter shared his ballot with THR, revealing films he didn't even see (including "Mad Max: Fury Road") and admitting that he hated "The Revenant" so much he voted for "Mad Max" in one category "solely because I want to stop The Revenant." He had some valid (and funny) points to make in his distaste for "The Revenant," arguing that Leo's Oscar campaign is based around how hard...
This particular Oscar voter shared his ballot with THR, revealing films he didn't even see (including "Mad Max: Fury Road") and admitting that he hated "The Revenant" so much he voted for "Mad Max" in one category "solely because I want to stop The Revenant." He had some valid (and funny) points to make in his distaste for "The Revenant," arguing that Leo's Oscar campaign is based around how hard...
- 2/25/2016
- by Gina Carbone
- Moviefone
The major retrospective of the 2016 International Film Festival Rotterdam is dedicated to the Barcelona school of filmmaking in the 1960s and 1970s, with Catalonian master Pere Portabella’s body of work—and his new film—serving as a figurehead. Nearly completely unknown in the United States—where critic Jonathan Rosenbaum has been a beacon of support and revelation—insomuch as Portabella is known in the film community it is for his film Vampir-Cuadecuc, which hijacks the production of Christopher Lee and Jesús Franco’s Count Dracula (1970) for its own ends and exhilaratingly exposes this documentarian’s acute analysis of and play with the subject of his films. (I will note here that Mubi has shown a great deal of Portabella’s work in the past, including this 1970 horror film.) This is hardly a lone accomplishment; in 1961 he helped produce Luis Buñuel's masterpiece Viridiana, and the director has been a strident voice in documentary,...
- 2/1/2016
- by Daniel Kasman
- MUBI
By 1931, nearly the entirety of the film industry had not only gained the capabilities to make sound pictures, but appeared to leave silent cinema completely behind. Save for a few iconic artists like Charlie Chaplin, who stuck with silent cinema aesthetics for quite some time after the growth of sound in cinema, the medium had all but shifted into both sound storytelling, and the stationary camera that it would need.
And then there is Tabu. From not only one, but two of those iconic artists mentioned in the paragraph above, this brisk and powerful journey into the South Seas was created by the pair of F.W. Murnau and Nanook of the North director Robert J. Flaherty, and tells a story only these two legendary filmmakers could. Blending both Murnau’s beautiful, expressionistic filmmaking with the cultural focus that made the heart of Flaherty’s work beat, Tabu became a film...
And then there is Tabu. From not only one, but two of those iconic artists mentioned in the paragraph above, this brisk and powerful journey into the South Seas was created by the pair of F.W. Murnau and Nanook of the North director Robert J. Flaherty, and tells a story only these two legendary filmmakers could. Blending both Murnau’s beautiful, expressionistic filmmaking with the cultural focus that made the heart of Flaherty’s work beat, Tabu became a film...
- 12/16/2015
- by Joshua Brunsting
- CriterionCast
Tabu: A Story of the South Seas
Written by (Told by): F.W. Murnau and Robert J. Flaherty
Directed by F.W. Murnau
USA, 1931
Compared to John Ford’s studio-bound—though still highly appealing—South Seas adventure The Hurricane, recently reviewed here, Tabu: A Story of the South Seas, directed by the great German filmmaker F.W. Murnau, is a patently more realistic and wholly distinctive production. Aside from its genuine French Polynesian locations (Bora Bora and Tahiti), Murnau’s silent 1931 film features a cast consisting almost entirely of actual island inhabitants, rather than Hollywood stars, thus resulting in a generally less strained authenticity. Not necessarily a better film for this reason alone, Tabu, even with its fictional plot, is nevertheless a purer and more revealing historical and scenic document.
Directed by Murnau and “told by” he and renowned documentarian Robert J. Flaherty (of Nanook of the North [1922] fame), Tabu is divided into two chapters.
Written by (Told by): F.W. Murnau and Robert J. Flaherty
Directed by F.W. Murnau
USA, 1931
Compared to John Ford’s studio-bound—though still highly appealing—South Seas adventure The Hurricane, recently reviewed here, Tabu: A Story of the South Seas, directed by the great German filmmaker F.W. Murnau, is a patently more realistic and wholly distinctive production. Aside from its genuine French Polynesian locations (Bora Bora and Tahiti), Murnau’s silent 1931 film features a cast consisting almost entirely of actual island inhabitants, rather than Hollywood stars, thus resulting in a generally less strained authenticity. Not necessarily a better film for this reason alone, Tabu, even with its fictional plot, is nevertheless a purer and more revealing historical and scenic document.
Directed by Murnau and “told by” he and renowned documentarian Robert J. Flaherty (of Nanook of the North [1922] fame), Tabu is divided into two chapters.
- 12/16/2015
- by Jeremy Carr
- SoundOnSight
Chis Marker's Chat écoutant la musiqueThere are dog people and there are cat people, this we know, and there are even people who claim to be of both—though latent sympathies remain unspoken, like with a parent and which child is their favorite. With the Vienna Film Festival welcoming me with a tumbling collection of dog and cat short films spanning cinema's history—the Austrian Film Museum, an essential destination each year collaborating with the Viennale, is hosting a “a brief zoology of cinema” throughout the festivities—it is clear that filmmakers, too, have their preference. Silent cinema decidedly prefers the more easily trained and exhibited canine, with 1907’s surreal favorite Les chiens savants as a certain kind of cruel pinnacle. For the cats, Chris Marker, already the presiding figure over so much in 20th century art, I think we can easily claim is the cine-laureate. One need not know...
- 11/8/2015
- by Daniel Kasman
- MUBI
Something happened midway through the first season of Documentary Now!, which wrapped up last night on IFC. The show started off — and was praised for — taking pitch-perfect documentary parodies and pushing them in absurd directions: twisting Grey Gardens into a horror movie, for example, or turning Nanook Revisited, a documentary about the documentary Nanook of the North, into a bizarre tale of an Inuit who pioneered most modern-film techniques. But over the course of six "documentaries" (which included the two-part finale), it also grew increasingly humane. While the precision was still there, the goal felt like it was no longer about creating accurate parody but instead about creating truthful character studies. It built and built to the last three minutes of last night's finale, which immediately felt like one of the most honest, human bits of comedy I've seen in years, if not ever. There were first inklings of...
- 9/25/2015
- by Jesse David Fox
- Vulture
This clip from last night's episode of "Documentary Now!" — IFC's spoof series that will send up such docs as "The Thin Blue Line" and "Nanook of the North" — will probably be lost on anybody who hasn't seen the Maysles' 1975 film. Read More: How "Grey Gardens" Was Restored to Its Squalid Glory In the clip from the parody, titled "Sandy Passage," Bill Hader as Little Edie aka "Vivvy" shares her fashion sense ("This is a skirt I safety-pinned on, and if I want, I can make it a cape"), while hitting on the crew, of course. Meanwhile, Fred Armisen makes an appearance as her adorably clueless mother Big Edie. We seriously can't wait to see what they have in store next week. (Longer clip here.) var bc_params = {"api":"hybrid","playerId":"88218671001","playerKey":"Aq~~,AAAAAAAn_zM~,B6LaFUvNnt2RhwK5cjOvZ4hHQyd5XXC9"};brightcove.createExperiences();...
- 8/21/2015
- by Ryan Lattanzio
- Thompson on Hollywood
Welcome to your tour of This Is TV in 2015. Please keep your hands and feet inside the vehicle at all times. On our left, you can see Blunt Talk, and if you watch the first episode, you'll spot Patrick Stewart suckling on the breasts of a sex worker. Yes, the real Patrick Stewart! Don't worry, the show is not actually bad. Okay, you can put on your safety glasses, we're entering the Fred Armisen wing. Did you know that Fred Armisen is himself on 9,000 shows? It's true! One of them is Documentary Now. Right over there is Bill Hader wrapping sweatpants around his head, not unlike Oola in Star Wars. Wave hi to Bill Hader, everyone. Now, who here has seen the 1922 Ur-documentary Nanook of the North? Oh, no one? Well, if you get a chance, that'll really enhance your appreciation of the full-on parody of it...
- 8/20/2015
- by Margaret Lyons
- Vulture
As Comedy Central’s Drunk History revolutionized the way we look at the past, IFC’s Documentary Now! (Thursdays beginning Aug. 20) hopes to alter how we remember some of history’s most important documentary films. Former Saturday Night Live castmates Fred Armisen, Bill Hader and Seth Meyers are the creators of this new six-part comedy series that spoofs famous documentaries like Grey Gardens, Nanook of the North and Reportero. Each installment has the appearance and tone of a serious documentary (they even got Helen Mirren to introduce each episode!). But the seriousness ends when Armisen and Hader appear onscreen as parodies of eccentric … Continue reading →
The post #TCA15: IFC’s “Documentary Now!” is history as it never was appeared first on Channel Guide Magazine.
The post #TCA15: IFC’s “Documentary Now!” is history as it never was appeared first on Channel Guide Magazine.
- 8/1/2015
- by Ryan Berenz
- ChannelGuideMag
The British Film Institute has a mouth-watering July program for across-the-pond documentary buffs and moviegoers. The series culls from BFI's most recent Sight & Sound Poll of 340 critics, programmers and filmmakers in search of the greatest docs of all time. The program, detailed here, spans the birth and life of the genre, from early ethnographic classic "Nanook of the North" and earth-shaking Soviet experiment "Man with a Movie Camera" to Claude Lanzmann's Holocaust epic "Shoah" (here screened in its entirety) and Errol Morris' "The Thin Blue Line," which in 1988 was an early example of the true crime mysteries that are now the craze of the zeitgeist. Read More: British Film Institute Unlocks Ambitious Plan to Digitize Films The rest of the series includes a double bill of Chris Marker's ode to memory, "Vertigo" and cats "Sans Soleil" and Alain Resnais' profoundly upsetting concentration camp doc...
- 7/1/2015
- by Ryan Lattanzio
- Thompson on Hollywood
As AFI Docs opens in Washington, DC, the Post's Ann Hornaday sketches a brief history of the American documentary, from the cinéma vérité of the 60s (Robert Drew, Richard Leacock, D.A. Pennebaker, Albert Maysles) through the personal essays of the 80s (Ross McElwee and Michael Moore) to the day "Errol Morris revolutionized the industry by introducing reenactments and stylized cinematic flourishes in the true-crime thriller The Thin Blue Line. (Actually, he reintroduced reenactment, if you consider the work of Robert Flaherty in 1922’s Nanook of the North.)" We're gathering previews of this year's 13th edition. » - David Hudson...
- 6/17/2015
- Fandor: Keyframe
As AFI Docs opens in Washington, DC, the Post's Ann Hornaday sketches a brief history of the American documentary, from the cinéma vérité of the 60s (Robert Drew, Richard Leacock, D.A. Pennebaker, Albert Maysles) through the personal essays of the 80s (Ross McElwee and Michael Moore) to the day "Errol Morris revolutionized the industry by introducing reenactments and stylized cinematic flourishes in the true-crime thriller The Thin Blue Line. (Actually, he reintroduced reenactment, if you consider the work of Robert Flaherty in 1922’s Nanook of the North.)" We're gathering previews of this year's 13th edition. » - David Hudson...
- 6/17/2015
- Keyframe
“We’ll give him more than chains. He’s always been king of his world, but we’ll teach him fear. We’re millionaires, boys. I’ll share it with all of you. Why, in a few months, it’ll be up in lights on Broadway: Kong, the Eighth Wonder of the World!”
King Kong screens at Schlafly Bottleworks (7260 Southwest Ave.- at Manchester – Maplewood, Mo 63143) Thursday, May 7th at 7pm. It is a benefit for Helping Kids Together
Doors open at 6:30pm. $6 suggested for the screening. A yummy variety of food from Schlafly’s kitchen is available as are plenty of pints of their famous home-brewed suds. A bartender will be on hand to take care of you. “Culture Shock” is the name of a film series here in St. Louis that is the cornerstone project of a social enterprise that is an ongoing source of support for Helping Kids Together (http://www.
King Kong screens at Schlafly Bottleworks (7260 Southwest Ave.- at Manchester – Maplewood, Mo 63143) Thursday, May 7th at 7pm. It is a benefit for Helping Kids Together
Doors open at 6:30pm. $6 suggested for the screening. A yummy variety of food from Schlafly’s kitchen is available as are plenty of pints of their famous home-brewed suds. A bartender will be on hand to take care of you. “Culture Shock” is the name of a film series here in St. Louis that is the cornerstone project of a social enterprise that is an ongoing source of support for Helping Kids Together (http://www.
- 4/24/2015
- by Tom Stockman
- WeAreMovieGeeks.com
Orson Welles indisputably made a huge impact on the film industry, both in terms of technical proficiency and storytelling sophistication. However, Welles was never the biggest fan of films themselves. He just saw it as a way to tell stories he wanted to. That makes sense to me of how he approached filmmaking. Had he been a movie fan, I don't know if he would have thought so much outside of the box about to make them than he did. That isn't to say he didn't like all movies. In the early 1950s, Welles managed to cobble together a list of his ten favorite films for Sound on Sight (via Open Culture). As he had only been exposed to a couple of decades of cinema, I think this is a very interesting list, and one that makes a lot of sense for someone like Welles. City Lights (dir. Charles Chaplin) Greed (dir.
- 2/20/2015
- by Mike Shutt
- Rope of Silicon
Throughout the summer, an admin on the r/movies subreddit has been leading Reddit users in a poll of the best movies from every year for the last 100 years called 100 Years of Yearly Cinema. The poll concluded three days ago, and the list of every movie from 1914 to 2013 has been published today.
Users were asked to nominate films from a given year and up-vote their favorite nominees. The full list includes the outright winner along with the first two runners-up from each year. The list is mostly a predictable assortment of IMDb favorites and certified classics, but a few surprise gems have also risen to the top of the crust, including the early experimental documentary Man With a Movie Camera in 1929, Abel Gance’s J’Accuse! in 1919, the Fred Astaire film Top Hat over Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps in 1935, and Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing over John Ford’s...
Users were asked to nominate films from a given year and up-vote their favorite nominees. The full list includes the outright winner along with the first two runners-up from each year. The list is mostly a predictable assortment of IMDb favorites and certified classics, but a few surprise gems have also risen to the top of the crust, including the early experimental documentary Man With a Movie Camera in 1929, Abel Gance’s J’Accuse! in 1919, the Fred Astaire film Top Hat over Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps in 1935, and Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing over John Ford’s...
- 9/2/2014
- by Brian Welk
- SoundOnSight
Last week, Sight & Sound released their poll of the top 50 documentaries of all time, sourced from 340 critics, programmers and filmmakers. The list includes seminal films such as Nanook of the North, Sans Soleil, Man With a Movie Camera, and Salesman, as well as recent, form-pushing works in The Act of Killing and Leviathan. Robert Greene took time out of his impressively hectic schedule to craft a video essay that is a send up to said titles and more, examining documentary for its inimitable, observational approach, and noting that “the art of nonfiction lies in the tension between chaos and structure.” Head over to Sight&Sound to view it.
- 8/7/2014
- by Sarah Salovaara
- Filmmaker Magazine-Director Interviews
Last week, Sight & Sound released their poll of the top 50 documentaries of all time, sourced from 340 critics, programmers and filmmakers. The list includes seminal films such as Nanook of the North, Sans Soleil, Man With a Movie Camera, and Salesman, as well as recent, form-pushing works in The Act of Killing and Leviathan. Robert Greene took time out of his impressively hectic schedule to craft a video essay that is a send up to said titles and more, examining documentary for its inimitable, observational approach, and noting that “the art of nonfiction lies in the tension between chaos and structure.” Head over to Sight&Sound to view it.
- 8/7/2014
- by Sarah Salovaara
- Filmmaker Magazine - Blog
As reported over at The Dissolve, highly respected British film magazine Sight & Sound is famous for its list of the greatest films off all time released once every decade. Since 1952, Citizen Kane held the number one spot until Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo dethroned it in the 2012 poll. Now for the first time Sight & Sound has released a list of the 50 greatest documentary films of all time. The list was compiled after polling from over 200 critics and curators and 100 filmmakers, including “John Akomfrah, Michael Apted, Clio Barnard, James Benning, Sophie Fiennes, Amos Gitai, Paul Greengrass, Jose Guerin, Isaac Julien, Asif Kapadia, Sergei Loznitsa, Kevin Macdonald, James Marsh, Joshua Oppenheimer, Anand Patwardhan, Pawel Pawlikowski, Nicolas Philibert, Walter Salles, and James Toback”.
The top 10 are:
Man With A Movie Camera, (Dziga Vertov, 1929) Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1985) Sans Soleil, (Chris Marker, 1982) Night And Fog (Alain Resnais, 1955) The Thin Blue Line (Errol Morris, 1989) Chronicle Of A Summer (Jean Rouch & Edgar Morin,...
The top 10 are:
Man With A Movie Camera, (Dziga Vertov, 1929) Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1985) Sans Soleil, (Chris Marker, 1982) Night And Fog (Alain Resnais, 1955) The Thin Blue Line (Errol Morris, 1989) Chronicle Of A Summer (Jean Rouch & Edgar Morin,...
- 8/1/2014
- by Max Molinaro
- SoundOnSight
Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera tops the list of the greatest documentaries of all time, according to hundreds of film critics, curators, directors, and documentary film specialists surveyed by British film magazine Sight & Sound.
Every 10 years, Sight & Sound polls hundreds of film luminaries from around the world to generate a list of the best films of all time. In 2012, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo knocked Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane off its 50-year perch for the #1 spot. For the first time, the magazine is debuting a separate poll for documentaries. 340 critics, programmers and filmmakers were asked to participate; 100 of...
Every 10 years, Sight & Sound polls hundreds of film luminaries from around the world to generate a list of the best films of all time. In 2012, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo knocked Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane off its 50-year perch for the #1 spot. For the first time, the magazine is debuting a separate poll for documentaries. 340 critics, programmers and filmmakers were asked to participate; 100 of...
- 8/1/2014
- by Jacob Shamsian
- EW - Inside Movies
More than 200 critics and 100 filmmakers take part in poll.
Dziga Vertov’s silent film Man with a Movie Camera (1929) has topped Sight & Sound magazine’s first major poll of the world’s best documentaries.
More than 1,000 films were nominated by 200 critics and 100 filmmakers with more than 100 voting for Man with a Movie Camera.
Vertov’s surrealist classic in which a man travels around a city with a camera documenting urban life was shot in Odessa, Kiev and Khadliv.
Vertov also topped the critics’ list of top doc filmmakers while Frederick Wiseman is number one according to his fellow directors.
Participating filmmakers included Kevin Macdonald, Walter Salles, Joshua Oppenheimer, James Toback, Asif Kapadia, Carol Morley and Mark Cousins.
Critics’ Top 10 documentariesMan with a Movie Camera, dir. Dziga Vertov (Ussr 1929) [pictured]Shoah, dir. Claude Lanzmann (France 1985)Sans soleil, dir. Chris Marker (France 1982)Night and Fog, dir. Alain Resnais (France 1955)The Thin Blue Line, dir. [link...
Dziga Vertov’s silent film Man with a Movie Camera (1929) has topped Sight & Sound magazine’s first major poll of the world’s best documentaries.
More than 1,000 films were nominated by 200 critics and 100 filmmakers with more than 100 voting for Man with a Movie Camera.
Vertov’s surrealist classic in which a man travels around a city with a camera documenting urban life was shot in Odessa, Kiev and Khadliv.
Vertov also topped the critics’ list of top doc filmmakers while Frederick Wiseman is number one according to his fellow directors.
Participating filmmakers included Kevin Macdonald, Walter Salles, Joshua Oppenheimer, James Toback, Asif Kapadia, Carol Morley and Mark Cousins.
Critics’ Top 10 documentariesMan with a Movie Camera, dir. Dziga Vertov (Ussr 1929) [pictured]Shoah, dir. Claude Lanzmann (France 1985)Sans soleil, dir. Chris Marker (France 1982)Night and Fog, dir. Alain Resnais (France 1955)The Thin Blue Line, dir. [link...
- 8/1/2014
- by andreas.wiseman@screendaily.com (Andreas Wiseman)
- ScreenDaily
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