Never mind all those Oscar predictions posts out there. If you really want to make some money in the office pool, look no further than a random blog created specifically to leak the winners of this year’s Academy Awards. Think it’s a hoax? I guess we just won’t know until Sunday, will we? And by then you’ll be out hundreds of dollars because you didn’t bet on The Readerfor Best Adapted Screenplay.
Okay, so who cares if it’s real or not, particularly in this predictable a year, anyway? The real betting should be on who the telecast producers have wrangled to be those “top secret” presenters. Oh wait, it seems the big names, those that obviously should be revealed in order to attract their audiences, have also come out.
Ah, but what are they saying about either leak on the interweb, you ask? As usual, check out the quotes/links after the jump.
If you were a nature documentarian and you were filming a lion’s hunt, would you intervene and save a gazelle from being eaten? Probably not, but if you were making a documentary about poor children in the Red Light district of Calcutta, you’d probably want to help the kids out, maybe even film yourself doing good deeds in order to show just how much of a saint you are. Obviously there’s a big difference in the ethical obligation to human beings versus animals, but there has also always been a debate with documentary regarding just how much interaction and intervention is okay. Should a filmmaker remain completely detached from his or her subject? Should the line be drawn at life or death situations, or is it fine to become involved with the filmed people? If direct-cinema kings Albert and David Maysles can interact so much with the Beales of Grey Gardens, even potentially becoming romantically involved, then nobody should question a documentarian’s desire to be an angel with a handicam. Right?
The weekly documentary series Stranger Than Fiction, curated by the Toronto Film Festival’s Thom Powers and hosted at Manhattan’s IFC Center, wrapped up its Spring 2008 season last night with a screening of two rarely seen films directed by Albert Maysles, a Q & A with the octogenarian documentarian, and the obligatory after-movie cocktail session. If the two films shown offered object lessons in Maysles’ combined talents––patience, negotiation, and an unfailing knack at taking advantage of serendipity––the discussion after the screening offered a glimpse into this independent artist’s ever-present conflict between his stated mission and the economic sacrifices that support it.
“Smart, absurd and heartwarmingly innocent, Joshua Safdie’s The Back of Her Head is a dessert short, that euphoriant treat that could in endless play still mesmerize with its sweetness and richness of story,” writes Noralil Ryan Fores at ShortEnd Magazine. The above clip “is in a way, a trailer for the film,” according to its YouTube synopsis.
This is as good an excuse as any for me to point you to redbucketfilms, the YouTube channel of Josh and Bennie Safdie and their filmmaking cohorts. There’s a bunch of stuff there: shorts, trailers, fragments, a minute of footage of Albert Maysles walking around an art gallery (and then, sitting and yawning epically) billed as “an observational documentary about a man at a party, who makes observational documentaries.” Etc.
Celia Maysles, daughter of David Maysles (who, with his brother Albert, directed such landmark documentaries as Gimme Shelter and Grey Gardens), has directed a film about her attempts to get to know her late father called Wild Blue Yonder. When the film had its world premiere at IDFA last fall, Albert Maysles (who is seen in the film denying Celia access to her father’s archives, on the grounds that her film might conflict with his own autobiographical doc) told indieWIRE that he had so far not been allowed to see his niece’s movie. But he apparently caught up with it at some point, because at an event celebrating his own The Gates last night, Albert offered The Reeler a review:
Terrible…Unnecessarily, I come off badly. I wanted to cooperate with her, but I was — and am — making my own autobiographical film at the same time. I couldn’t just let her pick whatever she wanted. I wanted the two of us to cooperate in that process. She took that as an offense. And as you see in the film, I come off as the bad guy.
Maysles concedes that Yonder is actually “fairly well-made,” but cites what he claims are numerous inaccuracies, and ultimately writes off the whole endeavor as “unnecessary.” Sour grapes or solid critique? We’ll find out when Wild Blue Yonder has its US premiere at the SXSW Film Festival next month.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
filmcouch-114
Never mind all those Oscar predictions posts out there. If you really want to make some money in the office pool, look no further than 
If you were a nature documentarian and you were filming a lion’s hunt, would you intervene and save a gazelle from being eaten? Probably not, but if you were making a documentary about poor children in the Red Light district of Calcutta, you’d probably want to help the kids out, maybe even film yourself doing good deeds in order to show just how much of a saint you are. Obviously there’s a big difference in the ethical obligation to human beings versus animals, but there has also always been a debate with documentary regarding just how much interaction and intervention is okay. Should a filmmaker remain completely detached from his or her subject? Should the line be drawn at life or death situations, or is it fine to become involved with the filmed people? If direct-cinema kings Albert and David Maysles can interact so much with the Beales of Grey Gardens, even potentially becoming romantically involved, then nobody should question a documentarian’s desire to be an angel with a handicam. Right?
