5 Lessons from “The End of Suburbia”

Filed under Post Archive by Arlen Parsa on February 22, 2009 at 6:39 pm {one comment}

It’s often worth watching documentaries that suck in order to learn what not to do as a filmmaker. While watching the 2004 documentary “The End of Suburbia” (available on Netflix but don’t bother) several lessons occurred to me. Here’s my new list of what not to do in my own docs:

1. Don’t make a movie that relies only on white men of a certain age for interviews who all agree with one another and have all written books with titles that have colons in them.

2. Don’t make a movie that has no real things happening in it, just lecture and interview footage with some thinly layered b-roll and archival.

3. Don’t try to cram too many topics into 78 minutes.

4. Don’t seat interview subjects on a couch in front of a white wall.

5. Don’t have three interviews with the same person saying the same thing in three different locations for no apparent reason.

Oh, and a bonus: don’t have an on-screen narrator who reads a script like he’s ranting.

Feb-May 2009 Film Screenings

Filed under Events by Andrew Rosinski on February 19, 2009 at 7:56 pm {2 comments}

Deborah Stratman\'s \"O\'er the Land\" (2008)
A wise man once said, “Let us all cool our jets. Let us all take the time out of our busy schedules to watch great documentary films. That is when we find our peace.”

For 2009, Viva Doc has put forth extra effort to curate a film schedule built both of the essentials and the obscure. And, to buy you some time, we have tried our best to assemble a schedule with documentaries more on the short side.

We kicked off the festivities this past Tuesday, with a screening of Christo’s Valley Curtain and, we must say, the attendance was phenomenal. We hope you all enjoyed the film.

On April 15th, filmmaker Deborah Stratman, a fellow Chicagoan and film professor at UIC, will make an appearance with her latest experimental documentary, O’er the Land(2008), which recently played at the Sundance 2009 film festival, and is also scheduled to play at the True/False film fest. We’ll also be playing Deborah’s documentary, The BLVD (1999), a documentary about Chicago’s elusive car racing gangs and street dudes. Do not miss this event, or else you will find yourself having reoccurring nightmares that, at the very least, will fill you with endless regret and a longing for time travel.

Visit Deborah’s website, Pythagorasfilm

View the Viva Doc flyer

2/17…Christo’s Valley Curtain, a film by Albert and David Maysles, 28 mins, (1973)

2/24…The Case of the Grinning Cat, a film by Chris Marker, 58 mins, (2003)

3/03…Cane Toads: An Unnatural History, a film by Mark Lewis, 58 mins, (1993)

3/10…TBA

3/17…Heavy Metal Jr., a film by Chris Waitt, 24 mins, (2003)

3/17…The Scrapper, a film by Jonathan Olsheski, 32 mins, (2008)

NO SCREENING DURING SPRING-BREAK

3/31…Digital Directions in Documentary Distribution, A discourse w/ filmmaker Tami Yeager of Tribeca and IFP Chicago

4/07…The BLVD, a film by Deborah Stratman, 63 mins, (1999)

4/14…20 Years of the Michael Rabiger Center for Documentary Film! A celebratory, fundraising, film screening event. Join us!

4/15…O’er the Land , filmmaker Deborah Stratman in person!, 52 mins, (2008)

4/15…Three Cheers for the Whale , a film by Chris Marker, 17 mins, (1972)

4/21…Up the Yangtze, a film by Yung Chung, 93 mins, (2008)

4/21…Bullfight in Okinawa, a film by Chris Marker, 4 mins, (1994)

4/28…Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind , a film by John Gianvito, 58 mins, (2008)
5/05…San Soleil, a film by Chris Marker, 103 mins, (1983)

5/14…TBA

Film synopses will be posted very soon. Stay tuned.

Bullfight in Okinawa

Filed under Events, Reviews by Andrew Rosinski on February 19, 2009 at 6:50 pm {2 comments}

Chris Marker’s Bullfight in Okinawa is a bizarre, 4 min documentary that introduces viewers to Japan’s subterranean past time of bullfighting. Part of Markers five-film “Bestiary” series, Bullfight employs observational documentary techniques and, in particular, Marker’s camerawork is impressive — tight framed shots, free-hand pans, and quick zooms all contribute to the film’s urgent sense of tension — and, if it weren’t for the suspense inducing music, this short-gem would be damn close to pure objective documentary cinema.

Be sure not to miss this short, hidden-gem — it’s only four minutes long, and is quite the bizarre spectacle — witness the primal rage of two seemingly bull-trainers as they shout at fighting bulls.

This film is part of the Viva Documentary 2009 film series.

Playing with Yung Chang’s Up the Yangtze (2008).

Tuesday, April 21st

5:15pm @ the Michael Rabiger Center for Documentary Film.

1104 S. Wabash RM 407, Chicago, IL

Bigger, Stronger, Faster

Filed under Articles, Reviews by Mario Contreras on February 7, 2009 at 5:52 pm {no comments}

In honor of the the end of the NFL season and the beginning of February, I want to share some video that I captured at True/False last year. Some of you may have heard me raving about a film called Bigger, Stronger, Faster, about America’s obsession with steroids. Well, I was going through some footage from my trip to the festival and it turns out that I shot a little bit of the intro and Q & A from the screening.


Bigger, Stronger, Faster intro True/False from Viva Documentary on Vimeo.

It was interesting to watch this clip now that a year has passed and I can find the DVD at Blockbuster, the public library or online with Netflix. It was great to see a young guy without a bunch of films under his belt be treated so well because he was willing to share such a personal story with the world. It didn’t hurt that the film made some poignant arguments about the place that steroids holds in American society but I think it was director Chris Bell’s willingness to put his story and his family’s story on the line that made this film so so compelling.

Here is another clip from the Q & A. If you haven’t seen the film yet, it might be nice to check it out before opening this next clip.


Q+A from True/False 2008 – Bigger, Stronger, Faster from Viva Documentary on Vimeo.

One the things that grabs me in this film is the familiarity of the opening. He starts off in a very personal / experimental form of showing us home videos with first person voice over but shifts to archive from our collective American memory to show how he has grown along side us. His commentary over moments in sports history, pop movie icons and recent political scandals puts us into his shoes for events that we witnessed ourselves so that we can see sports and entertainment from the perspective of a wide-eyed kid with dream of being a pro wrestler.

When we meet the present day Chris Bell, it’s understood that he is bitter about the world of professional sports but it’s intriguing that he still has a love for sports. I think that’s the ultimate reason that we’re willing to use him and his family as a mirror for our culture’s relationship with steroids. A father that sets a good example but let’s you live your own life, a mother who loves unconditionally and three brothers with completely different ways of coping with steroids in their lives.

We’re at that point where we need to come to terms with how we really feel about steroid use in the entertainment industry and in professional sports. It’s true that letting athletes use performance enhancing drugs would set a bad example for our youth but shouldn’t we hold actors and models to the same standards? Isn’t setting unrealistic expectations just as dangerous?

It isn’t the athletes as much as it’s the audience. Imagine how many players would make it through an NFL season without taking something for pain or weight loss. Would you pay for season tickets if your favorite player was allowed to sit out because of back pain or arthritis? Our expectations are unnatural so how can we expect them to be achieved naturally?

I, for one, would still buy a ticket knowing that all those things that society deems unethical are just par for the course. It might make me a bad person but know that I won’t be the only one there.

Viva Doc Calendar

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