On Sunday at True/False, filmmaker/blogger AJ Schnack screened the first thirty minutes of Convention, his verite-style film documenting the 2008 Democratic National Convention with an eye on the Denver locals (politicians, city administrators, journalists, protesters) who were in the mix. Shot by Schnack in collaboration with nearly a dozen documentarians (including the Oscar-nominated directors Laura Poitras and Julia Reichert, and Daniel Junge, who directed the Oscar-shortlisted They Killed Sister Dorothy), the film’s making-of process was almost as much of a serendipity-dependent feat of execution as the event captured on screen.
As his, uh, primary inspiration, Schnack cites Robert Drew’s Primary, a Direct Cinema landmark documenting the Wisconsin primary race between John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey. The first American nonfiction picture filmed with sync sound, its IMDb profile reads today as a who’s-who of 60s documentary film: Drew as audio recordist, Albert Maysles and Ricky Leacock behind the camera and D.A. Pennebaker in the editing room. Time will tell if Convention’s slate of collaborators seems as starry 50 years on, but in the present it stands out as a film built out of and on top of connections made on the film festival circuit. If, in the context of the incestuous world of indie film, that hardly seems all that noteworthy, it is relevant that the production seems to have harnessed the scrappy, obsessive energy of that rather insular community and put it to the service of documenting an event that could potentially have meaning to a much larger segment of the population. …Read more
Thinking about the art and process of documentary filmmaking, and then thinking about how people “document” their lives via Twitter — can you envision ways you might use Twitter as part of your work or storytelling?
Since the only kind of documentary work I’ve been involved in has been vérité style, in which the camera must stay with the subject for a long time, potentially years, in slow and deliberate accumulation of material that will be distilled down, I can see similarities between that process and Twitter. Certainly you can observe a lot about someone by reading the accumulation of in-the-moment information they have left behind in tweets. In that sense, it is similar to vérité. It is, at least to those who use it un-self-consciously, a window into personality. If a documentary subject were a Twitter user, you would definitely want to follow their feed — it would be a gold mine of inside information that could lead to new ideas and possibilities in your film.
Amanda Hirsch talks to documentary filmmaker Louis Abelman about Twitter on the P.O.V. Blog. You can follow Hirsch and Abelman on Twitter. Hell, you can follow me and Spout, too.
Alternative Reel recently placed Frederick Wiseman’s groundbreaking 1967 cinema verite doc Titicut Follies at the number 2 spot in their list of the Top Ten Banned Films of The 20th Century (what made number 1? Why, Cannibal Holocaust, of course!). The film, which offers a cold and often disturbing look at the lives anf treatment of criminally insane patients at a mental hospital inside a Massachusetts prison, was unavailable outside of educational use for 25 years, after the state Supreme Court declared it violated the patients’ rights to privacy. It’s now widely available––so widely available, in fact, that after about four seconds of digging, I found the film in its entirety on Google Video (see above). It’s an upload from a VHS tape, so it’s not perfect quality, but it’s adequate. For a wider screen, go directly to the Google Video page.
More on Titicut Follies:
Reverse Shot
Senses of Cinema
Bright Lights Film Journal
Allan King’s latest film, EMPz for Life, is a film long overdue. The common concept of racism is outdated and conjures images from the Civil Rights Movement. The racism we face today has been harder to attach an image to. EMPz for Life accomplishes just this as the camera crew follows–in King’s signature cinema verite style–half a dozen young men and their frustrated mentor through twelve weeks of their life in inner city Toronto.
Starz Denver Film Festival, spout.com podcast
Standard Podcast [8:43m]:
Play Now |
Download
In the 1960s and 70s, Allan King was at the forefront of a new way of doing documentary using cinema verite. Up until that point, cinema verite hinged on a central question that needed to be answered by the film, but King decided that the real life drama was the story in and of itself. This was very clear (and very successful) in the 1969 film A Married Couple, which Paul and I watched last night. I went into the film thinking it would be very interesting on an academic level, so I wasn’t prepared to be moved so deeply by the drama between Bill and Antoinette unfolding on the screen. King and his crew filmed the couple in their home for 10 weeks, until they appear to have completely forgotten the camera was present. The demonstrations of what goes wrong–and right–in a marriage are powerful. After the screening, Paul and I were very privileged to talk to Mr. King about the process of making A Married Couple and his particular understanding of marriage since making the film.
Starz Denver Film Festival, spout.com podcast
Standard Podcast [11:46m]:
Play Now |
Download
