Still Life with Cannibal: On Issei Sagawa and the Documentary Caniba (2017)
The notion of the body as entry to the soul becomes a fallacy: penetration is not a portal to another person’s psyche – just as Sagawa’s cannibalism of Hartevelt could[…]
Category: Documentaries
Directors · Documentaries · Experimental & Underground
Memories and Confessions: On the Filmography of Terence Davies
Davies – who can be described as a cultural conservative but never a simple nostalgist – wears his affection for his forgotten eras on his sleeve, generally eschewing close-ups in[…]
Actors & Personalities · Documentaries
Ingrid Bergman In Her Own Words Gets Up Close and Personal
Ingrid Bergman In Her Own Words makes clear that her life was messy and episodic, but she earned great love from her directors, co-stars, and family. Don’t wait for Mommie[…]
Documentaries · Religion & Spirituality
The Native Eye: Re-Embracing the Serpent with “Chullachaqui”
Ciro Guerra’s Embrace of the Serpent (2016) can be read as a brilliant subversion of the colonising role that the camera plays in appropriating native cultures in favour of Western[…]
Activist & Political · Documentaries · War
Casualties of the Spirit: Liberating John Huston’s Let There Be Light (1946)
Naturally, Huston was furious about the film’s suppression and remained so all through the intervening years. In his words, “I think it boils down to the fact that they wanted[…]
Activist & Political · Biopic · Documentaries
Dispatch from Tribeca: Get Me Roger Stone (Dylan Bank, Daniel DiMauro, and Morgan Pehme, 2017)
Jeffrey Toobin, whose 2008 New Yorker article inspired this film, describes Roger Stone as “a malevolent Forrest Gump.” Stone is more than okay with that. He’s happy for people to[…]
Activist & Political · Documentaries
Dispatch from Tribeca: Wasted! The Story of Food Waste (Anna Chai and Nari Kye, 2017)
New York’s prestigious Tribeca Film Festival started April 19 and runs through April 30. Claire Baiz reports on a film screened in the fest’s “Spotlight Documentary” section on one of[…]
No Masters or Kings: On Sergei Polunin and Dancer (Steven Cantor, 2016)
The story is that of the driven, disciplined youth turned rebellious and excessive – brought to the fore by Ilan Eshkeri’s viscerally punchy soundtrack – but also of an almost[…]
Activist & Political · Documentaries · New Media
Black Code: Documentarian Nick de Pencier Talks Surveillance/ Subveillance in the Age of Big Data
Black Code sheds light on the commercialisation of cybercrime through the development of surveillance malware by security companies for sale to governments. Referring to Orwell’s seminal work 1984, Shehabi notes[…]
Activist & Political · Documentaries
Tabula Rasa with Tits: Barbie Nation, a Documentary (Happy Birthday, Barbie!)
On this day, March 9, 1959, Barbie was introduced to the world at New York’s American International Toy Fair. The date also became Barbie’s official birthday. She’s 58. To honor/revile what[…]
Activist & Political · Documentaries
The Problem of Access: Weiner (2016) and the Limitations of the Fly-on-the-Wall Documentary
The response to Weiner shows us (yet again) that the greater the access to a subject, the more likely a documentary is to be lavishly praised . . . no[…]
African American · Crime · Documentaries
Black Lives Matter: Whitewashing the Amanda Knox Story in the Netflix Documentary
By ignoring the black lives involved, the new Netflix documentary Amanda Knox (premiering on Netflix on September 30) is not only a very white film, it ends up producing its own miscarriage of[…]
Asian · Directors · Documentaries · Interviews
Being Human: An Interview with Hong Kong Filmmaker Cheung King-wai
Note: This interview was conducted in English during the Hong Kong International Film Festival in Sha Tin, Hong Kong, on 3 April 2016. The author wishes to thank Esther Yau,[…]
Activist & Political · Directors · Documentaries · Interviews
Berlinale Dispatch #1: Gianfranco Rosi Talks About Fire at Sea (Fuocoammare) (2016)
Editor’s note: This is the first of two interviews (next up: Nanni Moretti) our correspondent Amir Ganjavie conducted with directors at the 2016 Berlin Film Festival (Feb. 11-21). Gianfranco Rosi’s Fire[…]
Directors · Documentaries · Silents
Nanook and Robert Flaherty: Father of Documentary Film – and More
Robert Flaherty and Alice Nevalinga (aka Nyla, the smiling one) were romantically involved – or as McLane modestly puts it, “he had an Eskimo female companion.” * * * In[…]
Counterculture · Documentaries · DVD & Blu-ray · Music & Musicals
Take What You Have Gathered from Coincidence: D. A. Pennebaker’s Dont Look Back (1967)
“BOB: Well, you always know who you are. I just don’t know who I’m gonna become.” – Sam Shepard. True Dylan: A One-Act Play as It Really Happened One Afternoon in[…]
Documentaries · Festivals & Awards · LGBT & Queer
Better Endings: QDoc: Portland’s Ninth Queer Documentary Film Festival (May 14-17, 2015)
“It’s time to give her story a better ending,” says Jane Anderson in her documentary Packed in a Trunk: The Lost Art of Edith Lake Wilkinson, speaking of her great[…]
Documentaries · Experimental & Underground · Historical & Epic · Reviews
“Hundreds of Thousands of Hours of Moments”: On Adam Curtis’s Bitter Lake (2015)
In a recent interview, the English filmmaker Adam Curtis described finding “hidden levels in the BBC archive” where a vast collection of extraneous footage has been accumulating over the last[…]
Directors · Documentaries · Experimental & Underground · War
Re-envisioning the Postwar Documentary: Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog and Hiroshima mon amour
Despite the reputation that Alain Resnais has garnered as “cinema’s definitive artist of postwar trauma,” few scholars have undertaken a detailed comparative analysis of his two works that broach this[…]
Directors · Documentaries · Reviews · Writers & Critics
Big Worms and Big Fish: Jodorowsky, Dune, and Jodorowsky’s Dune
“Jodorowsky capitalizes on the cachet of exclusivity, the wonderful feeling of being one of the elite few who “get it,” and, in treating it like a source of esoteric wisdom,[…]
