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“Forest of Bliss is an unsparing yet redemptive account of the inevitable griefs, religious passions and frequent happinesses that punctuate daily life in Benares, India’s most holy city. The film unfolds from one sunrise to the next without commentary, subtitles or dialogue. It is an attempt to give the viewer a wholly authentic, though greatly magnified and concentrated, sense of participation in the experiences examined by the film.Read More »
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1. Desert Gods
First transmitted in 1963, this is the first in a series of six programmes by David Attenborough on the Northern Territory of Australia.
David Attenborough, cameraman Eugene Carr and sound recordist Bob Saunders spent four months in the Northern Territory of Australia. Hoping to capture the essence of this vast territory they meet its people and explore its unique landscape and animals.Read More »
The film sought to portray a relatively unknown and isolated rural world and, through a highly politicized discourse, affirmed the genuineness of “folk culture.” Representative of the new documentary film movement that developed in Portugal after the revolution, the movie encouraged the local retrieval of the Caretos tradition. A ritual that seemed to be doomed by the conjoined impact of emigration, the colonial war and the crisis of agriculture was thus brought back to life. – Paulo RaposoRead More »
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A black and white documentary film about dance and possession in Haitian vodou that was shot by experimental filmmaker Maya Deren between 1947 and 1952 and edited and completed by Deren’s third husband Teiji Ito and his wife Cherel Winett Ito (1947-1999) in 1981, twenty years after Deren’s death. Most of the film consists of images of dancing and bodies in motion during rituals in Rada and Petro services. Deren had studied dance as well as photography and filmmaking. She originally went to Haiti with the funding from a Guggenheim fellowship and the stated intention of filming the dancing that forms a crucial part of the vodou ceremony. The film that resulted, however, reflected Deren’s increasing personal engagement with vodou and its practitioners (Wilcken, 1986). While this ultimately resulted in Deren disregarding the guidelines of the fellowship, Deren was able to record scenes that probably would have been inaccessible to other filmmakers. Deren’s original notes, film footage, and wire recordings are in the Maya Deren Collection at Boston University’s Howard Gotlieb Archive Research Center.Read More »
Located deep in the forested hills of the Siang valley of Arunachal Pradesh, at the north-eastern extremity of India, Damro village gathers to build a 1000 foot long suspension bridge, the elegant structures of cane and bamboo, that are the distinctive mark of the Adi tribe. Their only tool is the dao, a blade length of tempered steel, the size of a machete.
Ethnological documentary on the Adis of Arunachal Pradesh as they build one of their cane-and-bamboo bridges against the imminent arrival of “development” as backdrop.Read More »
From the Pole to the Equator (1987)
By JANET MASLIN
April 6, 1988
New York Times
LEAD: To watch ”From the Pole to the Equator” is to feel that one has seen a ghost – many ghosts, human and animal, from places all over the globe. The spectral quality of this documentary is overwhelming. Two Italian film makers, Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi, have drawn upon turn-of-the-century film from regions that were then fabulously exotic – the Arctic, India, Africa and less remote but equally striking settings in the Dolomites and the Caucasus – and assembled it at a sleepwalker’s pace, with changeable color tints and a humming electronic score.Read More »
Vietnamese-born Trinh T. Minh-ha’s profoundly personal documentary explores the role of Vietnamese women historically and in contemporary society. Using dance, printed texts, folk poetry and the words and experiences of Vietnamese women in Vietnam—from both North and South—and the United States, Trinh’s film challenges official culture with the voices of women. A theoretically and formally complex work, Surname Viet Given Name Nam explores the difficulty of translation, and themes of dislocation and exile, critiquing both traditional society and life since the war.Read More »
Reflecting on Mao’s famous saying “Let a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend,” Trinh T. Minh-ha’s SHOOT FOR THE CONTENTS—a title that alludes to a Chinese guessing game—is a unique excursion into the maze of allegorical naming and storytelling in China. The film ponders questions of power and change, politics and culture, as refracted by the Tiananmen Square massacre. It offers at the same time an inquiry into the creative process of filmmaking, intricately layering Chinese popular songs and classical music, the sayings of Mao and Confucius, women’s voices, and the words of artists, philosophers, and other cultural workers. The result is a meditative documentary that captures major shifts of interpretation in modern Chinese culture and politics.Read More »
A masterpiece of observational ethnographic cinema style.
An Australian feature length documentary about a poverty stricken family living in a squatter’s dwelling in Manila, Phillipines. Doc is set during a three month period and tells the story of two parents with two little children who must sell cigarettes to survive. Ethnographic and anthropological film shows the crises the impoverished family must face and is the winner of a number of awards.Read More »