Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Robert Flaherty's Moana with Sound (1926 / 1980) is playing August 30 - September 29, 2017 on Mubi in most countries around the world.Slowly, slowly, the tufunga taps his comb of bone needles into the young man’s lower back. His movements are practiced and precise, each tap marking the young man for the rest of his days. The young man winces in agony, sweat pouring down his face as his relatives wipe away the blood and excess ink with tapa cloth. A witch-woman stokes a fire and burns candlenut stalks to make more soot for the tufunga’s ink. The infernal tapping continues, now on his upper back, now on his flanks, now on his knees—the most painful part of the ceremony. Outside the hut, a crowd of men dance and sing. “Courage to Moana,” they cry, “Courage to Moana!
- 8/30/2017
- MUBI
The funniest fake documentary show on television now has a trailer for its second season.
Read More: ‘Documentary Now!’ Season 2 First Clip: Watch The Twisted & Morbid Spin on ‘The War Room’
Season two of IFC’s “Documentary Now!” starring “Saturday Night Live” alums Bill Hader and Fred Armisen will parody films including Albert and David Maysles’s “Salesman,” Jonathan Demme’s Talking Heads music documentary “Stop Making Sense,” D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus’ presidential election doc “The War Room,” and David Gelb’s “Jiro Dreams of Sushi.”
For anyone who hasn’t seen the show, every episode is shot in a unique style of documentary filmmaking to honor “some of the most important stories that didn’t actually happen.” The seven-episode first season earned a Primetime Emmy nomination for Outstanding Variety Sketch Series. The new season will have a total of six episodes.
Season one parodied films including “Grey Gardens,...
Read More: ‘Documentary Now!’ Season 2 First Clip: Watch The Twisted & Morbid Spin on ‘The War Room’
Season two of IFC’s “Documentary Now!” starring “Saturday Night Live” alums Bill Hader and Fred Armisen will parody films including Albert and David Maysles’s “Salesman,” Jonathan Demme’s Talking Heads music documentary “Stop Making Sense,” D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus’ presidential election doc “The War Room,” and David Gelb’s “Jiro Dreams of Sushi.”
For anyone who hasn’t seen the show, every episode is shot in a unique style of documentary filmmaking to honor “some of the most important stories that didn’t actually happen.” The seven-episode first season earned a Primetime Emmy nomination for Outstanding Variety Sketch Series. The new season will have a total of six episodes.
Season one parodied films including “Grey Gardens,...
- 8/26/2016
- by Graham Winfrey
- Indiewire
Spliced together from interviews, establishing shots, and dramatic reenactments, its subjects’ homegrown aphorisms set against the forceful tinkling of the score, “The Eye Doesn’t Lie” might’ve been made by Errol Morris himself.
Inspired by “The Thin Blue Line,” the fourth episode of IFC’s inventive, erudite “Documentary Now!” — from the frenzied imaginations of director Rhys Thomas and “Saturday Night Live” alumni Fred Armisen, Bill Hader, and Seth Meyers — mimics the filmmaker’s work so precisely that it comes to resemble an X-ray, showing the bone structure of his distinctive style while (gently) poking fun at it. In this sense, to describe “Documentary Now!” as a parody is to undersell: It’s a wildly funny act of criticism, deconstructing the mechanics of nonfiction in an age defined by the slippage between “reality” and the real.
Starring Armisen and Hader in an ever-changing series of roles—in a pungent send-up of Vice Media, they even play three indistinguishable pairs of plaid-clad, ne’er-do-well correspondents on the trail of a Mexican drug kingpin — “Documentary Now!” is designed with an in-depth knowledge of the form, down to the title sequence. A clever nod to public television, replete with evolving logo, synthesized theme music, and Helen Mirren’s refined introductions, the homage to the likes of “Pov,” “Frontline,” and “Independent Lens” is telling. Though tough, at times, on the familiar tropes of Morris and the Maysles, the creators’ treatment of documentaries is affectionate; their approach is closer to Christopher Guest’s warm, playful comedies, from “Waiting for Guffman” to “For Your Consideration,” than to the sharp satire of “Drop Dead Gorgeous” or “Tanner ’88.”
This is born, it seems, of their interest in the power of nonfiction narratives, and in the process by which such stories take shape. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, “Documentary Now!” is lavish in its praise — Hader’s version of Little Edie Beale, in the series’ tribute to “Grey Gardens,” replicates several memorable moments in the film almost exactly — but it’s when the series turns toward exaggeration and hyperbole that its understanding of the form’s fakery is on fullest display. Against the “direct cinema” aesthetic of the Maysles, “Documentary Now!” depicts the siblings, here known as the Feins, eliciting performances from their subjects, searching the shadows of “Sandy Passage” for the most compelling variant of the truth. (It comes back to bite them, in a way that acknowledges the elements of Gothic horror in “Grey Gardens” by blowing the original to bits.)
Understanding documentaries as a set of narrative techniques, and not simply as a reflection of “the facts,” “Documentary Now!” is at its most astute in the first season’s “Kunuk Uncovered.” Based on 1988’s “Nanook Revisited,” itself an investigation of the stagecraft in Robert Flaherty’s 1922 silent, “Nanook of the North,” “Kunuk” renders explicit the series’ animating principle: “Was the first documentary a documentary at all,” the narrator intones, “or was it something else?” As William H. Sebastian (John Slattery) attempts to mold his subject, Pipilok (Armisen), into the “Eskimo” of his ethnocentric assumptions, mounting dog sledding and spear fishing scenes, he loses control of the project to its central figure. “Kunuk” becomes an artful farce, part Hollywood excess and part careful craft.
Pipilok first demands compensation, securing the managerial services of a local pimp, and then displaces Sebastian altogether, transforming into a tortured auteur. (At one point, he curses out the cast in his native tongue, a true diva of the directing chair.) His aesthetic innovations — recording sound, building sets, developing “point of view” and new forms of movement — are those, roughly speaking, of realism, and “Kunuk” is, in essence, a reminder that the style that doesn’t seem like a style is no less fabricated for convincing us otherwise. In “Documentary Now!” nonfiction is always “something else”: A performance, a manipulation, a construction, adjacent to “the real” but not a mirror image of it.
In fashioning a new short film for each installment—with the exception of the two-part “Gentle and Soft: The Story of the Blue Jean Committee” — the series is an outlier in the Emmys’ nascent Variety Sketch category. Last year’s inaugural field featured five nominees on the traditional “sketch” model, including “Saturday Night Live” and winner “Inside Amy Schumer,” and all, including the final season of the excellent “Key & Peele,” are among this year’s twenty eligible series (up from 17). But given the TV Academy’s tendency to settle into firm patterns, to the point that one might call them ruts, it would behoove voters to honor the heterodox, learned, distinctly non-topical comedy of “Documentary Now!” while the contours of the category are still in flux.
If there’s one aspect of the series we know Academy members can appreciate, it’s the brilliant impression: Schumer and Ryan McFaul were nominated last year for directing the dead solid perfect satire “12 Angry Men Inside Amy Schumer” as if inhabited by the spirit of Sidney Lumet, a feat “Documentary Now!” manages many times over, and in myriad registers. Its sketches succeed, in the end, because they’re not sketchy at all, but rather fully realized, remarkably savvy reconsiderations of their subject, which is the creative, sometimes-deceptive act of documentary filmmaking itself.
“The Eye Doesn’t Lie” recalls not only “The Thin Blue Line,” then, but also, by dint of its title, the filmmaker’s examination of visible evidence in “Standard Operating Procedure.” “The pictures spoke a thousand words,” as Army Special Agent Brent Pack says in the latter of photographs of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, launching into the kind of Morris-esque paradox that IFC’s series so beautifully distills. “But unless you know what day and time they were taken, you wouldn’t know what story they were telling.” The eye does lie, of course, and the brilliant “Documentary Now!” is always catching it red-handed.
Related storiesHow 'Mike Tyson Mysteries' Season 2 Pushed Wacky Retro Designs Even Further (Emmy Watch)Taraji P. Henson's 'Empire' Highlight Reel Has to Be Seen to Be Believed'You're the Worst' Star Aya Cash Explains Why You Shouldn't Vote For Her at the Emmys (But You Really, Really Should)...
Inspired by “The Thin Blue Line,” the fourth episode of IFC’s inventive, erudite “Documentary Now!” — from the frenzied imaginations of director Rhys Thomas and “Saturday Night Live” alumni Fred Armisen, Bill Hader, and Seth Meyers — mimics the filmmaker’s work so precisely that it comes to resemble an X-ray, showing the bone structure of his distinctive style while (gently) poking fun at it. In this sense, to describe “Documentary Now!” as a parody is to undersell: It’s a wildly funny act of criticism, deconstructing the mechanics of nonfiction in an age defined by the slippage between “reality” and the real.
Starring Armisen and Hader in an ever-changing series of roles—in a pungent send-up of Vice Media, they even play three indistinguishable pairs of plaid-clad, ne’er-do-well correspondents on the trail of a Mexican drug kingpin — “Documentary Now!” is designed with an in-depth knowledge of the form, down to the title sequence. A clever nod to public television, replete with evolving logo, synthesized theme music, and Helen Mirren’s refined introductions, the homage to the likes of “Pov,” “Frontline,” and “Independent Lens” is telling. Though tough, at times, on the familiar tropes of Morris and the Maysles, the creators’ treatment of documentaries is affectionate; their approach is closer to Christopher Guest’s warm, playful comedies, from “Waiting for Guffman” to “For Your Consideration,” than to the sharp satire of “Drop Dead Gorgeous” or “Tanner ’88.”
This is born, it seems, of their interest in the power of nonfiction narratives, and in the process by which such stories take shape. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, “Documentary Now!” is lavish in its praise — Hader’s version of Little Edie Beale, in the series’ tribute to “Grey Gardens,” replicates several memorable moments in the film almost exactly — but it’s when the series turns toward exaggeration and hyperbole that its understanding of the form’s fakery is on fullest display. Against the “direct cinema” aesthetic of the Maysles, “Documentary Now!” depicts the siblings, here known as the Feins, eliciting performances from their subjects, searching the shadows of “Sandy Passage” for the most compelling variant of the truth. (It comes back to bite them, in a way that acknowledges the elements of Gothic horror in “Grey Gardens” by blowing the original to bits.)
Understanding documentaries as a set of narrative techniques, and not simply as a reflection of “the facts,” “Documentary Now!” is at its most astute in the first season’s “Kunuk Uncovered.” Based on 1988’s “Nanook Revisited,” itself an investigation of the stagecraft in Robert Flaherty’s 1922 silent, “Nanook of the North,” “Kunuk” renders explicit the series’ animating principle: “Was the first documentary a documentary at all,” the narrator intones, “or was it something else?” As William H. Sebastian (John Slattery) attempts to mold his subject, Pipilok (Armisen), into the “Eskimo” of his ethnocentric assumptions, mounting dog sledding and spear fishing scenes, he loses control of the project to its central figure. “Kunuk” becomes an artful farce, part Hollywood excess and part careful craft.
Pipilok first demands compensation, securing the managerial services of a local pimp, and then displaces Sebastian altogether, transforming into a tortured auteur. (At one point, he curses out the cast in his native tongue, a true diva of the directing chair.) His aesthetic innovations — recording sound, building sets, developing “point of view” and new forms of movement — are those, roughly speaking, of realism, and “Kunuk” is, in essence, a reminder that the style that doesn’t seem like a style is no less fabricated for convincing us otherwise. In “Documentary Now!” nonfiction is always “something else”: A performance, a manipulation, a construction, adjacent to “the real” but not a mirror image of it.
In fashioning a new short film for each installment—with the exception of the two-part “Gentle and Soft: The Story of the Blue Jean Committee” — the series is an outlier in the Emmys’ nascent Variety Sketch category. Last year’s inaugural field featured five nominees on the traditional “sketch” model, including “Saturday Night Live” and winner “Inside Amy Schumer,” and all, including the final season of the excellent “Key & Peele,” are among this year’s twenty eligible series (up from 17). But given the TV Academy’s tendency to settle into firm patterns, to the point that one might call them ruts, it would behoove voters to honor the heterodox, learned, distinctly non-topical comedy of “Documentary Now!” while the contours of the category are still in flux.
If there’s one aspect of the series we know Academy members can appreciate, it’s the brilliant impression: Schumer and Ryan McFaul were nominated last year for directing the dead solid perfect satire “12 Angry Men Inside Amy Schumer” as if inhabited by the spirit of Sidney Lumet, a feat “Documentary Now!” manages many times over, and in myriad registers. Its sketches succeed, in the end, because they’re not sketchy at all, but rather fully realized, remarkably savvy reconsiderations of their subject, which is the creative, sometimes-deceptive act of documentary filmmaking itself.
“The Eye Doesn’t Lie” recalls not only “The Thin Blue Line,” then, but also, by dint of its title, the filmmaker’s examination of visible evidence in “Standard Operating Procedure.” “The pictures spoke a thousand words,” as Army Special Agent Brent Pack says in the latter of photographs of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, launching into the kind of Morris-esque paradox that IFC’s series so beautifully distills. “But unless you know what day and time they were taken, you wouldn’t know what story they were telling.” The eye does lie, of course, and the brilliant “Documentary Now!” is always catching it red-handed.
Related storiesHow 'Mike Tyson Mysteries' Season 2 Pushed Wacky Retro Designs Even Further (Emmy Watch)Taraji P. Henson's 'Empire' Highlight Reel Has to Be Seen to Be Believed'You're the Worst' Star Aya Cash Explains Why You Shouldn't Vote For Her at the Emmys (But You Really, Really Should)...
- 6/15/2016
- by Matt Brennan
- Indiewire
Something happened midway through the first season of Documentary Now!, which wrapped up last night on IFC. The show started off — and was praised for — taking pitch-perfect documentary parodies and pushing them in absurd directions: twisting Grey Gardens into a horror movie, for example, or turning Nanook Revisited, a documentary about the documentary Nanook of the North, into a bizarre tale of an Inuit who pioneered most modern-film techniques. But over the course of six "documentaries" (which included the two-part finale), it also grew increasingly humane. While the precision was still there, the goal felt like it was no longer about creating accurate parody but instead about creating truthful character studies. It built and built to the last three minutes of last night's finale, which immediately felt like one of the most honest, human bits of comedy I've seen in years, if not ever. There were first inklings of...
- 9/25/2015
- by Jesse David Fox
- Vulture
As reported over at The Dissolve, highly respected British film magazine Sight & Sound is famous for its list of the greatest films off all time released once every decade. Since 1952, Citizen Kane held the number one spot until Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo dethroned it in the 2012 poll. Now for the first time Sight & Sound has released a list of the 50 greatest documentary films of all time. The list was compiled after polling from over 200 critics and curators and 100 filmmakers, including “John Akomfrah, Michael Apted, Clio Barnard, James Benning, Sophie Fiennes, Amos Gitai, Paul Greengrass, Jose Guerin, Isaac Julien, Asif Kapadia, Sergei Loznitsa, Kevin Macdonald, James Marsh, Joshua Oppenheimer, Anand Patwardhan, Pawel Pawlikowski, Nicolas Philibert, Walter Salles, and James Toback”.
The top 10 are:
Man With A Movie Camera, (Dziga Vertov, 1929) Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1985) Sans Soleil, (Chris Marker, 1982) Night And Fog (Alain Resnais, 1955) The Thin Blue Line (Errol Morris, 1989) Chronicle Of A Summer (Jean Rouch & Edgar Morin,...
The top 10 are:
Man With A Movie Camera, (Dziga Vertov, 1929) Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1985) Sans Soleil, (Chris Marker, 1982) Night And Fog (Alain Resnais, 1955) The Thin Blue Line (Errol Morris, 1989) Chronicle Of A Summer (Jean Rouch & Edgar Morin,...
- 8/1/2014
- by Max Molinaro
- SoundOnSight
Cinema, as Jean-Luc Godard wrote, is truth 24 times a second. Documentaries both prove and disprove the point; but the truth is their strongest weapon. Here, Guardian and Observer critics pick the 10 best
• Top 10 arthouse movies
• Top 10 family movies
• Top 10 war movies
• Top 10 teen movies
• Top 10 superhero movies
• Top 10 westerns
• More Guardian and Observer critics' top 10s
10. Man With a Movie Camera
To best understand this 1929 silent documentary, one ought to know that its director, the exotically named "Dziga Vertov", was actually born David Abelevich Kaufman in 1896. Some say the name derives from the Russian word for spinning top, but the pseudonym is more likely an onomatopeic approximation of the sound made by the twin reels of film as the director ran them backwards and forwards through his flatbed editor. For Vertov, film was something physical, to be manipulated by man, and yet, paradoxically, he also saw it as a medium...
• Top 10 arthouse movies
• Top 10 family movies
• Top 10 war movies
• Top 10 teen movies
• Top 10 superhero movies
• Top 10 westerns
• More Guardian and Observer critics' top 10s
10. Man With a Movie Camera
To best understand this 1929 silent documentary, one ought to know that its director, the exotically named "Dziga Vertov", was actually born David Abelevich Kaufman in 1896. Some say the name derives from the Russian word for spinning top, but the pseudonym is more likely an onomatopeic approximation of the sound made by the twin reels of film as the director ran them backwards and forwards through his flatbed editor. For Vertov, film was something physical, to be manipulated by man, and yet, paradoxically, he also saw it as a medium...
- 11/12/2013
- The Guardian - Film News
Documentaries embody the adage that the truth is stranger than fiction. They shine a torch into the darkest corners of the earth and tell the stories of extraordinary people; both the famous and the forgotten. The invention of home video (and, more recently, the camera phone) has effectively made directors and documentarians of us all. But let’s start at the beginning.
In 1896, the Lumière brothers wowed the world with their L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat, a silent, fifty-second film of a train leaving a platform. There’s the tale (perhaps apocryphal) of the audience at its first public screening frantically trying to escape the train racing through the screen towards them. The power of film, and indeed the documentary, was unleashed.
Considered the first feature-length example of the genre, Robert J. Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922) captured Inuk Nanook and his family living,...
In 1896, the Lumière brothers wowed the world with their L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat, a silent, fifty-second film of a train leaving a platform. There’s the tale (perhaps apocryphal) of the audience at its first public screening frantically trying to escape the train racing through the screen towards them. The power of film, and indeed the documentary, was unleashed.
Considered the first feature-length example of the genre, Robert J. Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922) captured Inuk Nanook and his family living,...
- 10/5/2013
- by Dan Wakefield
- Obsessed with Film
With the announcement of several classic films to finally be released on Blu-ray next year, from the original Indiana Jones trilogy to the “Alfred Hitchcock Masterpiece Collection”, our Blu-ray wish list is slowly narrowing down. In fact, 6 of the 10 films listed on our first Blu-ray wish list have either already been released on the format, or have at least announced to be released in the near future.
However, there are still many favorites out there that have yet to make the transition to the high definition restoration. Here’s our second Top 10:
10. Nanook of the North (1922)
In 1910, an explorer named Robert J. Flaherty was sent to the Hudson Bay in Northeastern Canada as a prospector. Fascinated by what he saw, he went home and bought his first camera (and three weeks lessons with it) before returning to the land in 1913, and filmed two years worth of footage there. After...
However, there are still many favorites out there that have yet to make the transition to the high definition restoration. Here’s our second Top 10:
10. Nanook of the North (1922)
In 1910, an explorer named Robert J. Flaherty was sent to the Hudson Bay in Northeastern Canada as a prospector. Fascinated by what he saw, he went home and bought his first camera (and three weeks lessons with it) before returning to the land in 1913, and filmed two years worth of footage there. After...
- 7/2/2012
- by Sam McDonough
- Obsessed with Film
Turner Classic Movies (TCM) has unveiled its list of 10 Most Influential Silent Films in celebration of Michel Hazanavicius’ ode to the silent era, The Artist, which won three Golden Globes® Sunday night, including Best Picture . Musical or Comedy, Best Actor . Musical or Comedy for Jean Dujardin and Best Original Score. The Artist also picked up 12 British Academy Film Award nominations. The Weinstein Company will expand its release of The Artist nationwide on Friday.
TCM’s list of 10 Most Influential Silent Films spans from the years 1915 to 1928 and features such remarkable films as D.W. Griffith’s groundbreaking (and controversial) The Birth of a Nation (1915), which revolutionized filmmaking techniques; Nanook of the North (1922), a film frequently cited as the first feature-length documentary; Cecil B. DeMille’s epic silent version of The Ten Commandments (1923); Sergei Eisenstein’s oft-imitated Battleship Potemkin (1925), which took montage techniques to an entirely new level; and Fritz Lang’s...
TCM’s list of 10 Most Influential Silent Films spans from the years 1915 to 1928 and features such remarkable films as D.W. Griffith’s groundbreaking (and controversial) The Birth of a Nation (1915), which revolutionized filmmaking techniques; Nanook of the North (1922), a film frequently cited as the first feature-length documentary; Cecil B. DeMille’s epic silent version of The Ten Commandments (1923); Sergei Eisenstein’s oft-imitated Battleship Potemkin (1925), which took montage techniques to an entirely new level; and Fritz Lang’s...
- 1/18/2012
- by Michelle McCue
- WeAreMovieGeeks.com
Fakery is so ingrained in pop culture that we're suspicious of anything claiming the truth. So we question the authenticity of what happens in Catfish
Almost any story is almost certainly some kind of lie," says Orson Welles in F for Fake. That goes double for soi-disant documentaries that test the viewer's credulity. Exit Through the Gift Shop, I'm Still Here and Catfish leave you wondering who is fooling whom. Unless the film-makers fess up, it's hard to spot where fact ends and fiction begins, but the debate generates column inches, which is gold dust for a film without a big marketing budget.
Such documentaries are playing on a long tradition of juggling degrees of truth, or weighting it for propaganda purposes. Robert Flaherty was retrospectively criticised for having faked elements of Nanook of the North (Nanook's two "wives", for example, were played by the film-maker's own girlfriends), but...
Almost any story is almost certainly some kind of lie," says Orson Welles in F for Fake. That goes double for soi-disant documentaries that test the viewer's credulity. Exit Through the Gift Shop, I'm Still Here and Catfish leave you wondering who is fooling whom. Unless the film-makers fess up, it's hard to spot where fact ends and fiction begins, but the debate generates column inches, which is gold dust for a film without a big marketing budget.
Such documentaries are playing on a long tradition of juggling degrees of truth, or weighting it for propaganda purposes. Robert Flaherty was retrospectively criticised for having faked elements of Nanook of the North (Nanook's two "wives", for example, were played by the film-maker's own girlfriends), but...
- 12/17/2010
- by Anne Billson
- The Guardian - Film News
Filed under: Documentaries, Columns, Cinematical
The full question: is it possible to remake a documentary as a documentary? We know, thanks to Werner Herzog and others, that you can redo a documentary's story as a dramatic feature. But let's imagine instead that the premise behind your favorite classic non-fiction film is lifted and re-applied to a new non-fiction work with the same title. 'Hoop Dreams' following a new set of high school basketballers. 'Salesman' documenting today's very different breed of door-to-door merchants (of bibles again or something else). 'The Thin Blue Line' investigating another murder. 'Primary' observing a 2012 Democratic (or Republican) primary election. 'Nanook of the North' presenting the life of the Inuit today.
Actually, 'Nanook' could simply be redone shot for shot. The original isn't exactly a document of an Eskimo of the time so much as how the people used to be,...
The full question: is it possible to remake a documentary as a documentary? We know, thanks to Werner Herzog and others, that you can redo a documentary's story as a dramatic feature. But let's imagine instead that the premise behind your favorite classic non-fiction film is lifted and re-applied to a new non-fiction work with the same title. 'Hoop Dreams' following a new set of high school basketballers. 'Salesman' documenting today's very different breed of door-to-door merchants (of bibles again or something else). 'The Thin Blue Line' investigating another murder. 'Primary' observing a 2012 Democratic (or Republican) primary election. 'Nanook of the North' presenting the life of the Inuit today.
Actually, 'Nanook' could simply be redone shot for shot. The original isn't exactly a document of an Eskimo of the time so much as how the people used to be,...
- 11/17/2010
- by Christopher Campbell
- Moviefone
Filed under: Documentaries, Columns, Cinematical
The full question: is it possible to remake a documentary as a documentary? We know, thanks to Werner Herzog and others, that you can redo a documentary's story as a dramatic feature. But let's imagine instead that the premise behind your favorite classic non-fiction film is lifted and re-applied to a new non-fiction work with the same title. 'Hoop Dreams' following a new set of high school basketballers. 'Salesman' documenting today's very different breed of door-to-door merchants (of bibles again or something else). 'The Thin Blue Line' investigating another murder. 'Primary' observing a 2012 Democratic (or Republican) primary election. 'Nanook of the North' presenting the life of the Inuit today.
Actually, 'Nanook' could simply be redone shot for shot. The original isn't exactly a document of an Eskimo of the time so much as how the people used to be,...
The full question: is it possible to remake a documentary as a documentary? We know, thanks to Werner Herzog and others, that you can redo a documentary's story as a dramatic feature. But let's imagine instead that the premise behind your favorite classic non-fiction film is lifted and re-applied to a new non-fiction work with the same title. 'Hoop Dreams' following a new set of high school basketballers. 'Salesman' documenting today's very different breed of door-to-door merchants (of bibles again or something else). 'The Thin Blue Line' investigating another murder. 'Primary' observing a 2012 Democratic (or Republican) primary election. 'Nanook of the North' presenting the life of the Inuit today.
Actually, 'Nanook' could simply be redone shot for shot. The original isn't exactly a document of an Eskimo of the time so much as how the people used to be,...
- 11/17/2010
- by Christopher Campbell
- Cinematical
It’s Fathers Day [weekend], that one special occasion to give a few moments of our attention (at least) to the Dads in our lives and extend to them a few tokens of our thanks for the role they’ve had in making us the people that we are. As a father of four young adults myself, I’m grateful to be on this side of the equation, having seen each of them turn out to be pretty cool and impressive people on their own terms, if I can say so myself! Of course, some of the greatest films ever made have a lot to say about the functions and foibles of fatherhood. Here’s a list of ten fatherly archetypes that I’ve selected from my past year-and-a-half of watching Criterion DVDs:
Criterion.com / Netflix / Amazon
1. Nanook of the North – The Primordial Father
When it comes to being a dad,...
Criterion.com / Netflix / Amazon
1. Nanook of the North – The Primordial Father
When it comes to being a dad,...
- 6/20/2010
- by David Blakeslee
- CriterionCast
In 1922, Robert J. Flaherty gave us Nanook of the North, one of my favourite silent films and an early example of a snow movie--that is, a movie that wouldn't be what it is without its wintry landscape. In some films, snow is incidental--a pretty backdrop or a minor metaphor (like the snowfall that blankets the Bride's duel with O-Ren Ishii in Kill Bill Vol. I). In others, a snowy climate is central to the story or sometimes even a character in its own right. Here are 10 movies that each use ice, snow, and cold in a specific way; together, they collectively demonstrate the range one symbol can have.
As with a typical Pajiba Guide, many genres are represented (don't worry Nanook fans -- silent film, documentary, and Inuit culture are all covered below in some form). And as with a typical Guide, apologies must be made for omitting many more...
As with a typical Pajiba Guide, many genres are represented (don't worry Nanook fans -- silent film, documentary, and Inuit culture are all covered below in some form). And as with a typical Guide, apologies must be made for omitting many more...
- 2/18/2010
- by Dustin Rowles
After the release of his Standard Operating Procedures, the director Errol Morris writes me: This movie seems to have incited controversy, almost as if I broke some sort of rule or series of rules. The ultimate mystery is people. They are often mysteries not only to others but to themselves. Almost everyone wants to dismiss the bad apples rather than look at them, as if there is nothing inherently interesting in their stories. Oh well. The words "to themselves" hold the key.
None of the opinions in the film are owned by Morris. They belong to the people on the screen, who actually appear in the infamous photographs from Abu Ghraib. There are a few very brief off-screen questions by Morris ("That was on your birthday?") but they're not penetrating, do not suggest opinions, are the sorts of things any attentive listener would say. Most of the reviews of the film get this right.
None of the opinions in the film are owned by Morris. They belong to the people on the screen, who actually appear in the infamous photographs from Abu Ghraib. There are a few very brief off-screen questions by Morris ("That was on your birthday?") but they're not penetrating, do not suggest opinions, are the sorts of things any attentive listener would say. Most of the reviews of the film get this right.
- 5/17/2008
- by Roger Ebert
- blogs.suntimes.com/ebert
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