Having now actually viewed King Corn, that PBS documentary that I mentioned a few days ago, I can heartily recommend it.
The film tracks Ian and Curt, two recent college graduates, as they farmed one acre of corn for one year. What's amazing that at no point do the guys actually appear to be farming, at least in any recognizable way. It's looks more like wedding planning. They make appointments for the giant planting machine to plant their seeds and arrange times for the herbicide truck to spray their plot. They manage to get through the year without getting a speck of dirt on their buttoned-downs.
If there's one thing that King Corn could have done better is to explain how modern farming has gone whole hog in embracing the division of labor approach to capitalism. There are plenty of sad farmers on displaying, lamenting the end of family farming, but there are only a handful of mentions of the corporate agriculture that has replaced it. (Photo thx JBAT)
Just got back from seeing Chicago 10, Brett Morgan's documentary on the trial of Abbie Hoffman, Bobby Seale, Jerry Rubin, and others for "inciting violence" during the protests around the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. I'd judge it uneven but enjoyable. The archival footage was a somewhat dry and disjointed. I found myself feeling completely crotchety for thinking "does the music have to be so loud?" And some of the scenes of the protestors and police clashing are soundtracked by non-contemporaneous songs like Eminem's "Mosh," which was completely jarring.
But the animated courtroom scenes are pretty amazing -- particularly in the way they cut out noise to leave only signal, making them more powerful than actual footage. In fact, when the film ended the audience just gave a polite applause, but when the animator credits scrolled, it went crazy! I'm not saying that wouldn't happen outside New York, but sometimes you really do have to love how people behave in crowds in this city.
(Oh, and another reason to love it -- as the lights came up a straggly-haired dude in a black knit cap stands up and says, "Thanks for coming. Oh yeah, I'm Brett Morgan. G'night." Director guy's just sitting in the crowd, amongst us.)
Three cameras simultaneously record the actions of every actor in a scene, inspired by documentary style of D.A. Pennebaker (The War Room) and the Maysles brothers (Gimme Shelter, Grey Gardens).
The show uses no sets, and instead shoots in real schools, stores, and houses throughout Austin, Texas.
The actors don't rehearse before shooting begins, and are free to ad-lib, including...
Non-actors recruited to play school staff, family members, and salesclerks.
Thanks for the link go to Adam, my guide through the pop-culture wilderness.
April 14, 2007 Screening of Brooklyn Matters When did this become at New York City events blog? Oh vell. This Wednesday at 7:30 at the Old First Reformed Church at the corner of Carroll and 7th Ave here in Park Slope there will be a free showing of the new documentary "Brooklyn Matters." The subject of the film is the much-contested proposed 22-acre (I have not run out of compound adjectives yet) Frank Gehry-designed Atlantic Yards development project in north Park Slope and Prospect Heights. Amazing, isn't it, that a proposed development plan has its very own Wikipedia entry?
But you know what would be really cool? If someone built a 3-D model of Atlantic Yards in Google Earth.
For what it's worth, Steven Johnson wonders whether the project perhaps isn't such a bad thing. The end result would be to have a developed corridor running from the Yards to downtown, replacing what is now sort of an echoing chasm and introducing a touch of big-building urbanism to brownstone Brooklyn. Of course, many of us in the most recent wave of Brooklynites choose to live in this outer borough exactly to escape big-building urbanism. Johnson cites Jane Jacobs to argue that the charm of human-scaled urban places is tied to the fact that they exist in the same environment as more massive development. Exactly. That's why Brooklyn is so darn charming today. There's already a ready contrast to the livable scale of our borough. It's called Manhattan. documentary, Steven Johnson
April 14, 2007 When It Comes to Art, Is Context Nothing, Something, or Everything? On Doculink, the fantastic documentary film discussion list I belong to, there's been a great debate recently on the idea of context. Should the documentarian avoid sending out screeners (advance copies of a finished film) knowing that they'll get watched on a TV somewhere by someone eating a sandwich and struggling to get thorugh a marathon screening session? Gene Weingarten's recent awesome article on virtuoso violinist Joshua Bell's mostly ignored performance in the Washington DC metro raises the same sort of question. Hey, did you know that that playing of live music in the metro in DC is forbidden? That's my newest answer when people ask me why I moved from there. Anyway, Weingarten chatted with Post readers recently about his piece, and one of them sent in a link to a video of Bruce Springsteen playing "The River" in Copenhagen with a local street musician.
Thing's happen in three, so this morning in the New York Times Magazine there's an article by Columbia sociologist Duncan J. Watts called "Is Justin TImberlake a Product of Cumulative Advantage?" It's not up online yet, but the gist is that Watts and his colleagues ran some online experiments to test whether music rated higher by other users would grow in popularity, independant of how well they were rated by users in terms of quality. You'll have to read it to see how it turns out, but Watts does say this:
[I]n fact, the question "Why did X suceed?" may not have any better answer than the one given by the publisher of Lynne Truss's surprise best seller, "Eats, Shoots & Leaves," who, when asked to explain its success, replied that "it sold well because lots of people bought it."
March 31, 2007 Leni Riefenstahl, Steven Spielberg, China, and Darfur It was just last night that I was reading Eric Barnouw's
Documentary:
A History of the Non-Fiction Film and I read about Leni Riefenstahl.
Riefenstahl is the German--dancer-turned-filmmaker who created films hergestellt
im auftrage des Führers -- by the order of Hitler himself. Her
most famous works were Triumph of the Will and Olympia,
the latter a documentary of the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin. And then
today, of course, I stumble across Riefenstahl's name again. This time,
it's Mia Farrow and
her son Ronan in the Wall Street Journal asking "does
Mr. Spielberg really want to go down in history as the Leni Riefenstahl
of the Beijing Games?"
Spielberg, you see, is serving
as artistic consultant for the opening and closing ceremonies of the
2008 Olympic games in Beijing, with Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou as the
project lead. Chinese is looking to the Olympics to burnish its image
after recent bad press. Farrow's particular charge against China is its
seemingly unblinking support for the government of Sudan. And Khartoum,
of course, is widely seen as the perpetuators of the crisis in Darfur,
where almost half a million people have been killed. China buys a great
deal of the oil that Sudan ships, money that goes to fuel Khartoum's actions
in Darfur. Entreaties to China to use its leverage in Sudan to do something
to stop that catastrophe have fallen on dear ears. You may as well just
go and read the Farrows' op-ed.
It's actually really well done.
Interesting point in the Barnouw book is that while Triumph of the
Will and to a far lesser extent Olympia where considered
really good Nazi propoganda, bother are actually considered extremely
well-made films, from an artistic perspective. For Triumph, Riefenstahl
managed a crew of about 120 and stage managed every aspect of the 1934
annual National Socialist German Workers party rally. For Olympia,
Riefenstahl and her crew filmed from pits feet away from where the world's
best high-jumpers competed.
Triumph
expertly captured every element of the Nazi operation. Giant precise columns
of German troops lined the field where the Führer was to
appear. Hitler was himself depicted as a near mythic figure, decending
from the clouds to anoint his people. Sweeping shots recorded all the
pomp and circumstance of Nazi pagentry.
In fact, Triumph of the Will was such a feat of documentary
that it became a tool of the opposistion forces -- integrated into the
Allied forces own propoganda. Major Frank Capra's borrowed from it liberally
for his Why We Fight series. As Barnouw puts it, "nothing
else depicted so vividly the demoniac nature of the Hitler leadership,
and the scarely human discipline supporting it." documentary
December 21, 2006 Wholphin A DVD magazine of unseen films is just the sort of thing that you didn't know that you needed until you learn that it exists. Wholphin is the new project from McSweeney's, Dave Eggers' publishing house and literary playground that has also spawned the Believer and various 826 writing centers. I've just ordered Issue #3 which features, among other things, a documentary short on a "thirteen-year-old Yemeni girl who refuses to wear her veil." I'll report back. 2, documentary, words
When I first moved to New York about six months ago, I ended up one night in the emergency room of Roosevelt Hospital with a guy named Matt O'Neill. Matt and I ended up there because we had been at an event when a mutual friend started to feel sick. During the course of a long night, as we waited for our friend to get treated, we got to know each other and I found out that Matt's a documentary filmmaker.
This was exciting to me because documentary films is one of the top things on my list of the things that I really wanted to dig my teeth into when I fled left DC. And so a few weeks after our night in the ER, Matt and I got together for a Chinese food lunch, and he very generously took a couple of hours to talk to me about doc making. After lunch, he walked me through his production studio and introduced me his editors. I came in particularly interested in the actual process by which you go from an idea -- a mere glimmer in the eye -- to a finished film, but we ended up talking about what's the point of non-fiction films, and what they can accomplish.
We agreed (and I'm hoping that I'm not putting words in Matt's mouth) that what docs are so great at is telling rich, compelling stories. And there's much power in that because, of course, it's through stories that we learn much of what we know about the world.
I think one reason that non-fiction filmmaking is so appealing to me so much because of my background in and frustrations with academic anthropology. Anthro tells amazing stories. It's a way of looking at the world holistically that, I think, is uniquely powerful. But let's be honest -- nobody reads what anthropologists write except other anthropologists. Film can't teach theory in the way that written texts can, but it can go very far to share the interesting stuff that the field knows about the ways of the world.
When we talked, Matt had been in the final stages of editing a project about the time he and another filmmaker, Jon Alpert, had spent in another ER -- an American military ER in Baghdad. I asked if the film was, for lack of a better way of putting it, political. A polemic against the Iraq war, if you will. Matt said no, that the point of the film was to show the physical costs of war, any war, and if it should make people question whether this war is worth it, so be it. Yesterday, Bob Herbert (Times Select) said that they succeeded:
In the first few moments of the documentary film "Baghdad ER," we see a man dressed in hospital scrubs carrying a bloodied arm that has been amputated above the elbow. He deposits it in a large red plastic bag.
This HBO production is reality television with a vengeance -- war-fare as it really is. And while it is frightening, harrowing and deeply painful to watch, it should be required viewing for all but the youngest Americans.
Matt's movie will premiere on May 21 on HBO. I will be watching with popcorn. I mention it both to congratulate him and to give me a chance to harp on the enormous potential of non-fiction filmmaking. I'm especially intrigued by the idea of smart progressives (Matt, for one, is also a co-founder of Drinking Liberally) using the medium to show, not tell, why liberal ideas are the way to go.
I fell even more deeply in love with the medium after watching "When We Were Kings" this weekend. That's the phenomenal film on the "Rumble in the Jungle" boxing match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman (angry George Foreman, not happy grill-shilling George Foreman) in Kinshasa, Zaire. It was so good and so rich, I sat staring at the screen with my mouth open for five minutes -- for real -- after the credits played. I highly recommend it and here's a link so you can put it in your Netflix queue. (Why is that word so long? Wouldn't "que" be sufficient? I say it in my head, "que-yoo." And fear that may prove embarrassing, like the time when I was a kid and said "libs" when I meant to say pounds.)
But "When We Were Kings" is also good example of what's tough about making documentaries. It took Leon Gast more than 20 years to get all the rights and financing together so that he could finally release the movie in '96. There's a real problem now with non-fiction filmmakers having to license the pop-culture that shows up while they're shooting. For example, go here for what "Mad Hot Ballroom" had to go through to clear the music in the film, including the "Rocky" ring tone that plays on a woman's cell phone for six seconds. And then there's the Smithsonian's new deal with Showtime that's making some filmmakers think that it's going to get trickier to use footage from their archives.
Still, documentary filmmaking is set to take off. There's the relative inexpensiveness of the equipment. A decent camera and the microphones, batteries, cables, that you need to film a basic documentary costs about $3500. The Final Cut Express software that you can use to edit your movies on your Mac goes for three hundred bucks. There's the new distribution and promotional possibilities opened up by the Internet. Those will (if all goes well) only get wider and more reliable as time goes by. And I think we're all primed to take in, process, and even expect rich media now. Witness the fact that even the big news guys like the New York Times and Washington Post have taken to pulling together text, audio, video, and photos in getting their jobs done.
Given all that, given the general public's seemingly renewed hunger for facts over spin, for experiencing reality (even a reality as mediated by the filmmaker) rather than just being told what truth is, I'm not sure there's a better medium today than the documentary film through which to tell a story.
April 16, 2008 King Corn King Corn! A PBS documentary about two jokers who farm one acre of corn in Iowa for one year, and then follow their golden ears through the food production process. It's on Friday night in NYC, but I don't know when it's on where you are. Because frankly, I don't know where it is that you are. documentary, food
February 22, 2008 Chicago 10 Trailer The trailer for "Chicago 10," Bruce Morgan's new documentary on he trial of Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and the other activists who were charged with conspiring to incite violence during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Morgan has drawn on archival footage to set the context of the trial, but since no cameras were allowed in the courtroom he's animated the trial scenes based off of the court transcripts. It opens at the end of this month, just about six months before the '08 Democratic convention kicks off in Denver.
I'm a Brooklyn-based writer obsessed with technology, networks, social organizing, and the politics of food. This is my online home where I talk about those things and whatever else strikes my fancy. Learn More
