Documentary

VARIETY – Warwick Thornton’s eye-opening doc about the cultural roots of the Southern Cross constellation is quintessentially Australian

At once benignly mischievous and profoundly serious, “We Don’t Need a Map,” the new documentary by “Samson & Delilah” director Warwick Thornton, explores the Southern Cross constellation, culturally integral to Australia’s indigenous peoples and inevitably massaged and reinterpreted by the white Europeans who later settled the continent. As such it is a pertinent message for the director’s countrymen and an eye-opening lesson for the world about the proud history and ongoing racial tensions that currently form the crux of the Australian experience.Read More »

When Catherine Robbe-Grillet—the legendary Parisian dominatrix, actress, and writer—was invited to visit Sylvère Lotringer’s loft on Front Street, she had no idea she’d be meeting Mlle. Victoire, her American counterpart, let alone that their encounter would be videotaped. At first reluctant to face the camera, Robbe-Grillet gradually realizes that although the two don’t speak the same language, they share the same desires. A deft ballet of words, blood, and seduction.Read More »

TCM production exploring the invented, and inventive, techniques of early cinematographers, and their impact on filmmaking from the earliest films to those of present day.Read More »

The second film in Ogawa Productions’ Narita/Sanrizuka series of documentaries about the resistance by farmers and activists to the construction of the Narita Airport.Read More »

After Summer, Ogawa Pro attempted a more epic scale with Winter in Sanrizuka. It was roundly criticised as a failure. In the wake of this criticism, the collective became increasingly militant. They decided to make a quick and dirty report from the front, calling it a “bullet film.” They shot this agit-prop film in three days, when 2,500 protestors battled 6,500 police. Even the school had been let out so children could participate in the action.Read More »

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PICTURE OF LIGHT (1994) feature documentary, takes a film crew to the Sub Artic to capture the wonder of the Northern Lights. While combining glimpses of the characters who live in this remote environment and the crew’s both comic and absurd attempts to deal with extremes, the film reflects upon the paradoxes involved in trying to capture the natural wonder of the Northern Lights on celluloid. Aurora Borealis…the lights with no bodies, pouring colours from the sky…images provided by nature more special than any special effect. Their majesty and their mystery lead the film to a most unexpected and haunting finale which considers the future of our relationship to technology and nature, in an increasingly artificial or “virtual” world. Read More »

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Shot in the foothills of Iwate Prefecture’s mystical Mt. Hayachine, the film records a year in the life of the area’s villages and villagers as they prepare for kagura performances, a dance-theater form with origins in religious rituals (now mainly performed for tourists). The film can be enjoyed and processed on many levels: a musicologist’s fascinating glimpse into kagura traditions and performances; an ethnographic portrait of rural life and village hierarchies; and most of all, a study of a key moment in Japanese society, when, even as Haneda filmed, rural lifestyles were exposed to modernity: paved roads, cars, and tv sets. Fittingly, the film’s true beauty comes not through its thesis, but in its attunement to the mountain’s own intricate rhythms. (Pacific Film Archive)Read More »

Gathering sounds and images from the land and seascapes of the Outer Hebrides, Joshua Bonnetta’s lush, eerie film is a compendium of ghost stories, weird tales of premonition, and supernatural lore told by the islands’ inhabitants. Throughout, the film’s richly textured images, captured on 16mm stock, complement a dense audio track layered with the sounds of nature, machines, and the human voice, creating a remarkable synesthetic experience of the environment and its embedded oral histories. The result is both a vivid, haunting portrait of a place and an absorbing exploration of the uncanny limits of the human senses.Read More »

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Baby’s Toilet is a 1905 British short film directed by Cecil Hepworth. The film features Hepworth’s baby daughter Elizabeth being bathed and dressed by her nurse, and was categorised by Hepworth as a “Domestic Scene”. In the film Hepworth combines a series of shots to produce a narrative depicting the bathing process from beginning to end. He would later acknowledge the influence of the pioneering work of the Lumière brothers on this and other similar films he produced in the 1900s. The print of Baby’s Toilet survives, and Patrick Russell of the British Film Institute observes: “Long after Elizabeth Hepworth’s own death, the affecting innocence of infancy remains a basic human theme. Baby’s Toilet has lost none of its charm.Read More »