French filmmaker Francoise Romand debuted in 1986 with a remarkable documentary called Mix-Up ou meli-melo. In telling the story of two English families whose lives were tangled by fate when their babies were inadvertently switched at birth, Romand used a number of striking visual and structural techniques to evoke the psychological and class elements of […]
Dark Of The Sun (Jack Cardiff, 1968) The great cinematographer Jack Cardiff, responsible for the dazzling imagery of Michael Powell’s A Matter of Life and Death (1946), Black Narcissus (1947) and The Red Shoes (1948), and Albert Lewin’s Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951), among many others, was also a director. One of my earliest […]
There’s still no recognizable pattern to my DVD watching, but maybe I shouldn’t worry about it. If my viewing became more systematic, it would probably start to feel like work. I finally finished getting through the British TV series Department S, which I mentioned a while back. It never really improved, though perhaps the production […]
Italian journalist and filmmaker Gualtiero Jacopetti died August 17, at age 91. Together with co-director Franco Prosperi, Jacopetti invented what became known as the “mondo” movie – after the title of their first collaboration, Mondo Cane (Dog’s World, 1962). The essence of the genre was shock – documentaries that displayed strange, disturbing aspects of human […]
A while back, I signed up with BlogCritics. The idea was that writing regular reviews for them would keep me from getting lazy; in addition, cross-linking with my blog would, I hoped, boost traffic for my own site. But I’ve only posted four reviews with them since February, while keeping up a regular weekly schedule […]
In the 1960s several factors came together to change the way American politics was both played and perceived, and the journalist Theodore H. White played an important role in the second part of that equation. With his Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Making of the President 1960, he brought the processes of presidential electoral politics out […]
By coincidence, having recently finally caught up with Robert Young’s Vampire Circus, I’ve just come across a short film he wrote and directed six years later for the British government’s Central Office of Information. Twenty Times More Likely (1978) is a motorcycle safety film included in the BFI’s fourth volume of COI documentaries – Stop! […]
West of the Tracks (Tie Xi Qu) would be a remarkable film under any circumstances. But the fact that it was the first project of a young filmmaker, Wang Bing, essentially working alone with a digital video camera, shooting over a period of two years, then editing over several more years (the film appeared at […]
I envy Marc Isaacs. Not just because he’s one of the best documentary filmmakers now working in Britain (or anywhere, for that matter), but because he’s found a sympathetic producer in Nick Fraser of the BBC who understands what Isaacs is doing and encourages and supports him in his work. After the past few years […]
Two years ago, I edited a documentary for Les Productions Rivard here in Winnipeg. The English title is One River, Two Shores: Reflections on the Mackenzie Gas Pipeline (in French, the more awkward Au pays du fleuve Mackenzie, Un gazoduc au coeur d’un peuple) and it was directed by Yellowknife resident France Benoit. Over the […]