Category Archives: Documentary

The Worst of All Possible Worlds

Documentary, New Releases

The internet is ruining us, discovers Niall Anderson. Also, Jonathan Franzen.

Jonathan Franzen is thinking, so you don't have to.
Jonathan Franzen is thinking, so you don’t have to.

Last Saturday, The Guardian published a lengthy essay by Jonathan Franzen, which it inaccurately decided to headline ‘What’s Wrong With The Modern World’. The headline was inaccurate in two regards: first, because Franzen was trying to introduce the work of German satirist Karl Kraus to a new audience, and therefore merely suggesting parallels between Kraus’s time (the interwar period) and ours. Second, because the essay told you glancingly little about the modern world, but a great deal about the anxieties of Jonathan Franzen. In particular, Franzen seems to have a bug up his bum about the internet. To wit: ‘I confess to feeling some … disappointment when a novelist who I believe ought to have known better, Salman Rushdie, succumbs to Twitter.’

Succumbs, eh? Leaving aside the principal metaphorical dubiousness (does one ever deliberately succumb to anything?), the language of disease is always surprisingly close at hand whenever contrarians and conservatives decide to take a look at the apparent social effects of the internet. Franzen’s specific complaints – that the internet distracts people from really important issues; that it induces a kind of phenomenological panic about needing to have an opinion on every subject; that it effectively closes off real communication, even as it claims to open it up – are fairly standard. Indeed, so standard that Saul Bellow was able to write a very similar essay (‘There Is Simply Too Much To Think About’) in 1991, without ever having heard of the internet. Imagine.

To be fair to Franzen, there’s little in his essay that hasn’t occurred to even the most web-savvy and web-friendly individual. Slouched in front of an iridescent screen, pursuing a pointlessly vindictive web-spat with somebody you’ll never meet, who among us has not thought we might be wasting our lives? But there’s a difference between this feeling and the attitude of outright rejection that Franzen seems to be suggesting. And there’s a massive difference between momentary anxieties about online behaviour and a panoptic fear about what it might be doing to us as a species. (Maybe this is why we still have novelists: to worry about the global effects of every email sent in haste.)

In any case, Franzen is not alone. A new documentary released this week by Beeban Kidron, InRealLife, is Franzen’s thesis made flesh. Comprising extensive interviews with six teenagers along with fly-on-the-wall footage of their lives outside the internet, InRealLife is serious, well-intentioned and occasionally genuinely shocking. It also goes beyond mere human interest into genuine ethical quandaries of how the internet turns us all into consumers at a younger and younger age. But for all that, it is wrongheaded, hasty, shortsighted and more than a little bit sensationalist – all phenomena that Jonathan Franzen would like to blame the internet for. Well, Jonathan, I hate to tell you …

Continue reading The Worst of All Possible Worlds →

Side by Side

Craft, Documentary, Film Making, Home Video, , ,

by Sarah Slade

side_by_side_keanu_reeves

One of the interviewees in this thoughtful account of the rise of digital moviemaking called the film production process “sculpting with light”, and they have a point. Film-making captures light and shade, and creates something solid, permanent: a thing that can be carried between places, handled, edited and projected. Whether digital or celluloid, the end result is the same, isn’t it?

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Ready to take your order

Documentary, Film Making, New Releases, Politics, , , , ,

Niall Anderson watches two very different cinematic confidence tricks

The Sting
Paul Newman knows more than you know

As the old joke has it: on the internet nobody knows you’re a dog. But what kind of dog are you? Are you housetrained? Do you like children? Do you have any infectious diseases? Are you even, actually, a dog?

Hoaxes and confidence tricks have always been fertile ground for drama, but certain crops have withered in recent years. The clever confidence caper (epitomised by The Sting) doesn’t seem to flourish as it used to. If it hasn’t quite died out, it’s been genetically modified into something almost unrecognisable. The films of Christopher Nolan, for instance, are all confidence capers at root, but you wouldn’t know it to look at the overbearing foliage.

Besides, there’s a new harvest. Films about, for want of a better term, being a dog. Where once the cinematic conman played a short game, hoping to trick himself into money or out of danger, he now does what he does indefinitely and for no immediately intelligible reason. His first hope is that you’ll accept him as a dog. His highest hope is that you’ll accept him as a dog for a really long time. The usual pleasures of the cinematic con trick – whether and how he’ll get away with it – are replaced by the mopier issue of why he wants to be a dog in the first place.

Catfish (2010) remains the exemplar of this new tricky cinema. A transparent and risibly faked “documentary” about how social media allows people to disguise their real identities, Catfish takes callow New York brothers the Schulmans into the American heartland to discover that the hot twentysomething pixie one of them fancies is actually a dowdy middle-aged woman with no friends and a lot of Facebook accounts. There is shock, followed by hugging and learning. The Schulman brothers learned so much, in fact, that they felt compelled to franchise their wisdom into Catfish: The TV Show – an MTV production in which Nev Schulman spies on internet daters and exposes them if they’re not telling the truth.

This seems to me to be a fairly crippled notion of the truth. It is also a fairly obvious bit of reactionary posturing about the rise of online communication. But the note of paranoia – the idea that you can’t trust anybody till you see them in the flesh – feels authentic in both its fear and naivety. Everything will be all right once all the masks are dropped. Two films coincidentally released this week take on this idea in very different ways. Continue reading Ready to take your order →

A Long Way From There To Here

Documentary, Film Festivals, Film Making, History

Niall Anderson looks at a new documentary about migrant experience in London

The Road runs 260 miles, from Holyhead in Wales to Marble Arch in London. We call it the A5, but the Saxons called it Watling Street and the Romans called it Iter II. It’s still the main westward approach to London, which gave filmmaker Mark Isaacs an idea: “Just to go along the road and meet people who’ve set up homes in this stretch that’s more associated with constant travel.”

Originally conceived as a series for the BBC, The Road was going to traverse the entire length of the A5, but that was, says Isaacs, “a difficult pitch”. It was the advent of the 2012 Olympics that eventually gave the film its final 76-minute shape: “The idea of all these different nationalities converging for a few weeks on London, set against London as a migrant city from day to day: the persistence of migration in London’s history.”
Continue reading A Long Way From There To Here →

Mostly BOO! Halloween Thoughts on The Shining and Room 237

Classic Films, Documentary, Genre, New Releases

by Indy Datta

Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 adaptation of Stephen King’s novel  The Shining is, courtesy of the BFI, getting a theatric rerelease this week (with previews tonight), in the longer US cut, previously little seen in Britain on the big screen. And last week saw the theatrical release of Rodney Ascher’s documentary, Room 237, a dense, impressionistic collage of varyingly outré interpretations of Kubrick’s film, narrated by the authors of the theories; simultaneously illustrated and undermined by Ascher’s selection and juxtaposition of images from the film and elsewhere. Some thoughts after I make you jump.

Continue reading Mostly BOO! Halloween Thoughts on The Shining and Room 237 →

Artists on Film

Art, Documentary

Ann Jones reviews a summer of documentaries about artists

It’s not all that often that a documentary about an artist gets a cinema release so for there to be not one, not two but three films about artists doing the (albeit limited) rounds this summer, albeit on very limited releases, seems sufficiently unusual to be noteworthy. Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present and Eames: the Architect and the Painter are very different films about very different artists but there are plenty of common threads and each raises interesting questions about the nature of art practice and the role of the artist.

There is, of course, nothing inherently interesting or unusual about the lives of artists,  though Ai Weiwei and Marina Abramović are perhaps exceptions –  with their life and work being inseparable – and Charles and Ray Eames arguably played a major role in defining the look of post-war domestic spaces,  so that their work is tied to our lives before one even starts to unpick their relationship. But though in all cases there are aspects of the artists’ lives that could easily hold our attention, all three films rightly concentrate on the work to a greater or lesser extent, albeit in very different ways.

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Are you sure you want to do this? The making of Barbaric Genius

Documentary, Film Making, New Releases, , ,

by Paul Duane

I spent four years making Barbaric Genius, my first feature documentary. I’ve been a director for about twenty-five years, but I learned more about every aspect of filmmaking – and more about life – in those four years than in the first twenty put together.

The film is finally getting a cinema release this week, a year after its festival debut, and it felt like it might be a good time to try to figure out how to pass on some of the things I’ve learned, for what they’re worth.

Continue reading Are you sure you want to do this? The making of Barbaric Genius →

Educating the Daily Mail

Documentary, Television

Caulorlime watches a real British hero in action and is dismayed by the press response

Everyone in this photo, see me after.

Regular readers (hi, Dave) will be aware that I don’t really like much. My longer pieces for this blog tend to consist of me ranting about one of the many things that have annoyed me. I write pseudonymously because the school that employs me, the students I teach and the parents that entrust me with their offspring will all sleep better in their beds if they don’t know what a bile-fuelled, potty-mouthed misanthrope I am. Who would benefit from the knowledge that I am so irritated by advertising and reality TV that I regularly find myself shouting, in another room, after a rage induced black-out? What does it profit a man to discover that I truly believe my greatest achievement in life is that I have never used the word “Cunt” in a classroom*? No-one and nothing, that’s who and what. Information like that will only lead to funny looks in the staff room (and I get enough of those) and ultimately to my losing my job. And I like my job. As I said, I don’t really like much, but my job’s alright.

Obviously, it isn’t perfect. Every good job has its downsides. I believe that soap actors object to people calling them by their character’s names, for example, and fashion photographers often describe a sense of ennui at being fellated, once again, by a selection of the world’s most beautiful women. For teachers the downside is being universally derided. The teaching profession is one of the British media’s favourite whipping boys. If the right-wing press is to believed there is barely an educator in Britain that isn’t tedious, incompetent, sleazy or lazy, or all of the above. Teachers are portrayed as politically-correct, sex-obsessed, illiterate, cowardly, doctrinaire, over-paid, under-worked individuals whose pensions are a personal insult to every hard-working family of middle England. We are what is wrong with this country.
Continue reading Educating the Daily Mail →

2011: A Film Odyssey

Classic Films, Documentary, Film Making, MF Recommends

Philip Concannon previews More4’s history of film and cinematic innovation

The Story of the Kelly Gang – the first feature-length film ever made

“At the end of the 1800s, a new art form flickered in to life. It looked like our dreams.”

The Story of Film is a story told through moments; images thematically linked to tell us how this art form, created by inventors and visionaries in the 19th century, exploded to become the industry that we know it as today. Mark Cousins has already told this story in his book of the same title, but this 15-part documentary series still feels like a significant film event. At a time when the art of cinema seems secondary to the business of moviemaking, and when public interest and awareness in films beyond the mainstream appears to be at an all-time low, The Story of Film is a valuable attempt to reconnect us with the essential magic at the heart of cinema. “Movies are multi-billion dollar global entertainment industry now,” Cousins admits at the start of episode one, “but what drives them isn’t box-office or showbiz. It’s passion, innovation.” Continue reading 2011: A Film Odyssey →

Looking Back into Darkness: Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah

Classic Films, Documentary, MF Recommends

By Philip Concannon

Mordechai Podchlebnik, one of the two known survivors of Chelmno-Schlosslager

Simon Srebnik should have died in 1945. As a teenager, Srebnik was a prisoner at the Chelmno extermination camp, where he managed to stay alive thanks to his agility and melodious singing voice, both of which pleased the SS guards. Two days before the Soviet troops arrived, the guards began killing all of the remaining Jews at the camp, shooting each in the head at close range. Incredibly, Srebnik survived, later regaining consciousness in the now-abandoned camp, surrounded by dead bodies. It is a miracle that he was still with us almost forty years later when Claude Lanzmann sought out stories for his epic documentary Shoah. He returned with Lanzmann to Chelmno, now a tranquil spot bearing no evidence of the horrors that once took place there. We only have the memories of people like Simon Srebnik to make us understand what it was like to be a Jew in this particular time and place, and to bear witness to unimaginable atrocities on a day-to-day basis.

For 9½ hours, Shoah presents these memories to us. Lanzmann spent more than a decade tracking down and interviewing people who had been involved in the Holocaust in some way – victims, perpetrators, witnesses – compiling over 350 hours of footage that he subsequently edited into one 567-minute monument to those who died as part of the Nazis’ “final solution.” Watching the whole film in one day, as I did recently, is an extraordinary, singular experience. Taking breaks and a lengthy Lanzmann Q&A into account (during the latter, Lanzmann coped well with the unbelievable crassness of a question comparing Holocaust deniers with climate change deniers), the event lasted for almost 12 hours and I have never been left feeling so exhausted – physically and emotionally – by a single film. Shoah is a torrent of words, and those words conjure images capable of breaking the heart many times over. Continue reading Looking Back into Darkness: Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah →