Documentary

Aired on BBC4 January, 2013. Shortlisted for Best Documentary, 2013 Academy Awards; Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize, 2012.

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As America remains embroiled in overseas conflict, a less visible war is taking place at home, costing countless lives, destroying families and inflicting untold damage on future generations of Americans. For over forty years, the War on Drugs has accounted for 45 million arrests, made America the world’s largest jailer and damaged poor communities at home and abroad. Yet for all that, drugs are more available today than ever before.Read More »

Jazz Calendar (1968): a rarely screened documentary record of the 1968 ballet by Frederick Ashton, performed by The Royal Ballet at the Royal Opera House, for which Jarman designed sets and costumes.Read More »

Whitehead’s breakthrough film, the documentation of the great Albert Hall Poetry Festival in ’65, which won him acclaim and awards. Shot handheld with only 45 minutes of stock (the finished film is 33 minutes), and presumably closely distilling much of the tension and event-ness of the celebrated ‘happening’. Verse luminaries include a bill-topping Allen Ginsberg (who reclines into his adoring entourage like a decadent monarch), the gruff, pipesmoking compere Alec Trocchi, an incendiary Adrian Mitchell, and most memorably the stoned heckler who disrupts the wired Harry Fainlight to the delight of the massive crowd. Read More »

The first of Schroeter’s series of documentaries about theatrical performers, Dress Rehearsal began as a commission by German television for a short report on the 1980 edition of the World Theatre Festival in Nancy, France. Inspired by a number of the performers at the festival, Schroeter created instead a feature-length film essay. In particular, he focuses on Pina Bausch and her troupe from the Wuppertal Tanztheater, the Japanese butoh dancer Kazuo Ohno and the American performance artist Pat Olesko. Out of an engrossing and entertaining collage of various impressions from the festival, including rehearsals, performances, interviews, readings and encounters onstage and off, Schroeter develops a meditation on the relationship between art and politics and presents an early formulation of his ideas about performance as a form of love.Read More »

Fictional documentary goes on the trail of sixties cultural renegade Peter Whitehead, underground filmmaker, writer, occultist and sometime falconer.Read More »

Winner of the 3rd Academy Award for Best Cinematography

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With Byrd at the South Pole (1930)
With Byrd at the South Pole is one of the earliest and most captivating film documentaries. A deserving Academy Award winner for Best Cinematography, the film chronicles in stark reality the Antarctic expedition that led to Byrd’s famous flight over the south pole.Read More »

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What happens to art in the Internet age? The philosophers, artists and exhibition makers in this documentary believe that endless reproduction liberates art from a muddled art market and an undemocratic exhibition circuit.

Some critics wonder whether the urge for physical objects is really just a nostalgic fetishism. But aren’t we losing something if the physical artworks disappears?Read More »

Richard was coming back into town and we set up a gig for him at the local co-op. He was bringing along his new, tough, beautiful, hard-won movie called The Last Days of Contrition. It showed just about everywhere that tough movies were being shown. But for this night we brought dad’s pull-down screen and a couple of boxes of beer and the crowd spilled out into the hallway. We sat around the projector and marveled at how he’d managed to go into America and find it so emptied and cruel. There were how many military vehicles shuttling across the desert in shots he’d waited all day for, so by the time he finally turned the camera on, all that anger had become something else. He really had a knack for the silver light.Read More »

Linotype: The Film is a feature-length documentary centred around the Linotype typecasting machine. Called the “Eighth Wonder of the World” by Thomas Edison, it revolutionized printing and society. The film tells the surprisingly emotional story of the people connected to the Linotype and how it impacted the world.Read More »