Documentary

Quote:
Wow!–I just finished watching “The Little Drummer Boy.”
Previously I had thought that I knew quite a bit about Gustav Mahler, but Leonard Bernstein showed me more.

What Bernstein does is show you–through biographical commentary and excerpts from Mahler’s music–just what it was that made this masterful composer and conductor so obsessed with Life and Death.

Yes, part of it was Mahler’s being born Jewish, and part was seeing so many of his brothers and sisters die so early in life. But Bernstein shows us how Mahler was, like most of us, striving to try to come to terms with life–to understand why death has to come and deprive us of the joys of life.

To give you an idea of how concrete, knowledgeable and specific this program is, Lenny takes a few minutes, using musical excerpts, to illustrate how there is a funeral march in each of Mahler’s nine symphonies.Read More »

Get Out of the Car is a response to my last movie, Los Angeles Plays Itself. I called Los Angeles Plays Itself a ‘city symphony in reverse’ in that it was composed of fragments from other films read against the grain to bring the background into the foreground. Visions of the city’s geography and history implicit in these films were made manifest.Read More »

The Khmer Rouge slaughtered nearly two million people in the late 1970s. Yet the Killing Fields of Cambodia remain unexplained. Until now. Enter Thet Sambath, an unassuming, yet cunning, investigative journalist who spends a decade of his life gaining the trust of the men and women who perpetrated the massacres. From the foot soldiers who slit throats to Pol Pot’s right-hand man, the notorious Brother Number Two, Sambath records shocking testimony never before seen or heard. Having neglected his own family for years, Sambath’s work comes at a price. But his is a personal mission. He lost his parents and his siblings in the Killing Fields. Amidst his journey to discover why his family died, we come to understand for the first time the real story of Cambodia’s tragedy.Read More »

Portrait of a small south German village and its residents in the early sixties.
Rural culture is undergoing a transformation caused by the intrusion of the industrial world. Gestures at work and words of its inhabitants.Read More »

Plot:
“What is the fate of the world?” With breathtaking Technicolor® photography and thrilling up-close encounters with the undersea world, The Sea Around Us gave audiences early warning about the environmental dangers threatening our planet. Based on Rachel Carson’s acclaimed book and written, directed and produced by Irwin Allen (The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno) with the visual power of a master storyteller, this dazzling odyssey takes us from the Great Barrier Reef to Arctic waters, from shark walking to crab herding, from titanic seismic sea waves to rainbow-hued Edens alive with flashing tropical fish. It’s an incredible, imperiled realm – and its future depends upon us. From Warner Brothers!Read More »

the original dvdr announce wrote:
This filmic exchange is based on two works that reflect on the way each director films, on the crew and the actors, on the way they see and make cinema. Albert Serra took the characters of Honor de Cavalleria and his regular team of collaborators to follow in the steps of Quixote. Lisandro Alonso returned to La Pampa province to film his work, for which he recalls Misael Saavedra, the lead of his first film, La Libertad.Read More »

Bright Lights Film Journal wrote:
The late Peter Adair (1943-1996) is best known in the queer community as one of the auteurs of Word Is Out, the first documentary about gay people that found a home in the mainstream. An outsider himself as a gay man, Adair was apparently drawn to other outsiders. His first, and in some ways best, film explored a distinctive American subculture. Holy Ghost People is a 53-minute documentary about snake-handling, strychnine-swilling members of the “Holiness” church. Rightly hailed by Margaret Mead as one of the best ethnographic films ever made, and a staple of classes on anthropology and documentary film, this study of a little-known sect who put their lives on the line for their religion still packs a wallop three decades after its release.Read More »

Panning shots describe the space of a room as a succession of still lives: a chair, some fruit on a table, a collection of solitary, waiting objects. Sitting on the bed there is the presence of a young woman: the filmmaker herself, eating an apple.Read More »

Quote:
Paris, 1995. On the cutting table in a modest office building in central Paris lie Juliette Binoche and William Hurt in Un Divan à New York. Chantal Akerman Par Chantal Akerman is also almost finished. It’s a self-portrait for the series Cinéma de Notre Temps by order of La sept Arte and producer Thierry Garrel. Because who can tell more about Chantal Akerman than Chantal Akerman herself. Through the open windows we can hear shreds of sounds from other cutting tables gathering in the inner courtyard. Fall is still warm. An interview on too much and not enough cinema.Read More »