Charles Guggenheim’s documentary film about Americans taken prisoner in the Battle of the Bulge, The Wall Street Journal reports:

All of Charles Guggenheim’s signature strengths–the ruthless economy of the commentary, the focus on fact, the impeccably telling images–are here in full flower in this, the last and perhaps the most brilliant of his films, and one he barely lived to finish. To make it, he pursued the impossible-seeming task of finding the survivors of Berga, Americans who had–and this was, for Guggenheim, the main theme–seen the Holocaust up close, as perhaps no others had. The four-time Academy Award winner who made “Nine From Little Rock,” “RFK Remembered,” “A Time For Justice” (on the civil-rights movement) and “The Johnstown Flood”–one of the most terrifying disaster films ever made–died last year at age 78. “Berga,” the only one of his works in which his voice is ever heard–if only briefly–is a fitting final adornment to a remarkable career.

The official PBS site here. There is a wealth of documentary footage at the site – click on the main-menu link “Stories of Berga” and then “Launch the INTERACTIVE STORIES” link.

It had to be made: American Mullet, “The most important hair documentary ever made!”

Andrew Revkin, New York Times photographer, has created a compelling narrated slideshow of his recent trip to the North Pole. He has also written a 2,000-word article on the trip.

The slideshow provides for an excellent example of documenting a story using the web. It is telling of the power of combining images with sound that words has difficulty competing with on the “draw-you-in” level. I am surprised there aren’t simpler tools for allowing an author to create such web-based slideshows. Sure, Flash is good, but it’s no iMovie when it comes to simplicity.

Battery Radio is the site of a Newfoundland radio documentary production company that features some fine documentary goodness such as Cholera Diary (RealAudio stream) and Songs My Mother Taught Me.

Sean Farnel of City Pages interviews Michael Galinksy about documentary filmmaking and his new documentary Horns and Halos:

Sean Farnel: When you’re making a documentary, there’s one sense in which you’re simply making a record of something that happened, and another sense in which you’re shaping that material into a story. As I see it, the crux of the challenge for a documentary filmmaker involves balancing himself between those two sides: the document side and the story side. And the audience today has become quite savvy in terms of questioning whether the film is telling “the truth” or not.

Michael Galinsky: Often the truth is a lot less clear-cut than people want to believe. Some people have come out of Horns and Halos feeling confused because they think they don’t know what we think – even though they do. The problem is that we haven’t told them, This is what you need to think.

The history of HipHop from a 1984 BBC archival documentary in 16 parts here. HipHop has come a long way, but important to recognize the roots as knowing the history makes the appreciation of the now richer.

Democracy Now! recently broadcast a controversial film about an incident in which U.S. troops may have been complicit in the killing of thousands of Afghan prisoners who had surrendered to the U.S. military in Afghan after a siege of Kunduz. More here.

The film has sent shockwaves around the world. It has been broadcast on national television in Britain, Germany, Italy and Australia. It has been screened by the European parliament. It has outraged human rights groups and international human rights lawyers. They are calling for investigation into whether U.S. Special Forces are guilty of war crimes.

But most Americans have never heard of the film. That’s because not one corporate media outlet in the U.S. will touch it. It has never before been broadcast in this country.

The documentay, in real media format, is found here (jog one hour into the stream for the documentary). The audio-only version here. The US Administration responds to the film here (comments found 5/6th of the way down the page).

Former Monthy Python fellow, Michael Palin, is interviewed by Brian Libby in Salon about his new travel series, Sahara:

Libby: It’s a good time for this series now — a chance to humanize the people of Islamic countries whom it’s all too easy for Westerners to vilify.

Palin: I think it’s a way of looking at the world that tends to disappear in times of war. You tend to forget that the people hit by collateral damage are the sort of people I’ve met on my travels, people who are immensely tolerant, hospitable and proud of the lives they’re leading. To me the saddest thing about war is that people like that, who we’re trying to help, are the ones whose lives are ending. When I travel it really comforts me how little actually divides us. Of course there is a huge gulf in our material welfare, religious upbringing, and things like that. But things like your family, your house, your children’s education, your hope for the future, are things that throughout the Muslim world they would share very easily with their counterparts in America.

Daniel M. Kimmel of The Christian Science Monitor reports on the new documentary, Capturing the Friedmans, from Andrew Jarecki that had started as a film about children’s birthday party entertainers.

Among the 150 people he interviewed for the proposed film was David Friedman, a leading party clown in New York. After his interviews with Friedman, Jarecki soon realized he was going to be making a different movie.

“I discovered he had this secret story,” he explains. “When I asked him about his father or brothers or mother, I got these prepackaged responses.”

Jarecki kept pressing, and soon he was telling his assistant to put all the circus-clown material in a box marked “Movie A” and start focusing on the Friedmans. “Now we’re going to start working on Movie B.”

Movie B is about how David’s father, Arnold Friedman, a retired and award-winning teacher, was accused of molesting boys in a private computer class held in his home. The youngest of his sons, Jesse, was also charged with participating.

The official site here (very smart site, for a documentary film). Rotten Tomates reviews here.

More: The New York Times Julie Salamon writes:

Call it “Dateline” filtered through David Lynch. Even the sprinkler systems maintaining Great Neck’s pristine lawns become ominous in the camerawork of Aldolfo Doring. Yet Mr. Jarecki manages to convey sympathy for Arnold and Jesse Friedman, raising significant points that cast doubt on their guilty pleas without making claims for their innocence. At the same time, his film conveys the utter strangeness of this family, its fixation on documenting itself even at its worst — especially at its worst.

More: USAToday reports:

Jarecki may be America’s richest documentary filmmaker, but he financed his film the usual way. “I can’t imagine a movie studio or television company that signed on to make the clown movie and then would weather the transition to this. We were lucky to fund it through family and friends.”

Update: Here is a link to Jesse Friedman’s web site which further details the injustices done to him and his family and also clears up some speculation that was left open or was misrepresented in the film.

Todd McCarthy of Variety reports on Errol Morris’ latest documentary film:

Film Reviews: Moving away from oddball subject matter to tackle some major issues stemming from a thick slice of history, Errol Morris delivers a compelling, thoughtful and entirely involving documentary in “The Fog of War.” Many will come to the film with their minds long since made up about its central figure, former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara. But pic quickly encourages the viewer to open up to its bracing but non-confrontational attitude and share Morris’ complex exploration of moral issues, human foibles, chance and freshly spotlighted historical evidence that may not change people’s opinions but could modify and enrich them. Destined to be a significant specialized attraction, Sony Pictures release has lots to say and will provoke considerable comment not only among critics but also among columnists and historians on the ever-relevant subject of war.

Roger Ebert of The Chicago Sun-Times writes:

“[McNamara] had a lot of doubts about making this film,” Blight said. “He wondered if he would be left to hang out to dry by Morris. He’d never seen one of Errol’s films before. It took a lot of nerve.”

Yes, but the gamble was worth it because instead of a dry talking-head documentary, Morris has captured the man himself, a man who held enormous power and responsibility, tried to exercise it well and was clear-eyed enough to see that Vietnam was not winnable.

Morris is an intellectual with a touch of mysticism, a man whose approach to facts sometimes seems musical, as if he wants them to bow and sway to inner rhythms. His motto, he told me, is from the novelist Harry Crews, who wrote, “I want more this, not more of this.”

RJ Reynolds, a.k.a. Choire Sicha, releases a clip from his blog documentary Umentary:

That’s right, I’ve been working on a documentary film about bloggers. Like a deadly new virus, or a brutal African regime, blogs are finally getting the in-depth Oscar-contending shaky-hand-held camera treatment they deserve. I began this project because of the unfair reputation that bloggers had gotten. They are not vain racist misanthropes, obsessed only with their own navels.

We’ll have to see about that.

Bob Dylan came into the world with a critically acclaimed documentary about himself in D.A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back and now Dylan comes full circle with a documentary about his life by critically acclaimed director Martin Scorsese, who as you might know, has made a few very good documentaries, namely The Last Waltz. More about Scorsese’s documentary on Dylan here, here and here.

Cultures in Webs by Roderick Coover “explores the frontier of new media, documentary filmmaking, photography, journalism, and anthropology.”

This challenging and compelling work incorporates sound and video recordings of West African performance, storytelling, and photos from a wine harvest in Burgundy. The project offers examples in the application of new media to non-fiction production and includes the discussion of works by Robert Gardner, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Nelson Goodman, Paul Friedrich, and others.

We hope to post a review soon. Find the CD here. Are interactive CDs still viable in the long-run compared to DVD and Flash-based online works?

From a National Film Board of Canada’s press release:

The National Film Board of Canada, the UK Film Council and the British Broadcasting Corporation jointly announced today the signing of a groundbreaking new partnership to establish the World Documentary Fund. The $3.5 million CAD fund (£1,500,000 or Euro 2,091,400) will be dedicated exclusively to the production of feature-length documentaries for theatrical release.

Excellent news.

The New York Times reports on the passing of David Ives:

As the man who approved major projects at WGBH, he became linked with enduring national favorites that were first shown in the United States on the station, including “Nova,” the scientific documentary series, first shown in 1970; the “Masterpiece Theater” (1970) and “Mystery” (1980) dramas – often from Britain and adapted for broadcast here; and “Frontline,” a documentary series that examines current political and social issues. It was WGBH that first introduced America to the antics of “Monty Python’s Flying Circus.”

More here from WGBH.

A Kalahari Family wins jury award at the Athens International Film and Video Festival. Congratulations John!

Nancy Franklin of The New Yorker writes about a series of films for a PBS series, Independent Lens:

These films are not great art, but they reward your patience, and at the moment it’s refreshing to see programming without a high polish. (And they’re a bargain – PBS could buy ten documentaries for the “Independent Lens” series for what the government spent on the media-briefing set it installed in Qatar during the war.) Watching “Independent Lens” and “P.O.V.,” a similar series on PBS, is like going into an independent bookstore – you don’t always find what you were looking for but you often find something you didn?t even know you wanted.

Haim Handwerker of Ha’aretz writes about the importance of Frederick Wiseman’s documentary contributions:

Wiseman is coming to Israel this week to receive the Dan David Prize at Tel Aviv University at the award ceremony on May 18. The prize includes a generous check for $1 million. That’s no small thing for a maker of documentaries who operates in a permanent state of lack of funds. The panel of experts that chose to grant him the coveted prize determined that Wiseman is the most prominent person ever to have held a camera for the purpose of creating a documentary film.

Indy Media posts the documentary: Skull and Bones, at Yale the Anglo-Saxon Ruling Elite. The Skull & Bones is a limited membership private/secret club for “elite” kids who attend Yale University. Some former members have gone on to become the President of the U.S. This is a good example of the sensationalist documentary form popular among many television documentaries.

This documentary blog is interested in a documentary about blogs produced by Chuck Olsen. Check out his progress here and here. He proposes making the documentary “open source” which would entail leaving footage online so that other could, supposedly, cut together their own documentary, possibly improving or adapting it to their own needs. Aside from the bandwidth costs of serving digital video, I feel the basic idea behind open source doesn’t apply very well to documentary filmmaking. Documentaries, I would argue, are inherently subjective whereas applications, which are the main benefactor of the open source movement, are objective. Weither or not a documentary is, by definition, based on fact or influenced by an individual’s perception is a rather old and uninteresting argument. Collaborative filmmaking rather than open source would be a more appropriate term in any case.

Palestinian documentary filmmaker Omar Al-Qattan was denied entry into Israel “on the grounds of ’security’.”

The three men arrived at Ben Gurion Airport at 4 PM on Wednesday afternoon. About two hours later (during which time no explanation was given for their continued detention), Al-Qattan was interrogated by police. All questions and enquiries were answered and supported with the relevant documents. At the end of the interrogation, which lasted about half an hour, Al-Qattan was told that he was under suspicion of belonging to a terrorist organisation, in view of the recent involvement of two British nationals in attacks on a Tel Aviv cafe, but that the information he had provided would be checked and, if it turned out to be sound, he and his crew would be granted permission to enter…

On June 2nd, your options for independent broadcast may vanish when FCC commissioners vote to change cross-media ownership. Inform the FCC that you do not want this to happen (3rd option down).

The New York Observer’s Frank DiGiacomo reports on David Weisman suing the filmmakers of The Kid Stays in the Picture due to “misappropriated” ideas portrayed in the film about Weisman.

…according to a draft of the complaint obtained by The Transom, Mr. Weisman “wrote, produced, directed and edited” on his own volition between January and April of 1998, in an attempt to convince Mr. Evans to let him direct the documentary of The Kid Stays in the Picture. The complaint, which Mr. O’Callahan said will be filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, charges the defendants with “stealing [Mr. Weisman’s] original sixteen-minute documentary concepts presentation of ‘The Kid Stays in the Picture,’ and all of [Mr. Weisman’s] original vision, concepts, techniques, ideas and approaches to illustrating [Mr. Evans’] life on film” to make the full-length The Kid Stays in the Picture.

Of Men and Gods has been selected to participate in OUTFEST 2003: The 21st Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Film Festival. The festival will be held July 10-21, 2003 at the Directors Guild of America in West Hollywood, and at selected theaters throughout Los Angeles. Congratulations Anne and Laurence.

Independent television, news, radio, and cable are in trouble. Please help independent media by filling out your address and pressing a button to send your legislative representative a fax telling them you are concerned about media ownership consolidation.

Video Librarian reviews Of Men and Gods:

Ellen J. Ingmanson of American Anthropologist reviews Chimpanzees Today. A video on Chimpanzee behavior by Anne Zeller.

The length of this video is ideal for classroom use as it provides time for discussion during a typical college class period. The potential for discussion and debate is high, including (1) the relevance of nonhuman primates as models for understanding human evolution; (2) the loss of habitat; (3) the bushmeat trade; (4) the ethics surrounding the use of chimpanzees in biomedical research; (5) whether zoos can serve the multiple roles of entertainment, education, and conservators; (6) should chimpanzees be kept as pets; and (7) what is our responsibility to them.

Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve got a digital camera, participate in America 27/7.

The largest photo project in history and the watershed event of the new digital photography age, America 24/7 will give hundreds of thousands of Americans the opportunity to create a national family album during one ordinary week (May 12-18, 2003). Take digital pictures of your kids, your friends, your pets, your community. What’s great about your town? What would you change? As a participant in this historic event you’ll join one of four teams working simultaneously across all 50 states.

Documentary photography and filmmaker, William Klien, is featured on NPR:

American photographer and filmmaker William Klein is not well known in his native country. In part that’s because Klein, who turns 75 this year, has spent the last half-century in France. But this spring, Americans will have the chance to acquaint themselves with Klein’s work in a flurry of events that celebrate the artist’s oeuvre. Klein’s photographs appear in two New York gallery shows and a new book, Paris + Klein. His films are on view in a retrospective at the French Institute in Manhattan, and his classic 1974 documentary, Muhammad Ali, the Greatest, will open in theaters across the country….

Almost all of Klein’s films have been low-budget endeavors, in many cases self-produced, which helps explain why younger filmmakers don’t know him. He usually distributes his own movies, and in the United States they’re rarely screened outside of museum retrospectives. His last movie, Messiah, which marked the millennium with images of American decay and kitsch set to Handel’s Oratorio, has still not played commercially in the United States. It was a hit in France.

Lynn Hirschberg of The New York Times interviews D.A. Pennebaker:

Hirschberg: How did Bob Dylan find you for ‘’Don’t Look Back'’?

Pennebaker: Albert Grossman, who was his manager, came to see me. I didn’t know Dylan, but I’d read in Time that he was an inconsequential folk singer. That intrigued me. Grossman said, Come along, and I just did anything I wanted with Dylan. He was so lovable. Our innovation then was to take the cameras off their tripods. We tried to use the cameras the way musicians used their instruments. No one had thought to do that. Being with Dylan then was like being inside the tornado. We were in the middle of something, and us being there, filming him, heightened everything for him too. The big difference between fiction movies and documentaries is that the actors in movies know they’re actors. But 10 minutes into the shoot, Dylan knew he was an actor, too.