Documentary

  • Claude Friese-Greene – The Open Road (1926)

    1921-1930ArchitectureClaude Friese-GreeneDocumentarySilentUnited Kingdom

    Quote:
    In the summer of 1924 Claude Friese-Greene, a pioneer of colour cinematography, set out from Cornwall with the aim of recording life on the road between Land’s End and John O’Groats. Entitled The Open Road, his remarkable travelogue was conceived as a series of shorts, 26 episodes in all, to be shown weekly at the cinema.

    Claude’s experimental colour process failed to reach a large audience owing to heavy flicker and colour fringing. Following on from the BBC’s recent documentary The Lost World of Friese-Greene, the BFI National Archive has restored a special compilation of highlights from the journey, using digital intermediate technology to remove the technical defects of the original.Read More »

  • Jason Massot – Louis Theroux: Law and Disorder in Lagos (2010)

    2001-2010DocumentaryJason MassotTVUnited Kingdom

    Quote:
    On the streets of Lagos, it is not the police who wield power but gangs of fight-hardened young men known as Area Boys. Louis spends time with several outfits, joining them as they patrol their turf, clash with local rivals and keep the peace in a brutal and haphazard fashion. The main income for the Area Boys is an arbitrary and unofficial form of taxation, extracted from local businesses and commercial drivers. Louis gets to know the rich and glamorous Area Boy leader MC, a former street youth himself, who has now become a friend of the most powerful men in the city. Taken under MC’s wing, Louis experiences the top levels of the Area Boys’ world from the inside, complete with a tour of MC’s grand residence and extensive shoe collection, and ending in a chaotic mini-riot with gunshots, blood and mayhem.Read More »

  • Shinsuke Ogawa – Seinen no umi AKA Sea of Youth (1966)

    1961-1970DocumentaryJapanShinsuke Ogawa

    Quote:
    SEA OF YOUTH was Ogawa’s first directorial effort. After leaving Iwanami Productions along with most of his cohort, he struck an unusual path. He gathered young activists together to make an independent documentary on the plight of correspondence students. The film features the group itself as they plot their activism. Many of the onscreen personalities would become core members of Ogawa Productions. The film met only mild success in fundraising, so they completed it by selling off books and blood.Read More »

  • Louis De Rochemont – The Ramparts We Watch (1940)

    1931-1940DocumentaryDramaLouis De RochemontUSA

    America learns the value of wartime preparedness in de Rochemont’s study of World War I’s effect on average citizens (imdb)Read More »

  • Barbara Kopple – American Dream (1991)

    1991-2000Barbara KoppleDocumentaryUSA

    Depicting the effects of a mid-1980s strike by the employees of a Hormel meat-packing plant in Austin, Minnesota, Barbara Kopple’s Academy Award-winning documentary American Dream observes both the daily struggles of the striking workers and the behind-the-scenes conflicts amongst the union leaders. Upset at a proposed pay cut, the local union chapter begins the strike against the advice of their parent organization, hiring an outside consultant who encourages the workers. This consultant’s aggressive, no-compromise approach turns the conflict into national news but also alienates management.Read More »

  • Vera Iwerebor – Baby Peggy, the Elephant in the Room (2010)

    2011-2020DocumentaryNetherlandsVera Iwerebor

    Diana Serra Cary, a well-conserved lady of ninety, is one of the last living legends of the silent movie era. She was not even two when she endeared herself to the public as cute Baby Peggy. In Hollywood, she worked long days as an infant, earned millions and provided for the family. When she was six, the fairytale abruptly ended when her father, a stunt man and ex-cowboy, quarrelled with a producer and the saved fortune turned out to be squandered. In this documentary, with abundant historic footage, Diana looks back on her bizarre childhood and explains to her granddaughter she really does not know what it is like to be a child. As a teenager, she started loathing Baby Peggy and ran away from home to start a new life. She wrote a book about child stars and eventually became reconciled with Baby Peggy. Nowadays, she visits festivals that screen her films and enjoys the attention from often young fans..Read More »

  • Anne Chapman, Jorge Prelorán & Ana Montes – Los Onas, Vida y Muerte en Tierra del Fuego (1977)

    1971-1980Ana MontesAnne ChapmanArgentinaDocumentaryJorge Prelorán

    Documents the life of the last generation of Selk’nam’s. Their way of life, economy, rituals, chants, traditions, and their slow extinction after the colonization…Read More »

  • Lev Kuleshov – Sorok serdets AKA Forty Hearts (1930)

    1931-1940AnimationDocumentaryLev KuleshovUSSR

    Sorok Serdets is a 49 minute politprosvet film centered on electrical power plants, the new beating hearts planned for Soviet society and economy.

    The infotainment flick is full of both creative metaphors and rather rude suggestions towards the bourgeois and capitalists, conveying historical materialism in a bombastic way that anyone can understand. The most prominent metaphor, a horse transformed by technology into a factory, connects peasant toil to industrialization. And it goes on to contextualize the early 20s grain famines, NEP, and Stalin’s new 5-year-plan phases, and it gets you on board for the role of electrification in the development of a workers’ state in the Soviet Union.Read More »

  • James Benning – daylight (2019)

    2011-2020DocumentaryExperimentalJames BenningUSA

    Quote:
    Benning’s 18-minute study of moonfall in the morning sky– A close cousin to his film “two moons”. A lovely rendition of ‘Moon River’ accompanies the footage, filmed July 24th, 2019.Read More »

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