Documentary 101 Samplers

“Documentary 101” now available as e-book

Happy to announce that my book, “Documentary 101: A Viewer’s Guide to Non-Fiction Film”, previously available only in paperback, has now been released as an e-book in all formats—in most cases selling for the low low price of only $4.99. All these sites allow you to “look inside” at the first 40 pages. See below for the links.

My publisher BookLocker.com has done a great job on the e-book conversion, allowing readers to land on any of the over 300 reviews by clicking on the title in the table of contents.

In my Categories list to the right, the “Documentary 101 Samplers” offer highlights from a more varied cross-section of the book, along with film stills only seen there.

Cheers, Rick Ouellette
(Reel and Rock readers: I am now on Facebook if you’d like to connect with me there)

AMAZON:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00IRLKZE0

BARNES & NOBLE:
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/documentary-101-rick-ouellette/1116257055?ean=2940149447824&itm=1&usri=2940149447824

BOOKLOCKER:
http://booklocker.com/books/6965.html

ITUNES:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/documentary-101-viewers-guide/id833794635

KOBO:
http://store.kobobooks.com/en-US/ebook/documentary-101-a-viewer-s-guide-to-non-fiction-film

Documentary 101: the e-book

Happy to announce that my book, “Documentary 101: A Viewer’s Guide to Non-Fiction Film”, previously available only in paperback, has now been released as an e-book in all formats—in most cases selling for the low low price of only $4.99. The list of the various online outlets is below; all of these sites allows you to “look inside”, usually meaning a peek at the first 40 pages that before now was only available on my author page of the publisher BookLocker.com

BookLocker has done a great job on the e-book conversion, allowing readers to land on any of the over 300 reviews by clicking on the title in the table of contents.

In my Catergories list to the right,the “Documentary 101 Samplers” features highlights from a more varied cross-section of the book, along with film stills only seen there.

Cheers, Rick

AMAZON:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00IRLKZE0

BARNES & NOBLE:
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/documentary-101-rick-ouellette/1116257055?ean=2940149447824&itm=1&usri=2940149447824

BOOKLOCKER:
http://booklocker.com/books/6965.html

ITUNES:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/documentary-101-viewers-guide/id833794635

KOBO:
http://store.kobobooks.com/en-US/ebook/documentary-101-a-viewer-s-guide-to-non-fiction-film

The Beatles meet the Maysles, 7 Feb 1964

The review below taken From “Documentary 101: A Viewer’s Guide to Non-Fiction Film”
Now on sale: http://booklocker.com/books/6965.html (This author page has an extended book excerpt. Also available from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com)

The Beatles: The First U.S. Visit
Albert and David Maysles—1964/1991—83 minutes

It was only ten weeks after the assassination of President John Kennedy. With the pall of national tragedy still in the air that winter, the filmmaking team of Albert and David Maysles got a call from Granada Television in England saying a musical group named the Beatles were arriving in New York in a couple of hours and would they mind heading down and maybe getting some footage? Albert was a bit nonplussed but younger brother David was more hip to the current pop scene and sensed the opportunity. After negotiating a deal right there on the phone, the light-traveling duo were on their way to recently renamed John F. Kennedy Airport, getting there just in time for the famous moment when John, Paul, George, and Ringo hesitated a moment at the top of the steps while leaving the plane, realizing that the hordes of people lining the balcony of the terminal were there for them and not some head of state as they first thought. And just like that the Maysles brothers found themselves in the middle of one of the twentieth century’s defining cultural moments. The First U.S. Visit is a 1991 re-edit of the original ’64 film (called “What’s Happening: The Beatles in the U.S.A.”) that adds more music and excises some interview material. But both versions pull the viewer right into the middle of the tumultuous birth of 1960s youth culture. It also features the Beatles performing thirteen unedited songs, from both a Washington, D.C., concert and the epochal Ed Sullivan Show TV appearances.

Twisting by the pool in Miami Beach, 1964

The Beatles were poised for big things and “I Want to Hold Your Hand” (their first widely distributed single in the U.S.) had hit #1 two weeks previous. Early segments show famed DJ Murray the K in his studio hyping them up but establishment media were often belittling in their opinions and their long-term prospects in America were uncertain. At the airport press conference they quickly charm the jaded New York press corps with their contagious high spirits and sharp wit, then are whisked off to Manhattan and to a rock ’n’ roll superstardom never to be equaled. Although a few hours before they had hardly heard of the Fab Four, the filmmakers found themselves squished into the back of a limo with the confident but still nonplussed band members. Arriving at the Plaza Hotel, we get the first dose of Beatlemania up close with fans pounding on the window, the boys dashing from the car to the lobby door, and the scenes of police struggling to keep back the hordes, all soon to become iconic images of the decade. Two nights later, on February 9, 1964, the band would make television history with 73 million people tuning in to Sullivan’s Sunday-night showcase. The Maysles brothers would tag along for the next five days with unfettered access and whether it’s the boys goofing around in hotel rooms, dancing at the Peppermint Lounge, or getting photographed in Central Park, the camera never seems more than a few feet away from the action.

When it’s time to head south for the D.C. concert, the whole entourage takes the train like it is no big deal and the band jovially mingles with the other passengers. The group here is shown at a giddy apex of fame just before becoming imprisoned by their own celebrity. And although the performances on Sullivan’s show seem as fresh and buoyant as ever, the gig at the old Washington Coliseum may be the musical highlight here. Playing from a makeshift stage in the middle of the arena, the group is surrounded by the deafening din of screaming girls but cut through the pandemonium with a manic energy unseen on the tube. “I Saw Her Standing There” rocks with an almost punkish jolt and Ringo gets a rare concert lead vocal during a likewise frenetic “I Wanna Be Your Man.” The sight of the four of them having to turn around their own amps and rotate the drum riser to play to a different part of the house couldn’t be quainter—roadies weren’t even invented yet!

The Beatles raise the roof on the Washington Coliseum, Feb. 11th, 1964

Ed Sullivan is waiting down in Miami Beach, ready to introduce these “fine youngsters” for the second of the three consecutive weeks on his show. Although the Maysles brothers’ time with the Beatles ended down there, also included is their return appearance (taped earlier) at the regular New York location for week three on Sullivan (with a farewell rave-up of “Twist and Shout” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand”) and a bit of their departure and triumphal airport reception back in London.

The filmmakers’ methods seem to point the way to one of rock’s most celebrated films, “A Hard Day’s Night”, which started filming a month after the group’s return. That movie’s director, Richard Lester, carefully crafted a pseudo-documentary feel and a few notable scenes, like the mob-besieged Beatles running to their catch their train before being eaten alive, were not staged but done spontaneously, a bit of cinematic verisimilitude not appreciated by the band. “What’s Happening!” (as it was still known) was a great feather in the cap for the Maysles brothers. With an eerie symmetry, these Johnny-on-the-spot filmmakers would close out the 1960s with “Gimme Shelter”, unwittingly filming the dark flip side of the scene the Beatles created while following a late 1969 tour by the Rolling Stones.

“Documentary 101” sampler, Part Six

Now on sale as both a paperback and e-book: http://booklocker.com/books/6965.html Also available from Amazon and other online book sellers.

“Documentary 101: A Viewer’s Guide to Non-Fiction Film” is a first-of-its-kind anthology, covering the entire spectrum of non-fiction film from 1895 to the present day. There are 101 full-length reviews of documentaries chosen for their aesthetic prominence and/or historical significance, followed by briefer entries on related titles. There are 325 total reviews and an informational appendix in its 418 pages.

The relocated deceased pets are given a final final-resting place at the Bubbling Well Pet Memorial Park run by Calvin Harberts and his family. His younger son, Danny, ranks above older brother Phillip due to his length of service. Danny is a soft-spoken, hippie-ish young man who plays guitar and is the sole occupant of a hilltop bungalow overlooking the park. He seems indifferently fated to inherit the family pet cemetery as he sits in his room surrounded by stereo equipment and a TV, talking up vague notions of love and rock ’n’ roll superstardom. In one well-known scene, he takes his electric guitar and his powerful amplifier outside, serenading the passed-on pets and the whole empty valley with some choice hard-rock riffs. Danny seems as dispossessed as any protagonist from a Kafka novel. It’s startling to realize how far Errol Morris has expanded from his base subject. “Gates of Heaven” is a film permeated with a certain kind of human fragility, the kind that lies just behind the veneer of people’s stoical everyday lives.
(Gates of Heaven, 1978)

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Russian director Dziga Vertov, along with fellow countryman Sergei Eisenstein, did much to pioneer the development of film montage and subjective editing. His was a cerebral brand of filmmaking, encompassing as it did patriotic movies for the young Soviet Union as well as the methodology of elevating the “life-facts” of photographic observation into a wider realm using stylistic flourishes. Vertov cleverly uses the actual making of the movie as its own framing device and along the way uses frenzied jump cuts, subliminal dissolves, overlapping images and split screens with the utmost confidence. Vertov’s stature was eventually undermined by Josef Stalin’s iron-fisted rule. Vertov may have been a committed Marxist but Stalin was an even more committed dictator and the director did not fare well when film projects started to fall under the auspices of rigid planning committees. His considerable talents and boundless creative drive were not so much crushed as gradually marginalized.
(Man With a Movie Camera, 1929)

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The haunting “voice” of the theremin, the first electronic musical device, wafted above a long stretch of the twentieth century and found its apotheosis as a creepy backdrop for Cold War-era science fiction and suspense movies, as well as on the Beach Boys’ optimistic pop gem “Good Vibrations.” Even more intriguing than the instrument’s sound is the life story of its enigmatic inventor, Russian émigré Leon Theremin. At the height of his fame, Theremin vanished from his swank New York penthouse amid speculation that the KGB had kidnapped him. He reappeared several decades later, living in Moscow. Director Steven M. Martin unearthed exceptional archival footage of Theremin’s early years when he was the toast of New York, playing Carnegie Hall and hosting grand parties at his Fifty-Fourth Street compound with paramour, Clara Rockwell, also a theremin virtuoso.
(Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey, 1995)

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Ross McElwee was born in 1947, into an old-line Southern family from Charlotte, North Carolina. He attended Brown University in Rhode Island, where he was exposed to the socially conscious films of Frederick Wiseman. Since doing his graduate work at MIT (under the tutelage of master documentarian Richard Leacock), he’s been based in the Boston area. Under different circumstances, his first full-length film may have been a fine, straightforward doc on the notorious march to the sea by Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman. But, as film history would have it, his girlfriend dumped him just as the funding for the project was secured. Beset by self-recrimination over the break-up, McElwee headed south with something more than the siege of Atlanta on his mind. McElwee gets sidetracked over large stretches of the old Confederacy, training his camera lens on seemingly every available woman on his own path to the sea. What came out of all this was a very droll landmark in the annals of the personal film-essay style, taking below the Mason-Dixon Line the kind of cerebral romantic comedy that Woody Allen used to be famous for. But McElwee is canny enough to keep his would-be womanizing from becoming self-indulgent, and his occasional insights about the Civil War and more modern forms of annihilation keeps the interest level high despite the film’s long running time.
(Sherman’s March, 1987)

“Documentary 101” sampler, Part Five

Now on sale as both a paperback and e-book: http://booklocker.com/books/6965.html Also available from Amazon and other online book sellers.

Several notable rock festival documentaries—”Woodstock”, “Monterrey Pop” and “Gimme Shelter” being the most famous—not only capture the giants of their genre in a live setting but also serve as sociological snapshots of their era. But in the half-generation that preceded those events, it was the annual Newport Jazz Festival that was the place to be for city hipsters and savvy suburbanites alike… Director Bert Stern quickly establishes the breezy carnival atmosphere of the 1958 edition of the festival as a moderately rebellious beatnik crowd blends into the gauzy, Eisenhower-era comfort zone with relative ease. The concert footage starts with Anita O’Day entertaining an afternoon crowd of more-formally dressed folks with some wild scat singing during her elaborate deconstructions of “Sweet Georgia Brown” and “Tea for Two.”
(Jazz on a Summer’s Day, 1959)

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It would be difficult to imagine a documentary style more personal than the one behind the Oscar-winning “Best Boy”. Director Ira Wohl followed his fifty-two-year-old developmentally disabled cousin Philly for three years, during which he gained a measure of self-reliance and entered the outside world for virtually the first time. It was Wohl himself, convincing Philly’s loving but elderly parents that their son should prepare for the time when they were not around anymore, who prompted this move to greater independence. Pearl and Max, are the very image of stoic, uncomplaining people of modest means who got along playing the hand that was dealt them. “If God wants to punish someone, he should only punish them with retarded children,” Pearl says, but even this comment seems free of bitterness.
(Best Boy, 1979)

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When Munich was chosen as the site of the 1972 Summer Olympics, World War II was not that far in the past, and neither were the sour memories of the 1936 “Hitler” Olympics in Berlin. So the event organizers were determined to show the world the modern liberal-democratic face of West Germany. But instead of the “Olympics of Serenity,” they got a globally televised nightmare when Palestinian terrorists invaded the athletes’ village, kidnapping and eventually killing eleven Israeli sportsmen. In his riveting film about the tragedy, director Kevin MacDonald views it as a watershed moment in mass media and as a momentous debacle of West German incompetence. For many Americans, when all those cameras turned away from the competition to focus on the sudden hostage story, it would be their first close-up view of international terrorism.
(One Day in September, 1999)

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Werner Herzog’s “Fitzcaraldo” was the based-on-real-life story of an eccentric impresario whose goal in life is to build a grand opera house in the deep Amazon backcountry and have Enrico Caruso sing there. In the script, Fitzcaraldo is faced with navigational difficulties in the pursuit of that goal and decides to have his hired hands haul his three-hundred-ton steamship up and over a mountain ridge to a parallel river. Herzog hired local men as extras to do just that, spurning the idea of doing a process shot, bringing the art of cinematic realism to a new extreme. The easygoing Les Blank was just the man to coolly record the monomaniacal impulses of both Fitzcaraldo and Herzog (“I live my life and I end my life with this project,” the director tells us at one point) and deftly examines the dizzying heights and desperate depths that such an attitude will lead to. “I don’t want to live in a world where there are no lions anymore,” Herzog says at one point. Yet with the coming age of demographic targets, played-down-to audiences, test endings, and the like, it is little wonder that those of Herzog’s ilk found it ever more difficult to foist something like the beautifully crazed fever dream of Fitzcaraldo onto to the public. But as Herzog puts it, “all these dreams are yours as well.”
(Burden of Dreams, 1982. Werner Herzog is pictured on the set of “Fitzcaraldo” in a photo taken by Blank’s trusty editor and sound recordist, Maureen Gosling)

Almost two hundred years after Captain Cook discovered New Guinea, French explorers set out for the same island, most of which has changed little since the Stone Age. Although director and expedition leader Pierre-Dominique Gaisseau contemplates the different eras as he stares out the jet window (“distances have lost their meaning”) this is no week at the beach. His group is to bisect the island on foot, a distance of 450 miles (150 of them uncharted) and an area still replete with headhunters and virtually impassable jungle growth. Gaisseau’s journey into “blank spots on the map” is memorable; the team deal with dense masses of undergrowth, monstrous rivers, and days spent nervously negotiating the island’s formidable central ridge, which tops off at 12,000 feet. Just as risky and unforgettable are their meet-ups with indigenous warrior tribes little changed since the days when Cook and his crew beat a hasty retreat from the island.
(Sky Above, Mud Below, 1961)

“Documentary 101” Sampler, Part Four

Now on sale as both a paperback and e-book: http://booklocker.com/books/6965.html Also available from Amazon and other online book sellers.

Below are four new excerpts from the book, accompanied by film stills only seen here. Click on images for a larger view.

“In the Year of the Pig” was the first major documentary in protest of American involvement in Vietnam and it’s admirable that director Emile de Antonio rejected the era’s fashionable agitprop to instead carefully delineate the war’s trajectory from a post-war French colonial issue, to a regional political struggle to a suddenly important outpost in the international fight against communism. A thought-provoking stew of vital interviews and ground-level footage, this is perhaps the first film of the radical left to ever receive an Oscar nomination in the documentary category.
(In the Year of the Pig, 1968)

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The Rolling Stones hired the Maysles brothers, along with their frequent collaborator Charlotte Zwerin, to document their 1969 American tour, the first where they were introduced as “the Greatest Rock and Roll Band in the World.” Right from the film’s first musical number, a turbo-charged version of “Satisfaction” from a Madison Square Garden show, the Stones do their best to live up to that hype. Times have changed since the Beatles invented the modern rock concert a half-decade earlier. Witness the communal hero-worship, the sophisticated sound system, the druggy ambience. Certainly, the sexually-charged appeal of singer Mick Jagger is a far cry from the schoolgirl crushes inspired by the Fab Four in the mid-6os. But the Stones had missed out on Woodstock, which had happened a few months before their arrival. They were already looking ahead to staging a one-day free festival in California at the end of the tour, hoping to create their own “microcosmic society,” a memorable decade-ending event. That it certainly was…
(Gimme Shelter, 1970)

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The film begins in Chelmno, Poland, where some of the earliest exterminations of prisoners first took place (starting in December 1941), and where hundreds of thousand were eventually put to death in its infamous gassing vans. By the end of the war, with Soviet forces closing in, the German guards set out to kill all those still alive. Fifteen-year-old Simon Srebnik was one of the less than five people to survive this desperate massacre. After recovering from his wounds (a bullet had grazed his head) he moved to Israel, but he is persuaded by Lanzmann to return to Chelmno thirty-four years later. After walking down a country road with a haunted look on his face—-as if he’s half-expecting to be apprehended—-Srebnik identifies the sight of the concentration camp where the foundation of the vast crematorium is still visible. “No one can re-create what happened here,” he says. “Impossible! And no one can understand it.”
(Shoah, 1985. Pictured is Simon Srebnik with residents of Chelmno, likely in the late 1970s)

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The subject of Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s first film are the “Ward boys,” four elderly bachelor brothers who run a small dairy farm in upstate New York. They lead a hermitlike existence centered around their squalid farmhouse; aside from daily trips to the market, they have very little to do with the outside world, and vice versa. Their quiet lives change drastically when one of the brothers dies in bed and another, Delbert, is charged with his murder. Soon after the arrest, the Wards learn they have a lot to both fear and appreciate from the society they have closed themselves off from. The state police and the district attorney show about as much concern for common decency as the brothers do for personal hygiene. The police manage to wrangle a confession out of an unrepresented Delbert Ward, a man of low IQ—-a “triumph” they and the DA’s office follow up with a series of ever-more-questionable tactics that culminate in a desperate attempt to turn the whole thing into an incestuous sex crime when their case seems to be faltering. The townspeople of Munnsville, on the other hand, rally around the Wards with a surprising show of support and affection.
(Brother’s Keeper, 1992)

“Documentary 101” Sampler, Part Three

Now on sale as both a paperback and e-book: http://booklocker.com/books/6965.html Also available from Amazon and other online book sellers.

Below are five more snippets from the book, accompanied by film stills only seen here.

During the Sixties, Berkeley, California became a boiling cauldron of activism and left-wing causes, the ingredients added one after the other (civil rights, free speech, Vietnam, feminism, the ecology) until it threatened to spill out of control. As to how this widespread culture of protest developed, director Mark Kitchell touches on the curious phenomenon that is the “oppression” of upper-middle-class white youth. It starts with parents who came of age in the Depression trying to give their children “everything” as they raised families in the expanding postwar economy. When this edged over into the materialism and conformity of the 1950s, it sowed the seeds of rebellion. Kitchell infers that these kids could only break through the status quo if they considered themselves not to be privileged in the conventional sense, but instead to have been raised in spiritual and intellectual poverty.
(Berkeley in the Sixties, 1990)

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Michael Moore financed much of the film’s $160,000 budget himself and centered it on his own fumbling attempts to meet GM chairman Roger Smith and convince him to personally meet a few of the Flint area’s 30,000 newly unemployed… Toward the end of the film the camera is behind Moore’s shoulder as he finally tracks down Roger Smith at the GM Christmas party. The chairman has just given a speech where he somehow saw it fitting to quote Dickens’s famous monologue from “A Christmas Carol” (“I always thought of Christmas as a good time . . .”). Many viewers by this time would likely see Scrooge’s callous comments about the “surplus population” as the more fitting passage. At least Moore gets to speak to Smith amid a milling crowd; he’s just come from Flint “where we filmed a family [of a former GM worker] being evicted from their home on the day before Christmas Eve. Would you be willing to come with us to see?”
(Roger & Me, 1989)

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With “The Thin Blue Line”, director Errol Morris would ultimately achieve what most documentaries can only strive for: affecting tangible change on the issue raised by the film. The publicity surrounding the film in 1988 helped to overturn the murder conviction of former death row inmate Randall Adams, who was released from prison the following year. Originally sentenced to be executed in the 1976 killing of a Dallas, Texas, police officer, the dubious case against Adams had already caused a reduction to life in prison when Morris caught wind of the case while researching in the Lone Star State for a possible documentary on a related subject. Morris helps to correct a travesty of justice without ever coming within a mile of a soapbox, building a case against the legal system despite his seeming impartiality. Even more impressive is that he does this while having the stylistic daring to hone a detail-obsessed, overtly cinematic form of nonfiction filmmaking that would greatly influence the genre through the 1990s and beyond.
(The Thin Blue Line, Errol Morris pictured in 1988)

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Set against an economic paradigm shift and the anti-union bias of the Reagan presidency, director Barbara Kopple investigates the nationally publicized 1985 strike at a Hormel meatpacking plant in Austin, Minnesota. She contrasts an old company film touting founder Jay Hormel’s enlightened employee-friendly policies with the compulsive bottom-line mentality of modern management and shareholders. The union splits into two in over strategic differences, sometimes ripping apart families in the process. The protracted strike leaves Koppel with plenty of time to portray a beleaguered American working class, with millions hung out to dry as the once-proud industrial sector becomes inexorably replaced with an anemic retail and service sector economy.
(American Dream, 1990)

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Modern-day America comes off looking more like a spruced-up version of the Dark Ages when three teenagers in Arkansas are arrested for the murder of three young boys and the only “evidence” against them seems to be that they dress in black, listen to heavy metal music, and have a high school-level interest in the black arts. This literal witch hunt forms the basic premise of Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s masterful but distressing documentary. The fate of the accused seems as preordained as that of the Negro defendant in “To Kill a Mockingbird” in an earlier film treatment of the American South.
(Paradise Lost:The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills,1996)

“Documentary 101” Sampler (Part 2)

Now on sale as both a paperback and e-book: http://booklocker.com/books/6965.html Also available from Amazon and other online book sellers.

“Documentary 101” is a first-of-its-kind anthology, covering the entire spectrum of non-fiction film with entries on over three hundred titles from the years 1895 to 2012. There are 101 full-length reviews of documentaries chosen for their aesthetic prominence and/or historical significance, followed by briefer entries on related titles. There are 325 total reviews and an informational appendix in its 418 pages.

Below are five more snippets from the book, accompanied by film stills only seen here. Click on images for a larger view.

Lieutenant George Coker, was a POW for seven years who returns home with a worldview that remains as black-and-white as one of those old Westerns. No one nowadays would begrudge Coker his status as a homecoming hero in his hometown of Linden, New Jersey. He takes the stage in front of a group of local housewives, literally extolling the virtues of motherhood and apple pie, calling the enemies “gooks” and telling a cafeteria full of schoolchildren that the people of Vietnam are “backward and primitive.” The film seems to imply that Coker is the perfect surrogate for a shortsighted national policy, someone who bought into the system early on and can be relied on to help carry out any military agenda no matter how shaky its justification.
(“Hearts and Minds” 1974)

Jackie, Lynn, and Sue are former East End school chums who for several episodes were interviewed together and even sitting in the same order. In earlier times, director Michael Apted used subtle tactics to get them to react to what is perceived to be their station in life. But they are now hip to the director they have known for so long, pointing out that the rich kids in the Up group must have found it hard living up to the greater expectations. Besides, they only think about class “every seven years, when you come around.”
(Pictured with Apted during the filming of “28 UP”, these three subjects are part of a group profiled every seven years since they were seven. “56 Up” was released in 2013.)

The miners only receive medical benefits after they have been diagnosed with black-lung disease and they are generally treated as little more than another piece of equipment, easily replaced when broken. When the thirteen-month strike begins, you may already find yourself convinced that things haven’t changed much since the early mining days when picketers were openly attacked by police or troops. Director Barbara Kopple is right in the eye of the hurricane during the increasingly hostile confrontations at the gate and she’s not seen as a neutral presence when the company strongmen up the ante with impulsive violence.
(“Harlan County USA” 1976)

In one of the film’s more notorious scenes, President Bush is shown sitting at his Florida-classroom photo op, staring vacantly into space for seven full minutes after being informed the U.S. has just suffered the worst terrorist attack in history. Since Michael Moore can’t resist showing this sequence in nearly real time, he fills up the surreal normality of the moment with his own guess at the president’s train of thought as he continued to sit through the reading of “My Pet Goat.”
(“Fahrenheit 9/11” 2004)

Stalwart indie documentarian Les Blank was invited to Peru by his friend Werner Herzog to record the production of the German director’s wildy ambitious film “Fitzcaraldo.” This tumultuous project inspired Blank’s most sweeping work. It’s an exceptional insider’s look at the cinematic process at it’s most chaotic. The films center on directors whose grandiose vision of a masterpiece gets knocked off course by formidable obstacles of a political, financial, meteorological, and psychological nature, all in a far-off tropical location.
(“Burden of Dreams” 1982)

“Documentary 101” Sampler (Part One)

Now on sale as both a paperback and e-book: http://booklocker.com/books/6965.html Also available from Amazon and other online book sellers.

Roger and Me. March of the Penguins. Man on Wire. Paradise Lost. Grizzly Man. Gates of Heaven. Taxi to the Dark Side. Super-Size Me. Spellbound.

In recent decades, titles like this have raised the profile of documentaries like never before. The appeal of films that rely on the testimony of real life have increased in the age of the “indie” and attracted a growing numbers of viewers looking for an alternative to a movie industry that too often seems fixated on the bottom line.

Documentary 101 is a first-of-its-kind anthology, covering the entire spectrum of non-fiction film with entries on over three hundred titles from the years 1895 to 2012. There are 101 full-length reviews of documentaries chosen for their aesthetic prominence and/or historical significance, followed by briefer entries on related titles. There are 325 total reviews and an informational appendix in its 418 pages.

Over the next several weeks I will be excerpting the book, using film stills I purchased that were not included for reasons of cost and the eternal differing opinions on what constitutes fair use.

The man director Robert Flaherty named Nanook (“The Bear”) was a prominent hunter for the Inuit tribes in the landmass to the east of uppermost Hudson Bay. He fashioned a “family” for Nanook and brought along on expeditions a handful of men known to him. They were all enthusiastic about the idea of the movie, which they called the “aggie” (big picture). From the start of film, Flaherty’s sympathies are clear: free of civilized neuroses, these are “the most cheerful people in all the world”, and the keen focus on daily survival skills affords them an inspirational aura. The affection Nanook and his screen wife show to the children and the children’s affection towards their puppy shrinks the vast distance between the subject and viewers. But the survival “lifestyle” is rugged stuff and the bulk of “Nanook of the North” is made up of a series of memorable hunting scenes. The 300 members of this tribe scrape out a living on a frozen range the size of England. The specter of starvation is always close at hand and Flaherty does not forget the crucial nature of this struggle—he hardly could have because he was part of the same knife’s edge existence during his sixteen months of filming. (“Nanook of the North” 1922)

Humphrey Jennings’ tribute to (Britain’s) Auxiliary Fire Service was called “Fires Were Started” and may have seemed passive in comparison (to the war’s more pugnacious bugle-call films), despite now being the most critically lauded of his works. It is set up as a dramatic film, largely re-created by real brigade members since large-scale bombings had ceased in London by 1943. There is no mention of the Germans until the twenty-eight-minute mark, when the banshee wail of an air-raid siren pierces the night. The brigade is sent to tackle an inferno at a dock warehouse and keep it from spreading to munitions-carrying ships due to sail for the Continent.
(“London Can Take It” and other films by Humphrey Jennings, 1940-1951)

The popular legend that took hold in France after World War II, of a widespread resistance that fought Nazi occupation tooth-and-nail, comes under intense scrutiny in Marcel Ophuls’s epic work, one of the most critically acclaimed of all documentary films. Using the city of Clermont-Ferrand as a microcosm of the whole nation, Ophuls bravely makes the case that the forces of collaboration were much stronger and reduced France to a long-term accommodation with one of the most deplored regimes in history. “The Sorrow and the Pity” certainly struck a raw nerve with officialdom at the time of its release. It was banned from French TV for ten years.
(“The Sorrow and the Pity” 1971)

In the early minutes of the film there are some readymade Michael Moore moments like the well-known scene where he opens a savings account at a Midwest bank in order to receive the free shotgun that apparently has replaced the complimentary toaster of days gone by. But “Bowling for Columbine” works best when Moore is seen on camera talking matter-of-factly to a wide variety of Americans and trying to come to terms with the country’s high level of gun violence. This is not the easiest issue to suss out, especially when the murder rates of other industrialized countries barely rate as a fraction when compared to the United States. During a side trip into Canada, Moore finds that there are seven million guns in about ten million households nationwide, yet the folks there would barely know what a homicide looks like.
(“Bowling for Columbine” 2002)

In 1983 Life magazine hired acclaimed photojournalist Mary Ellen Mark to do a story on the growing problem of teenage runaways. Her central subject was Seattle’s skid row and within a year Mark returned there with her filmmaker husband, Martin Bell, to make this equally sympathetic and non-judgmental film. These kids, most in their early teens, eke out a living via panhandling, prostitution and dumpster diving, forming a makeshift society on the fringes of the “respectable” world.
(“Streetwise” 1985)

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