Acclaimed science fiction writer, William Gibson, “stars” in a CBC documentary archive from 1967 entitled Yorkville: hippie haven here. It is an amusing piece of television documentary from that period – have television documentaries changed much since?

Gibson comments here:

Yep, that is indeed me, though nothing I’m saying there, at such painful length, is even remotely genuine. They were offering $500 for someone to monologue about the summer of lurve, etc., and I was (1) somewhat articulate, and (2) wanted desperately to get my ass out of Yorkville…

Claire Cozens for The Guardian writes:

The BBC’s governors have criticised the corporation for failing to warn viewers that a Correspondent film about the siege of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem showed events almost exclusively through the eyes of the Israeli military.

The governors launched an investigation after a BBC viewer complained that the Siege of Bethlehem, which was made by an Israeli production team and told from the point of view of the army negotiators who dealt with the crisis, offered a “singularly one-sided” account of the tragedy.

Once again, a documentary has, in part, helped save a life faced with the death penalty. David A. Lieb of The Associated Press writes:

Upon hearing the news [of Joseph Amrine’s release from death row], about 40 people gathered at the Kansas City home of Amrine’s brother, Ronnell Amrine, where there were lots of hugs and high-fives.

The family had become more hopeful, Ronnell Amrine said, after the release of a 30-minute documentary — “Unreasonable Doubt: The Joe Amrine Case” — produced by a University of Missouri teacher and students. Groups have shown it across the state.

Documentary filmmakers DA Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus (”Startup.com,” “The War Room”) and journalist Roger Friedman document the great soul singers of the 1960s and early 1970s in their upcoming film, Only The Strong Survive. Their film is due to be theatrically released May 9th and distributed via Miramax. From the official press release:

Many of the legends of soul died at an early age: Marvin Gaye, Otis Redding, practically all of the Temptations among them. But those who are still alive have been largely ignored since their youth – relegated to oldies shows and budget tours – until now.

The Pennebaker team put together a concert of the great soul survivors, reuniting many of the stars under the influential Stax record label, including Wilson Pickett, “The Iceman” Jerry Butler, former Supreme Mary Wilson, The Chi-Lites, Sam Moore, and Carla and Rufus Thomas, whose duet “Nighttime is The Right Time” brings the film to a climactic close. The result is a musical celebration of soul, a glimpse into the skewed world of the music industry, and a compelling narrative of these seven talented acts who’ve lived extraordinary lives beyond our expectations.

Read reviews of Only The Strong Survive here. The official web site here.

NPR’s Morning Edition offers a look back on the 1983 documentary, Style Wars:

The film follows notorious graffiti writers such as Min One, Dez, Iz and Seen as they sneak through subway tunnels to train yards, avoiding the ominous electric third rails. Armed with cans of Krylon spray paint, they outrun transit police to create mural masterpieces with block letters and cartoon figures, all in the name of fame. Style Wars documents the thrill of seeing their so-called “wild style” graffiti tags on passing subway trains throughout the city.

Sylviane Gold of The New York Times writes about the academy-nominated documentary, Spellbound:

“I realized that there was something about the [spelling] bee that would allow me to tell the kind of broad American story that I was interested in telling,” Mr. Blitz said. “There are times when a nonfiction filmmaker chooses a subject because he or she wants to let that subject speak for itself, and then there are times when a documentary filmmaker wants to shape a subject to tell the kind of story that he or she wants to tell. I think it was a healthy mix of the two for me.”

A Slate review here:

Spellbound is a gorgeous weave. When the contestants take the stage, the editor, Yana Gorskaya, cuts fluidly from the kids to their parents?often doubled over with anxiety?and back to the harrowing recitation of letters. Daniel Hulsizer’s simple, plinking chords remind you of “Chopsticks” or a child’s building blocks: It’s the perfect music for this innocent?yet unnerving?milieu. The real-time tension is so strong that it’s a relief when the movie takes a breather to meet contest officials and past spelling champions, among them the very first winner, from 1925. They remember their own sense of monklike isolation while they studied, the bond they felt to other social misfits when they arrived at the national finals, and their Olympian pride in victory.

Any discussion of police work in America inevitably evokes ambivalent responses, touching, as it does, on our deeply rooted but not always shared notions of privacy and social responsibility, of individual freedom and the law, of order, of violence, and of the use and abuse of power. The role of the police has been as variously defined, historically, as our own responses, a history that has helped to shape the often frustrating and difficult roles in which policemen find themselves in this society.

During the late 1960s, when the Pittsburgh police films were made, Americans became increasingly aware of tensions and conflicts in their urban “asphalt jungles.” The Vietnam war, student protests, and race riots in Detroit, Newark and other cities served to highlight these tensions and to focus attention on the figure of the urban policeman. Yet the conflicts and the antipathy toward the police were not new, nor were they to be resolved in the post-Vietnam war years. In May 1980, the worst racial and anti-police rioting in over a decade erupted in Miami, upon the acquittal of four white policemen accused in the fatal beating of a black man, Arthur McDuffy. Historically, long before the influx of blacks and Hispanic peoples into North American cities, the racial, ethnic, and class backgrounds of the police, the policed, and the police reformers played crucial roles in determining the nature and operation of the law-enforcement institution.
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Apple has the trailer for the academy nominated documentary spellbound here.

Peter Nichols of The New York Times writes about the Oscar winning documentary Murder on a Sunday Morning:

Watching Jean-Xavier de Lestrade’s documentary “Murder on a Sunday Morning,” you wonder how he got access to shoot as freely as he did. An account of a murder trial in Jacksonville, Fla., the film persistently stays in the faces of the 15-year-old defendant, Brenton Butler (who was acquitted), and his family; the dogged defense team; the prosecutor; and detectives assigned to the case.

The filmmakers had long discussions with Judge Waddell Wallace of the Duval County Circuit Court about camera access, said Denis Poncet, the documentary’s producer, in an e-mail message from France: “It was his ruling alone after the Florida Supreme Court told him he could do what he wanted. He decided to agree with our proposals because we were making a film to be broadcast months after the trial. Even though the prosecution tried to kick us out, the judge always sided with us. We thank him.”

Jacob Holdt traveled to America with $40 and ended up with thousands of beautiful and telling portraits of a side of America one doesn’t often wish recognize: racism, poverty, and virtual slavery. Visit his photo album here.

From one of his photographs captions:

I made friends with a hitchhiking clan member whom I picked one night between my lectures. As with most of my clan friends he had suffered incest in childhood and needed psychological help. Later he took me to a mind-blowing Klan meeting and even helped hide my film from the other Klan members. Photo taken from under my own hood!

Chirs Hedges of the New York Times writes about a documentary project called “UnseenAmerica” in which those being documented were the documentarians. Described as a program to promote the first person photographs and stories of people who are frequently ignored by the media and mass culture

The images are staggering in their simplicity and power. A home health care worker, for example, spent weeks taking pictures of the chairs she could never occupy. Another woman shot a picture of her son in his 20’s getting a haircut, explaining that when he was a boy she never had the time to take him to cut his hair, and get a picture, because she was working.

In the last two years, local chapters of the union, the nation’s fastest-growing union, has embraced the program. There are about 1,500 workers nationwide who have taken a 12-week introductory photography class and photographed their lives. On May 13, the federal Department of Labor will display about 40 of the photographs in an exhibition in Washington.

View some of the photographs here.

For those in the Istanbul area, Benjamin And His Brother will be screening at the 7th International Environmental Film Festival. Turkish Foundation of Cinema and Audiovisual Culture (TURSAK) 06-12th June 2003 in Istanbul, Turkey.

The New School in New York City will host D.A. Pennebaker (Primary, Crisis, The War Room) Chris Hegedus (The War Room), Nick Doob (The War Room), David Van Taylor (A Perfect Candidate) and Alexandra Pelosi (Journeys With George) to discuss the politician and political process as documentary subject, as well as the following questions:

1. How is the documentary different from daily news coverage?
2. How do documentary films shape our understanding of politics in America?
3. What is the potential of documentaries to recast the way we see the political process and those who inhabit it?
4. And how has documentary film-making changed from Primary (1960), which covered John F. Kennedy’s bid for the presidency, to Journeys with George, featuring Alexandra Pelosi’s videotaped interactions with George W. Bush during the 2000 election?

The lecture is free and open to the public and will be taking place at The New School at 66 West 12th St. (between 5th and 6th Avenues), Room 404, New York City Monday, May 5th, 6 pm to 7:30 pm. It will also be broadcast live via the web here.

Eugene Hernandez of Indiewire reports:

A noncompetitive festival of telvision documentaries opens this week at New York’s Museum of Television and Radio, offering a showcase for new work. It will run from April 24th - May 4th in Manhattan. The 2003 Television Documentary Festival will present the premieres alongside a retrospective, panel discussions, works-in-progress and Q & A sessions. Also on tap is a youth doc event.

For more information about the festival, go here.

Update: Julie Salamon of the New York Times reports on six vietnam documentaries being shown at the festival:

In the Vietnam films, particular set pieces appear over and over: men trudging through streams; delicate-looking peasants wading in rice paddies; helicopters landing or taking off; soldiers sweating and slapping bugs. These intimate portrayals of life on the front also show graphic views of the wounded and dead from both sides, as well as poignant glimpses of ethereal waifs. The imagery may seem familiar even to those too young to have watched these documentaries and daily coverage on television. That’s because these reports became blueprints for later, noisier Hollywood versions of the war, like “Apocalypse Now” and “Full Metal Jacket.”

According to Zap2it, American Experience, a PBS documentary program, has begun production on a two-hour documentary on Castro:

Stone’s film, based on a series of interviews with Cuba’s communist leader, is reportedly sympathetic to Castro and attempts to humanize him. Early discussion of the “Experience” documentary suggests that an attempt will be made to achieve the former, if not the latter.

“There is a need for an objective, well-researched documentary on Castro, ” says Margaret Drain, executive producer of “American Experience.” “His impact on the United States is extensive, dramatic, and ongoing. For nearly 50 years, he has commanded our attention. He brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. He has outlasted nine presidents. Yet he is unknown to most of us. Current events in Cuba make this film particularly relevant.”

Seabiscuit, the story of a famous racing horse, airs on PBS and there is some small controvery surrounding movie footage being passed off as news footage. The Beacon Journal’s R.D. Heldenfels writes:

A publicist for the show readily acknowledged the Black Stallion substitution – and noted that the show’s credits refer to a Black Stallion clip.

She also maintained that all the racing footage was archival. But after consulting with producer-director Stephen Ives, she noted other re-enactments…

And eschewing controvery, The Washington Post via the The Kansas City Star reports of the filmmaker:

“I’d love to take full credit for the re-enactments,” Ives said. “But that would go to Francis Ford Coppola. There were a couple of key scenes from `The Black Stallion’ (Coppola’s 1979 film) that were shot at that period. We looked at those and knew there was no way we could do better. I am not a huge fan of re-enactments, but I just could not pass up something like that. So we paid for them.”

When is reinactment in documentary filmmaking wrong?

Miguk is a 16 chapter online documentary on the life of an ex-patriot teaching English in Korea.

Bodysong is a movie about an archetypal human life using images from around the world and movies from the last 100 years of cinema. The web site allows visitors to explore every shot in the movie, literally hundreds of images, navigable through a 3-dimensional user interface.

The director, Simon Pummell is asked, “Why did you write Bodysong?” And he replies:

If you were able to look back from the vantage point of 500 years in the future, what would movies have captured that was really profound, exciting, still worth looking at?

Is it possible to make films that have a mythic scale? And yet show ordinary people living recognisable human lives. The things we have in common…

Pummell was also asked, “How does the web site relate to the movie?”

In the movie only the image speaks, the website provides the background and setting of each shot.

The website takes you to a 3D space where the story of the movie, every shot, hangs in space. You can fly along the time line of the whole movie, see the shots in the film and if you click on a shot it opens and tells you the story of that individual shot.

If the movie’s big mythic single story is the trunk of the tree; then the individual stories behind each of the hundreds of shots are the branches. The project contains hundreds of stories and the site allows you to explore them.

The site also has another version of the film’s music as sets of samples and loops, which play as you move through the film. So you can really ’surf’ the film - move through it as a datascape and explore the areas that grab you.

David Sterritt of The Christian Science Monitor writes:

Documentaries are back in style, and that world-class curmudgeon Michael Moore deserves a big share of the credit.

Sterritt goes on to report on the age-old question of truth in documentary filmmaking:

“There’s no such thing as ‘objective truth’ in films,” says Haskell Wexler, a renowned cinematographer and director of both documentary and fiction movies.

“Every film is a story the filmmaker wants to tell, and he tells it the way he thinks is best…. Don’t look for ‘truth’ in documentaries, because you won’t find it.”

And continues with documentaries potential of explotation:

“It’s an age-old issue,” James says. “I had a [prior] relationship with Stevie, and when I got caught up [as a filmmaker] in his [history of] crime, and his family, and my own desire to play a role in his life, I realized that the film had to take account of this. Otherwise it would have been exploitation.”

Ted Turner tries documentary production with Ted Turner Documentaries. Their first program, broadcast by PBS, aired this past week. Entitled Avoiding Armageddon, the series explores weapons of mass destruction. The official site here.

A Year On The Wing is an Austraian web documentary about the migration of the Eastern Curlew. Not quite as elegant as Becoming Human, but very comprehensive and well-executed never-the-less.

Blogcritics.org reviews Six, a documentary about Natasha Cornett who went on a killing spree.

On April 6, 1997, a group of six occult-inspired teenagers from Kentucky and a family of picnicking Jehovah’s Witness were brought together by fate. A few minutes later, the family was dead, and the teenagers were headed for Mexico.

How did such a tragedy occur? SIX outlines the events that led to this fateful confrontation: from a mental health and criminal justice system that released people known to be dangerous and failed to heed repeated warnings, to and educational system that bred fear, resentment, and anger.

The six teens are behind bars. But the system that bred them is still on the loose.

Doug Engelbart, inventor of the mouse, computer window, web page and video teleconferencing is the subject of a new, yet to be produced, documentary entitled Invisible Revolution. Included on the site are video clips and a blog that details production work. The documentarians are either up to their necks in production work or they’ve dropped the ball on the blog since the last update appears to have been from January 2003.

There are some early video of Doug Englebart here and here. Thanks Russell Beattie for the link.

Steve Rhodes of TV Barn provides an overview of documentary films at the festival as well as insights gained from the festival, such as:

One thing that is clear from watching films showing at the festival is many of the foreign films get support from government funding and television channels like the BBC and ZDF and Arte (as do some films and many documentaries from the US).

More about the festival from Kelly Vance of the East Bay Express:

The most gratifying thing about this year’s fest may be its terrific lineup of documentaries. Docs have typically been one of the SF festival’s strong suits, but appropriately enough during this time when thoughtful culture consumers are eager to separate the truth from the embedded version of reality, the nonfiction form is particularly well represented at the SF festival.

HBO has decided to “shelf” Oliver Stone’s documentary on Fidel Castro on the basis that the documentary depicts Castro without judgement. Should documentary filmmaking be a “true journalistic endeavor” as the article suggests?

Posting this same article to metafilter generated the following discussion here.

Another brief article about the “shelving” from BostonChannel here.

Update: Reuters reports that Stone went back to Cuba to ask Castro about “a recent crackdown on dissidents and interview some of his opponents…”

David Herman of Prospect Magazine discusses the state of arts programming on television:

Arts television today has become blander and less curious, more mainstream and less opinionated. When was the last time an arts programme started a debate…?

This narrowing applies to formats too. Now we have mainly the set-piece interview or the documentary series. The short quirky film, the drama-doc, the process film, following the creation of a particular work, the topical discussion, have all gone for the moment. What made Bragg’s famous interview with Potter so memorable was not just the quality of the conversation, but the setting?filming it in a television studio with the bits and pieces of machinery and technology in full view. This was a statement about Potter’s place in television, that he was not merely a great writer, but a great writer for this particular medium. Or think of Anand Tucker’s conceit of interviewing “talking heads” lying on Hampstead Heath in a short film about Constable’s sky paintings. This kind of risk-taking has almost completely disappeared.

The Kids Are Alright is a short quicktime documentary that offers self-reflective perspectives from gay and lesbian teenagers.

Matthew Rothschild of The Progressive interviews Roger Ebert:

Rothschild: Tell me what was your reaction to Michael Moore’s acceptance speech at the Academy Awards.

Ebert: I heard him give the same speech the day before at the Independent Spirit Awards, where he stood up straight, and looked the audience in the eye, and took his time. It got a good response, although that audience was more receptive than the academy. But I have a feeling an acting coach could have analyzed his performance at the Academy Awards and said he was prompting the Academy to dislike his speech because he hunkered over the microphone, and he talked too fast and defiantly, as if he was trying to get it out before he was stopped. His body language and his verbal language all kind of sent the wrong message.

Our own beloved Cynthia Close writes for Imagine magazine about John Marshall’s documentary work on the Kalahari bushmen:

The general stylistic principle guiding most of John Marshall’s filmmaking has been cinema vérité, further elaborated by him with the concepts of “sequence” and “slot”. He argues that his method and product are merely “reporting” and that true meaning comes from “immersing” the viewer in the ordinary life of the people through “sequences,” snatches of reality. Given this strong commitment to what he sees as a scientific or journalistic endeavor, it is interesting that John’s personal commitment to the Ju/hoansi (Bushmen) people and his views of how films may be used in development work on their behalf, are essentially humanistic, relativistic and, postmodern.

John Marshall continued his film documentation of the Ju/hoansi throughout the 1950’s. Due in part to the political ramifications of apartheid, Marshall was not allowed to enter South Africa from the early 1960’s and throughout much of the 1970’s as his close relationship with the Bushmen was seen as a threat to the status quo. By 1960 John was working with D.A. Pennebaker and Ricky Leacock to further the development of cinéma vérité. By this time, Marshall was recognized as a gifted cameraman. He shot Titicut Follies for Fred Wiseman. Never one to shy away from danger, he went to work for NBC, shooting the civil war in Cyprus…

James Gorman for the New York Times, writes about the Academy nominated Winged Migration:

“Winged Migration” follows a year in the life of birds in North America, Europe and Asia, in Africa and the Middle East, in Antarctica and the Southern Ocean. The film crews went to Iceland and Kenya, Nebraska and Kosovo, Senegal and Greenland, Vietnam, Peru and many other locations.

At times, poetic license was extended. Cinematographers filmed Canadian hunters shooting snow geese, but they also used images of fowl tumbling from the sky that were actually birds doing excited acrobatics as they came to land. In the second instance, the gunshots were added in the studio.

In addition, one shot of birds walking through oil was done on a constructed set. The oil was milk with vegetable color. And in another scene when crabs were attacking young birds, something that occurred naturally, Mr. Perrin said, the filmmakers snatched the young chicks away before the crabs got them and substituted a piece of fish, so that the final feeding of the crabs seen on screen was not actually on a bird carcass.