Documentarists tend to be an eccentric breed. They need to be, since none of the main film festivals allow their films into competition (an incomprehensible decision), and to get a documentary into a cinema these days is a fraught process. But there is no more highly personal yet elusive film-maker than Chris Marker. His importance lies not in how many audiences have been affected by his films, but in how many of his fellow film-makers regard him as something of a genius.Read More »
Synopsis:
A man dressed in Marshal Tito’s uniform appears and, instantly, groups of people flock around him. In this film, Žilnik brings the former Yugoslav leader back to the streets of Belgrade to see how his people are now living without him. Tito’s double wanders around the city and procures remarkable reactions as people come up to speak to him, feeling the need to articulate their destinies to him. Žilnik collects statements from a cross-section of Yugoslav society, revealing its attitudes toward the past and the current government.Read More »
Like a bulletin board that has all kinds of notices next to each other, Jenoe Farkas’ documentary on the various inhabitants of Copenhagen, filmed over a several-year period, has all sorts of people and events on display, but not one unifying theme or any cinematic artifice to link them together.Read More »
Congolese democracy entrepreneur Lebrun takes us on a tangled, tender and cruel adventure to finalise a Chinese T-shirt deal which is turning sour. Between documentary and fiction, this tragicomedy sketches the outlines of a world without the West.Read More »
Description:
Documentary on the final years in the life of director Andrej Tarkovsky, who died in 1986, including his exile in Western Europe. The film shows the degree to which the themes of his films, NOSTALGHIA and the SACRIFICE almost literally came to encapsulate the director’s own life and death.Read More »
Quote:
THE ORIGINS OF SCIENTIFIC CINEMATOGRAPHY is a documentary film series directed by Virgilio Tosi. The films complement Tosi’s book Cinema Before Cinema, using archive film and original equipment to show how cinematography had its origins not in the music hall or the fairground, but in the laboratory, as scientists of the 19th and early 20th centuries attempted to find new ways of seeing and measuring the natural world.Read More »
AMY! is neither a drama not a portrait in the conventional sense, but an assembly of sounds and images which evoke the subject through historic documents and relics, re-enactments and metaphors. The film also asks an underlying question; what is a heroine? We want to enquire into the idea and image of the heroine, not in an explicitly theoretical way, though the film has a theoretical background, but by putting fragments on display to suggest both the frustrations from which heroism is born and to which it is condemned, and at the same time something of the exhilaration it provides for the heroine herself and for others. Formally, our points of reference are Maya Deren and Gertrude Stein.Read More »
From Jordi Torrent’s program notes for “Raúl Ruiz: works for and about French TV,” at Exit Art (Nov 1987):
LA PRESENCE REELLE works through four axes of plot which are intercut throughout the film:
1. Adam Shaft, an out-of-work actor who recently worked on an interactive video disk documentary about the Avignon Theatre Festival, and who is now in a studio watching the program with the help of a computer specialist. Through conversations between Shaft and the computer specialist we find out that only 10% of time-space images in the video disk have been recorded from actual footage and the rest of the disk has been created by the computer using the ‘real presence’ of living beings. At one point Shaft complains because in the video disk his images are saying things that he never said. The computer specialist explains to him that his words have been used to create an entity that thinks and talks by itself, but that will not necessarily say things that Shaft would have thought or said.Read More »
Alvarez’ longest documentary examination of the Cuban Revolution, this contains exceptional interviews with Fidel, Raúl, Almeida, Vilma, Haydee, Celia and Faustino Perez, among other key players in the Revolution.Read More »