Documentary

J. Hoberman, The Village Voice:

Set in a tiny Philippine village, the inimitable Kidlat Tahimik’s film focuses on a family that makes papier-mache animals to sell during the traditional Turumba festivities. One year, a German department store buyer purchases all their stock. When she returns with an order for 500 more (this time with the word “Oktoberfest” painted on them), the family’s seasonal occupation becomes year-round alienated labor. Increased production, however creates inflated needs. Soon, virtually the whole village has gone to work on a jungle assembly line, turning out papier-mache mascots for the Munich Olympics. Long before the town band learns to play “Deutschland Uber Alles”, the fabric of village life has been torn asunder. Read More »

During World Word II, the difficult construction of a railroad through the Boom ravine at Kant-Rybachie. One of the construction workers then takes a train ride along the road he helped build.Read More »

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In the autumn of 2009 we filmed a drill at the Marine Corps Base 29 Palms in California. Four Marines sitting in a class represented the crew of a tank. They had laptops in front of them on which they steered their own vehicle and watched others in the unit being driven through a Computer-Animation Landscape. The simulated Afghan is based on geographical data out of Afghanistan. Read More »

From Amos Vogel’s Film as a Subversive Art:
Though entirely based on “authentic” newsreel materials, this is a splendidly distorted “record” of the Nazi Blitzkrieg against Poland, designed to terrorize (particularly foreign) viewers into accepting the Nazis’ god-like military superiority. Kracauer’s profound analysis stresses the magic, irrational core of the film, its reliance on graceful over-simplifications, clever amalgams, a pseudo-narration that professes to inform, and insidious comparisons. Particularly frightening are its terrifying maps of encirclement and destruction from above. Strength and decisiveness are constantly stressed; suffering is, at most, cartographic, and death entirely absent.Read More »

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Two ordinary inner-city kids dare to dream the impossible – professional basketball glory – in this epic chronicle of hope and faith. Filmed over a five-year period, Hoop Dreams follows young Arthur Agee and William Gates as they navigate the complex, competitive world of scholastic athletics while striving to overcome the intense pressures of family life and the realities of their Chicago streets. The Criterion Collection is proud to present this landmark documentary chronicling two remarkable families who challenge the American dream.Read More »

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Thomas Harlan, filmmaker, author and revolutionary was born in 1929 in Germany. His father was the infamous propaganda filmmaker Veit Harlan, director of Jew Suess. During his childhood, as a result of his father’s closeness to the Nazi Party, the little Thomas came face to face with Hitler and Goebbels. Now an old frail man, Harlan lives in a respiratory clinic in Berchtesgaden. It is in this clinic in South Germany that he, along with documentary filmmaker Christoph Hübner, examines fragments of his past.Read More »

Ben Rivers’ films tend to look outward at the larger world. GHOST STRATA is no exception. But to a somewhat different extent, it also looks in. A film diary, it reflects his globetrotting ways, existing in the margins of his otherwise outward-bound filmmaking style. So landscape plays a huge role, and in fact the film takes its title from a geological concept. As a scientist explains in the film, “ghost strata” are theoretical layers of time. When you see the strata of sedimentary rock, you are given to understand that the space around that rock, the very space you occupy, was once filled with earth as well. Rivers composes the film as a calendar, with 12 sections, one for each month of the year of its making. Read More »

A follow-up to his 1995 television documentary A Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Movies, Martin Scorsese’s My Voyage to Italy (Il Mio Viaggio in Italia) is a thrilling trip through six decades of seminal, great and near-great Italian films so dear to the celebrated Sicilian-American filmmaker. Easing us through a rich cornucopia of high-quality, largely black-and-white clips, Scorsese, who serves as an eloquent and lucid onscreen and offscreen commentator, makes highly personal and not always popular choices. Still, even when the clips are unfamiliar, the New York-based director, whose Gangs of New York is scheduled for release early next year, conveys with passion and clarity why these films are important to him and should be to us.Read More »

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In 1984, the West German film director Thomas Harlan (maker of Torre Bela [1976] and author of the novel Rosa [2000]), directed Wundkanal: Execution for Four Voices, a joint French-German production about Dr S, a soldier impeached after the war for taking part in the massacre of Jews in Lithuania, and his slide towards suicide. To express his resistance to the forgetting of Nazism as war criminals aged, Harlan cast Alfred Filbert – an actual member of the SS during the War who spoke only German – as Dr S for this experimental fiction film shot in a French studio. (7) Filbert was not aware of what was to happen on set, in front of the camera, mor that the script was merely a pretext or ruse for a psychodramatic ‘happening’: Harlan, in fact, intended to interrogate and expose, ‘live’, his complicity with Nazi atrocities.Read More »