Wednesday 4/28:
Bake Sale… 12-5pm in the 1104 S. Wabash lobby… interested in baking?
Contact Mitch at wenkusproductions@gmail.com
Thursday 4/29:
Come support doc filmmaker Zach Mehrbach at Big Screen, starting at 7pm. Big Screen will be in the Film Row Cinema on the 8th Floor of the 1104 S. Wabash Building
Sunday, 5/2:
“World Shorts” fundraiser for the ISDC, $10 at the Viaduct Theatre @8pm, with performances by Pet Peeve, Jon Drake & the Shakes, and the Gentlemen’s Guild. Prizes for person wearing the best shorts!
Monday, 5/3:
Looking for Democracy Film Fest in Film Row Cinema from 5pm-8pm, brought to you by the Illinois Humanities Council:
Wednesday, 5/5: Check out dir. Brent Day’s “Farm 2 Fork” doc about local organic farming. 4-6pm, Hokin Lecture Hall, 623 S. Wabash. Discussion to follow.
Thursday, 5/6:
“An Evening of Brave New Films” screening featuring ‘Rethink Afghanistan’ and live Skype Q&A with dir. Robert Greenwald. Doors open at 6pm at the Ferguson Lecture Hall in the 600 S. Michigan Building. Screening begins at 6:30 pm. Q&A at 8:15 pm after the screening. For more, visit bravenewfilms.org and bravenewtheaters.com.
Just over a week ago, Gordon Quinn and Jerry Temaner came to Columbia College to participate in the “Art, Access & Action” Summit at Columbia and talk with documentary students (and others) about documentary film making and how film making and society has changed since the era when great early Kartemquin films like What the Fuck are These Red Squares? and Hum 255 were made.
The discussion featured a screening of What the Fuck are These Red Squares?.
Here’s a synopsis of the film:
Striking students meet at a “Revolutionary Seminar” at the Art Institute of Chicago in response to the invasion of Cambodia and the killing of protesting students at Kent and Jackson State Universities. They explore their role as artists in a capitalist society and issue questions like: What are the implications of the artist’s elitist position in America? Is it possible not to be co-opted, as “radical” as one’s art may be? What are the connections between money and art in America? between the “New York Scene” and the rest of the country?
The conversation was filmed and video of the conversation may be posted on the Viva Documentary website in the near future. For those of you who missed it, the discussion got into how discourse has changed since the 1960s, why students protested during Vietnam and why there aren’t many students protesting the wars in the Middle East right now, whether spontaneous conversation like this could be filmed for a documentary in today’s world, and whether young people are turned on to the most pressing social and cultural issues of the day.
The conversation was very free-form with Gordon Quinn and Jerry Temaner offering many anecdotes from their experiences as filmmakers throughout the past decades. Both shared memories of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968 and the fascinating sight of young people at pay phones letting their parents know that they were alright and their parents shouldn’t be worried about them (this as shots of police beating young protesters were being shown on television).
Following the early Kartemquin films discussion, Gordon Quinn participated in a talk about fair use, copyright and the commons with accomplished PBS filmmaker Brad Lichtenstein.
The two used the document, “Best Practices in Fair Use“, to go through examples from their experiences as documentary filmmakers. Each example touched on an element of the “Fair Use” document, which is a document for filmmakers which empowers them against those who might suggest they don’t have the right to use certain material in their work. “Fair use” allows a filmmaker to “quote copyrighted material without asking permission or paying for it” (in some circumstances). It’s what keeps copyright law from being total censorship.
That conversation was filmed, too. And it will be made available to the public some time in the not-so-distant future as well.
If you enjoyed these documentary events, please comment on this. And if you would like to see more documentary events at Columbia, stay tuned.
How fitting is it that during a week of premieres for Michael Moore’s new film, Capitalism: A Love Story, the “group of twenty” nations (G20), which together account for about 85 percent of the world’s economy, were in Pittsburgh to revitalize global free market policies and even renew the people of the world’s faith in capitalism?
Just as Michael Moore was about to begin his premiere in Chicago, in Pittsburgh thousands of students (effectively or ineffectively) were acting upon what they think and feel about capitalism and were being criminalized and suppressed by a security presence that was effectively imposing martial law on the city of Pittsburgh so that the G20 summit could happen without a din going on in the background.
At the premiere in Chicago, about 50-100 people from the general public were allowed in to the premiere. Another couple hundred seats were for press, local politicians, union workers, and workers from the Republic Windows factory, which had staged a sit-in in December 2008 when the workers found out the factory they worked in would be shut down and they would not be getting owed vacation and severance pay.
The screening was an event. Moore came before the audience to introduce the film saying he was honored to be here. He would be going on Bill Maher’s show, and afterward, a Q&A would take place.
In two hours, Moore along with his great crew and archival team weaved a tableau that connected a series of events and personal stories which had occurred in the past few years.
A montage of bank robberies with Iggy Pop singing a rendition of “Louie, Louie” opens the movie. A masterfully edited sequence comparing America and the history of Rome before its empire fell takes place followed. Then, Americans are seen being “robbed” by banks or having their homes foreclosed on.
Moore’s new favorite fact to tell news pundits is heard: A foreclosure happens once every 7.5 seconds. Rep. Marcy Kaptur is featured in the film advocating for open rebellion as she says from the House floor to Americans, “don’t leave your home” unless the bank foreclosing on you can physically produce your mortgage.
A harrowing portion of the film provides Americans a glimpse into the dark side of capitalism through “dead peasant policies,” a practice that involves businesses or corporations taking out life insurance policies on people who they think will die and make them money. The practice symbolizes all that it is evil about capitalism.
Moore said of “dead peasant policies” during the Q&A that this is “how corporations see you.” They think it is in their best interest to not give you health insurance and rig the system through unsafe conditions in the workplace. Then, you will die sooner and will make them money.
A horrific story involving young people is included in the film. Moore details how two Pennsylvania judges were charged with taking millions of dollars in kickbacks to send teenagers to two privately run youth detention centers. He chooses to go beyond calling this corruption and calls it a symptom of capitalism, a result of a system that legitimizes greed.
In the latter part of the movie, Congress is shown doing the bidding of Sec. of Treasury Henry Paulson. The majority of Congress members are afraid of voting “no”, of being responsible for an economic meltdown that could cost them their re-election. Like in October 2002 when they were afraid to vote against the Iraq war for fear of being labeled a supporter of Saddam, they allow what Rep. Marcy Kaptur agrees is a “financial coup d’état.”
Archival footage of Franklin Delano Roosevelt that Moore explained was “conveniently lost and buried” appears toward the end of the film. As he was dying, FDR asked that someone film him speaking about a Second Bill of Rights.
For Moore and crew working on the film, it was intensely emotional every time they watched the footage because it made one wonder what the last 65 years would have been like if Americans had seen this. And, the archival team uncovered the footage by refusing to believe the Roosevelt Library when the library told them the footage didn’t exist.
The film is an intensely personal one for Moore. Going back to the production of Roger & Me (1989), Moore goes into the trials and horrors that his hometown Flint, Michigan experienced and how Flint has been for the past twenty years. Moore tries to get a meeting with the men in charge of running GM so he can offer some advice that could significantly turn business around. He is not allowed to go near the building entrance.
The faith Moore had as a child in Judeo-Christian teachings and interviews with priests add an extra element of intensity. News clips show how Americans have been duped into having faith in capitalism, faith that directly contradicts what many believe religiously.
Moore’s magnum opus comes to an end with a sequence of Obama riling up citizens for “hope and change.” Shots of individuals taking on the recession, shots of people refusing to let capitalism take away basic needs that are necessary for survival, and shots of workers championing democracy in the workplace end the film on a high note.
The idea of democracy in the workplace was emboldened by the presence of the Republic Windows workers whose story was featured in the film. Moore and his crew were the only media allowed in to the factory during the sit-in. It is evident that the workers trusted Moore as an ally who would give voice to their values and a few of the workers choose to thank him personally during the Q&A.
The audience participating in the Q&A showed signs of increasing skepticism for Obama. Chicago might be “Obamaland,” but the engaged working class of Chicago knew even more clearly after seeing Moore’s film that Obama has been conducting policy for the richest 1% at the expense of the poor, working, and middle classes of America.
Moore indicated that he found the appointment of Timothy Geithner to Secretary of Treasury and the naming of Larry Summers as an adviser to be very unsettling. Instead of being properly critical of Obama, he chose to apply twisted logic to the situation and argue that big banks hire bank robbers to help them prevent banks from being robbed and so, perhaps, Obama hired Geithner, Summers, and others closely linked to the banking industry so they could tell him how to prevent Americans from being robbed again.
It doesn’t quite make sense how willing Moore is to contend that we should continue to hope Obama does something that would sharply contrast his history as a senator, presidential candidate, and as a president so far. What does make sense, however, is how Moore explains that Obama has been out there alone with little support from the Left in America.
Moore tells the audience there is no crying in politics. Americans have to get busy themselves and cannot leave this up to a Michael Moore or Barack Obama. He asks the audience to organize around the movie and bring groups and unions to the film that will open in more than 1,000 theatres.
Capitalism: A Love Story has the potential to tap into the anger boiling beneath the surface, anger that has manifested itself on the right but has unfortunately been stifled and stymied by progressives, liberals, activist organizations, and even unions.
A film student stood up during the Q&A to ask what advice he would give film students. Moore told film students in the audience “beg, borrow, and steal” and “shoot, shoot, shoot.” He says “make films from your heart.”
He added, “Don’t make what you think will look good. Make something you would like to go see on a Friday night.”
Finally, he told film students, “Think about the 1 million who want to see your movie, not the other 299 million in America” that won’t. Focus on mobilizing that audience to see your film and you’ll be successful.
Looking back, I can find all types of moments that may have foreshadowed my love for documentary but if there was a time that truly made me commit to non-fiction, it was my last year at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. The design of the film program at that time was that you make a choice at the thesis level; make a narrative film in 16mm snyc-sound or a documentary in digital video with the Canon XL1. The year that followed stretched me and challenged me in so many ways that I realized that documentary filmmaking makes you eat, sleep and breathe film in the way that my Production 1 teacher, Mike Covell, talked about in my first real film class. At that age all I wanted to do was change the world and documentary gave me to tools to do so.
My thesis film followed a bus full of immigration rights activists for 8 days as they lobbied and rallied in Washington D.C. with thousands of others from around the country. The Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride marked the beginning of a new civil rights movement that combined the issues of all immigrants instead of just one population. I knew little about all this when I stepped on the bus and I probably never would have if I hadn’t taken a leap into something completely foreign to me but I was college so I took the chance.
In a tiny way, getting on that bus was like the immigrant experience. I left home with a few bags and a camera and I lived among a group of people that I knew very little about. Feelings of displacement, helplessness, pride and acceptance were some that I was able to sample during those 8 days and 9 nights. I was different when I returned but I still didn’t have the language to articulate my new outlook on life. I was a kid with 30 hours of footage and about 10 hours of experience in non-linear, digital editing. Lily Buroskowski helped me manage the footage and look for the story but it was a grueling 4 months of bad edits and do overs.
It was in this venerable state that I first encountered The New Americans. Steve James, a Southern Illinois alum and Academy Award nominated director of Hoop Dreams, was screening his series, The New Americans during The Big Muddy Film Festival. The film was spread out over 3 days which meant that we were able to watch it the way that Kartemquin preferred. The series still hadn’t aired on television and we had the privilege of listening to Steve James, who was there for a Q & A after part 1. I spoke to him briefly about my thesis project and he was very encouraging. The details of the conversation are blurred by my star-struck memory but I’m sure I sounded like a nervous little fanboy so I still appreciate how kind he was.
The juxtaposition between Riccardo, an unmistakable talent, and Jose, a poor boy who can play, gives us a wide range of information about why families pin in their hopes to something as fickle as a professional baseball career. There are echoes of this relationship when Jose and Riccardo negotiate contracts with management and are happy to have check for $5,000 for a season while their U.S. born counterparts won’t consider playing for under a million dollars.
The Nigerian story of Ogoni Refugees, Israel and Ngozi shows a completely different approach to the story because we are introduced to Israel and Ngozi Nwidor after they’ve lived for a refugee camp for 2 years and are about to make the transition of starting a new life in America. This storyline requires a backstory to explain the circumstances that brought the Nwidor family, and many other Ogonis, to this point.
Isreal’s optimism serves as a reminder of what makes people risk their futures to come to the U.S. A scene where Ngozi and Isreal send a portion of their earnings shows some of the pressure that most immigrant families are under to maintain the image of the American Dream in the eyes of family back at home. Even though they are suffering through hardships, they still have to send money back home and tell everyone that they are doing well.
Watching the Nwidor family experience America for the first time is an amazing thing. When the refugees are first given McDonald’s hamburgers it’s as if they’ve finally arrived in the land of opportunity. It’s a food that I do everything in my power to avoid but watching Isreal eat one makes me appreciate what it would mean to appreciate it without even knowing what’s inside. His excitement to learn what goes on the outside and what is in the middle shows that, like anyone on the brink of change, he doesn’t know what he’s in for.
The last story that’s introduced in the first part of the series is of Naima Saadeh, a Palestinian bride that is determined to leave her small town in the Israeli-occupied West Bank where she has lived her whole life. We get to know Naima as she goes through a typical commute to school. She needs to take three taxi-vans and cross an Israeli checkpoint to get to school. We get some of the back story of the situation in the West Back through letters that her brother, Jihad, wrote to her while imprisoned for his role in the youth movement during the Intifada. I love the scene for it’s emotional power, the amount of information communicated and because they allow Naima to break the fourth wall by telling Jihad that “They” asked to see the letters.
The relationship between of Naima and her fiance, first-generation Palestinian American Hatem Abudayyeh, is fascinating because of the differences between the way they view Naima’s life. Hatem is offended to see Naima and all of his people have to travel through checkpoints. There’s also a scene where Hatem sheds a tear for the story of one of his father’s tenants. Naima, on the other hand, doesn’t find her story as tragic and seems uncomfortable that her husband is so moved and she isn’t.
The tapestry that’s woven with these 3 stories creates a depth that couldn’t be achieved by focusing on an individual family. However, Kartemquin’s approach doesn’t cheat any of the characters out of their own complexity. That’s why I’ve found it so easy to find parallels between The New Americans and my own life last time I watch it as well as this time. The issues that are bought out of the lives of these families translate to the lives of anyone that is in transition.
The feelings of displacement that I felt when I was on a bus full of strangers is the same as those that Jose and Ricardo felt when they were brought up by the Dodgers. The helplessness that Isreal and Ngozi felt in trying to advance at their jobs is similar to my having a mountain of footage and no knowledge of how to edit it and the feeling that I had as I neared graduation echoed Naima’s experience as she passed her exam and prepared for her new life in America. As the series is rebroadcast, I find myself in a similar transition as I assimilate into the culture of documentary filmmakers and begin a new chapter in my own life. I can’t wait to see what this series holds for me this time around.
The filmmakers behind The New Americans will be visiting the Viva Doc online forum soon. To read more about that, click here.
River Monsters is one of the shows that I look forward to on Sunday. With Amazing Race over and Big Brother not starting yet, I lean on good old Animal Planet for my Sunday night viewing. Please join me at the Viva Doc forum on Sunday Night so we can talk about what crazy Jeremy Wade is up to.
River Monsters
Jeremy Wade is a biologist and extreme angler. Chases down man-eating fish in the Amazon River Basin. The first time I watched Jeremy, he was dangling his toes into a pool that was holding 100 starving red-belly piranhas. All the Animal Planet teasers told me that he was going to get into the pool but the progression of the 3 minute scene is was made me a fan of the show.
Before getting into the pool, Jeremy had to raise the stakes by proving to us that these piranhas are as hungry as he says they are. He does this by pouring blood into the pool to show that the smell of it riles them up. I use the word smell with confidence because Jeremy’s voice over puts his biology background to use by explaining how the fish has a sense of smell that evolved from living in murky, cloudy water.
This scientific approach to the scene continues as he dangles a piece of prime steak into the pool using a fishing line. This is the first time in the scene where the pool of fish is portrayed as dangerous. Their efficiency comes from their numbers. The way the piranha tears off one piece of meat, let’s everyone know where the food is and leaves so that someone else can take a bite. Each fish takes what it can use and leaves the rest for the next fish, that’s community. The scene gave me a respect for the piranha and the footage of them at work gave me a fear of them too.
This fear is what makes the climax of the scene so effective. Jeremy steps into the pool very gingerly and there seems to be a safe buffer around him. However, as his body language relaxes, the fish get closer and become comfortable around him. They let a few shots linger so that you can see the piranhas sniffing his toes, increasing the drama. He claims that this proves that they won’t go after live animals but I wonder if he’d be willing to pour some blood in the pool while he is in it… I wouldn’t.
Jeremy’s “check this out” approach, along with his enthusiasm for the river make his stories of man-eating River Monsters a special treat on television. As a friend of mine said, “Every time I’m channel surfing, I get stuck on this program.” That’s the power of a storyteller.
The party will take place from 4-7 (and probably later) in the Doc Center, 1104 S Wabash, suite 407. Photos and video will be uploaded to the Viva Doc website afterwards.
Update: Mario C. adds a slew of photos he took at the event:
As the the proliferation of high speed broadband connections increases and the expense of theatrical distribution continues to stay the same, the internet is looking more and more like a viable medium for documentaries. Conscious of this shift, The Tribeca Film Institute has started a program called Reframe, aimed at providing an outlet for both new and old content that otherwise might not find an audience.
Tami Yeager (IMDB), the producer behind the award-winning 2008 PBS Independent Lens documentary “A Dream in Doubt” is working with Reframe to make it an innovative doc distribution solution for both media makers and watchers. Viva Doc’s Andrew Rosinski asked Yeager about this groundbreaking initiative and the future of documentary distribution in general in December 2008.
Viva Doc: How is Reframe different from DVD distribution?
Yeager: Reframe is an exciting project to describe because it serves a lot of different needs at once. Rather than acting as a traditional DVD distributor, Reframe’s central mission is to help individual filmmakers, distributors, public media organizations, archives, libraries and other media owners digitize, market and sell their work using the Internet. Reframe’s initial non-exclusive platform partnership is with CreateSpace, a subsidiary of Amazon.com. When content holders sign up with Reframe, their analog tape formats and DVDs are digitized for free and enjoy the better royalty returns negotiated by Reframe. The content owner sets the prices and provides the artwork – Reframe showcases the content owners’ brand and profile. All content is marketed on Reframe’s robust, searchable website and is sold and fulfilled through Amazon.com in DVD and/or digital Video on Demand formats, per the content holders’ choosing.
One of the perennial challenges facing filmmakers and distributors alike is connecting with a film’s target audience. The new media landscape presents as many opportunities as hurdles. The Reframe website is designed to address those hurdles and take advantage of those opportunities by becoming a destination where scholars, artists, teachers and film enthusiasts can easily discover, recommend and purchase media. Building community and providing a voice for trusted sources from various fields of expertise are important tools for supporting the community of work gathered on the Reframe site. Reframe’s functionality will increase over time beginning with guest curators, blogs, and thematic lists adding tagging and discussion forums and embracing networking and many other applications later.
Viva Doc:What is Reframe’s submission process?
Yeager: The first step is to send an email to partners@reframecollection.org and tell us about the film/s you would like to submit. If possible, include any relevant links to websites, reviews, film festivals, etc. so we can learn more about the work. Someone from the partnerships team will contact you to share information about the contract, terms, and deliverables. If a film is a mutual fit for Reframe, then you will send in the contract, relevant details about the film, signature still image, filmmaker photo and bio, cover DVD artwork, and source material (tape, DVD, or digital file on a hard drive) for digitization.
Viva Doc:In most cases, festivals look for short films that are under 12 minutes in length. Will online distribution open a market for films that are 20 – 50 minutes in length?
Yeager: Festivals are constrained by the clock and the schedule. Shorts either have to be very short to play before a feature to fit into the conventional two-hour blocks or to be around ten to twelve minutes to create a program comfortably comparable in length to a feature presentation. When the consumer is the programmer, things change. For the user at home at her computer, a work is captivating or it isn’t. There are no constraints of theater turnover or conventions for time-length. For the institutional consumer, shorts work well in classrooms and civic settings as they can convey the emotion or information of a feature length work while leaving ample time for the assembled group to engage in active discussions. Cynthia Wade has said on panels that she purposefully decided to keep her film FREEHELD within the Academy’s short film limits as much to make a film that was a more useful advocacy and teaching tool as to compete in the short category. Digital projection eliminates the costs and time constraints of dealing with physical media, and the time-shifting technologies of DVRs and Internet services will allow consumers to connect with subjects that compel them, captivate them and entertain them without regard to time and physical constraints of the past. Interestingly enough, two of the first three sales of Reframe titles were shorts, one a thirty-minute film and the other an eight-minute film.
Viva Doc:What direction do you see documentary distribution headed in?
Yeager: The fascinating thing about the Internet is that it has allowed documentary filmmakers to reach out directly to their target audiences. The ability to sell your DVDs from a website and/or stream clips or a whole film is completely revolutionary, and, in my opinion, empowering for our community. For the short term, it appears that DVD sales will continue to be the cash cow for films in general, while creative Internet marketing techniques allow filmmakers to raise critical awareness about the work. As we know, online distribution is still sorting itself out as different companies compete to perfect the technologies and to reach new audiences. I do believe that we will eventually access much, if not all, of our content via the web, especially once we can connect it adequately to the television.
For these reasons, I am a believer that there will be new opportunities for documentary distribution. By opening up the marketplace in a way that allows smaller, but specific audiences to find the content they are seeking, documentaries will reach their greatest potential. Certainly, creative marketing will be required to get heard through the noise.
Another very important area for documentaries that is often overlooked when discussing digital distribution is institutional and educational sales. For documentaries, this is typically the most lucrative marketplace for your work. Educational institutions are still buying DVDs in large numbers, but they are starting to look toward a future of digital distribution. The field is wide open at this point. Since reaching the educational market is important to Reframe, much attention is currently focused on DVD sales. This will likely change as the distribution ecology further evolves.
Viva Doc:Do you find yourself watching more films on the computer screen, the TV screen, or the big screen?
Yeager: I watch all three pretty equally. I recently bought my first LCD TV in order to bring the Internet connection to the tube. Still, I hope the big screen stays around for a long time, for both the cinematic experience and for hosting community screenings.
Viva Doc:How has working on the distribution-side helped you as a filmmaker?
Yeager: I have learned so much about the creative ways one can reach audiences. Conversely, I work in digital distribution because I want to represent the perspective of content makers. I believe that we should be very involved in the development of this burgeoning marketplace, as it will have a dramatic effect on our creative opportunities as well as our incomes.
Viva Doc:Any words of wisdom for students looking to submit to Tribeca Film Festival?
Yeager: Programmers at the Tribeca Film Festival say it is most important to make the strongest film possible and resist sending a premature cut of that film for consideration. You get one chance to make a first impression and, at the very least, this first impression needs to elicit a champion for your film so that it will get a second look.
Viva Doc: List your top five documentary films.
Yeager: For a cross-section of documentary styles, here are some personal favorites:
We’ve all been there. With no late fees, it’s wayyyyyyyy too easy to keep a Netflixed documentary for far too long without watching it.
Have you ever gotten one in the mail, only to have it sit atop your DVD player for weeks, eventually just returning it without watching it? It’s an easy situation to get into.
At a recent Viva Doc meeting, we asked our members what documentaries were sitting on top of their DVD player, collecting dust. Here are the replies:
Rebecca C writes:
Bus 174 and Tarnation are peacefully collecting dust on my DVD player. Hopefully this break will allow me to finally watch them.
Michael L writes:
The documentary that is on the top of my DVD player is “My Kid Could Paint that.” The mystery of this film is that I see all these paintings on the back that this little girl did or didn’t do. The front cover sometimes gives me the creeps if I pass it on my way to the midnight snake fridge.
Tristan S. writes:
On top of my VCR/DVD player is…
Sound and Fury: Doc about deaf families’ debates about whether to have their deaf children use cochlear implants that would allow them to hear.
Heartbeat Detector: French fictional film starring my favorite actor, Matthieu Amalric.
Chicago: City of the Century: American Experience: Disc 2.
In the Realms of the Unreal: Doc on Henry Darger, janitor, visionary artist, novelist and very disturbed man.
Cassie B. writes:
Taxi to The Darkside has been on top of my DVD player since it was released on DVD a few months ago. I haven’t had time with this busy semester, but can’t wait to get to it soon!
Mitch W writes:
The movie that has been sitting on my dvd player for two months is the documentary 10mph. The disc came cracked and I haven’t bothered notifying Netflix then returning it. I think I haven’t return it yet, because they will send me another copy and I really don’t want to watch the movie anymore. It is about a guy who goes across the country on a Segway. What was I thinking when I was browsing Netflix….it must of had an interesting caption or something cool….now it just blends in with the gray of my dvd player.
Adora W. writes:
Okay, right now on top of my DVD player is the documentary For the Bible Tells Me So, which I’ve had for, like, a month now. Oh, Netflix and your lack of late fees. Sigh.
Arlen P. writes:
What’s currently sitting on my DVD player is a 2007 documentary called “War Made Easy.” Apparently, it’s about how easily Americans get tricked into rooting for wars. I haven’t gotten around to it unfortunately because I’m so darn busy with school.
Have you seen any of these docs? Or been in the same situation? Leave a comment and tell us whether the person should bother watching it, or send it back…
Last week Viva Documentary President Margaret Ratliff asked Viva Documentary members which doc-makers they admire and why. Here are some responses that were sent to vivadocumentary@gmail.com:
Viva Docster Cassie B. is a fan of the Maysles bros:
The Maysles Brothers have inspired me as a student and beginning documentarian with their approach to non-fiction storytelling with films such as “Salesman” and “Grey Gardens.”
There is a quote from Albert Maysles that has defined my outlook on documentary filmmaking and life itself – “After all, the knowledge of the real world is exactly what we need to better understand and therefore possibly to love one another.”
Viva Docster Josh C. wants Michael Moore to keep digging:
I am a fan of Michael Moore’s work. I just hope that when he makes his films from now on, he is more careful about what footage he uses so that people don’t accuse him of taking people out of context or making up facts. He can make great points with people who actually want to be in the film. Keep digging Mike!
Viva Doctster Mary H. admires Werner Herzog’s work:
I have only recently been watching more documentaries so i’m not really familiar with a lot of the directors (at least not enough to say that I ultimately admire them)… but I did enjoy Werner Herzog’s film “Grizzly Man.”
One of the moments that most stood out for me in regards to the film and the film maker is the fact that he shows the viewers his reaction to Timothy Treadwell’s death. It was a moment where I questioned whether our focus should be on Timothy actual death or Herzog’s reaction?
I’ve only seen Herzog’s Grizzly Man but I’d be interested in viewing his other films to see if he also puts himself in those as well ( Puts himself as in terms of seeing him on the screen and not just narrating). If anything I found it amusing that he did that.
Viva Docster Mario C. admires Herzog for a totally different reason:
I admire Werner Herzog because of a film called Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe.
It was a publicity stunt where Werner told Errol Morris that he would eat a shoe if he (Errol) completed his film, Gates of Heaven. The film that I saw was of Werner cooking and eating the shoe. It was a great moment in cinema history and it made Herzog one of my favorite filmmakers.
Do you have opinions about the filmmakers mentioned above? Who do you admire? Leave a comment!
Update:Michael L. emails in another one:
I have to say that I really admire a team of filmmakers: Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott. The two films that really stand out that these filmmakers have done are Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media and The Corporation. These two Canadian documentary filmmakers have managed to create two films that really challenge the status quo, questioning capitalism and its place in modern society. The techniques to do this are both traditional and not. The talking head appears in the Corporation as a main way to get ideas across. But they also have kind of visual essay going on that looks like something you may find in a high school, with an authoritative women’s voice speaking down. Both films have an essay feel that helps me personally, conceptualize the ideas that they are talking about. Manufacturing Consent lets the view understand the business of media and lets the view examine this though the individual Noam Chomsky. This is quit outstanding that they exploited the love and idol worship that comes in the Western world surrounding the individual. These filmmakers in Manufacturing Consent exploit this love for the individual thought telling the story of Noam Chomsky as a way to express impotent ideas dealing with freedom and what it means in an almost anarco-capitalist world. I think it is important for content and form to work off each other to make a good film, they have to overlap in all mediums of art.
When Morgan Spurlock of Super Size Me fame came to Chicago to screen his latest doc “Where in the World is Osama bin Laden?,” Viva Doc’s Arlen Parsa was in the audience to record his observations and some low quality video of the subsequent Q&A session. What follows is a transcript from the Q&A along with two YouTube videos.
Part 1 (scroll down for the video and transcript of Part 2):
TRANSCRIPT:
[Part 1 video begins here]
Q: What was it like going to all these places where America is not exactly the most popular country in the world and interviewing people on the street?
A: It was incredible how people really did open up their homes and open up their lives and were anxious to kind of share their stories with me and really wanted to sit down and talk to me and in a lot of these countries I went to, you know, Pakistan, Afghanistan, there were places where I was the first American any of these people had ever met. And so we would just talk and talk about our world views, and what we hoped and hoped for our kids, and what we thought about what was happening and they were like “You’re American?” And I was like “Yes” and they were like “Do lots of Americans think like you?” And I was like “Yeah, there’s a lot of people who don’t want war and want things to change and are hopeful for the future and it was pretty remarkable. It was a beautiful thing. You know, we were in the middle of Morocco in City Mumon, the shanty town you see me having dinner with Achmed and his wife Zorah and their whole family and [it was] such a beautiful thing, this family has next to nothing and they let us into their home and made dinner for us during Ramadan– this was iftar that we were having at the end of the day. It’s interesting when you walk into the shanty town where people have next to nothing and their walls are made out of plywood and these tin sheets and on the roofs there are satellite dishes where they basically illegally pipe satellite tv into their homes… And so they’re like “We see Fox News, we know what America is like!” [Laughter] In this neighborhood, a lot of these people, that was their whole perception of America is kind of what’s said on the Fox News Channel which was remarkably scary.
Q: Were you ever scared you might offend cultural sensibilities in other countries? How did you get people in countries where Westerners are hated to talk to you?
A: We were very aware and tried to be incredibly respectful of people and… I had people who helped coach me before I went for what I should and shouldn’t say, what I should do and shouldn’t do, and even when we got to Saudi Arabia, our local producer there, our local fixer, the guy who kind of helped us navigate the waters, was the one who was like “Yeah, you should definitely dress in Saudi clothes– people will love that!” And it was true. Once I started dressing in Saudi clothes people were like “Look at you, you look like a Saudi, come here!” So they wanted to talk to me, and they were very welcoming and I mean, it was incredible but there were things that I tried to do to really endear myself. One was dressing in local clothing, which it did kind of open people up, and it made it look like to them I was actually trying to fit in, I was trying to understand kind of a little bit more. When we were shooting a lot throughout the Middle East, I fasted during Ramadan, which is one of the hardest things you’ll ever do in your life. I didn’t make it through the whole 30 days- I made it about twenty-one days, so I owe em about eight or nine days [laughter], maybe they can pick that up sometime, but it’s just little things like that I think really helped along the way to make people kind of want to talk to us.
Q: Tell us a little bit about the technical aspects of how the film was made.
A: We shot this whole film on the Sony F900 HD camera, which is a beautiful camera, it shoots in true HD, shoots in true 24 frames per second so the transfer to film is 1:1. The picture is beautiful as you can see in the blowup [from video to film], I mean it doesn’t look like video, it looks like we shot this movie on 35 millimeter– it’s amazing. Production itself, we shot for, the core production when we were overseas and traveling was about five months. We did some pickup interviews the following year… We had about 900 hours of footage [scattered "wow"s from the audience] and that’s just the field footage. There was archival [footage] that we also got and went through, there was about 100 hours of archival that we pulled things out of over the course of making the film. So it was about 1,000 hours in total– 900 [from us] and 100 of archive. And the post process on this film was long. They started editing while I was still overseas, or at least started screening footage and going through it with the editorial staff in like October of ’06, and then we edited it all the way through February of ’08. So basically we just stopped like a month ago. So it was about fifteen months from start to finish. It was long.
Q: Did you actually think you could find bin Laden when you set out to make the film?
A: Of course I was going to find him! [Laughter] The thing is, when we first started making it, we were like “Well c’mon, why couldn’t a guy with no expertise or experience or, you know… knowledge go find this guy?!” And then kind of once we got on the trip, we started going on the journey as you see in the film, we started to realize that it’s so much not about this guy– it’s about so many other things. [But] you don’t buy a lottery ticket thinking you’re not going to win.
Q: Structurally, you sort of wandered around and let the film shape itself. Tell us a little about this.
A: Yeah, it’s a very organic process, and I’m a real believer in kind of letting a movie… I think documentary films are very organic. And I think you have to let them be organic. When I first started making Super Size Me, I called a couple friends of mine who I knew who were filmmakers and just asked them for advice and I got some of the greatest advice I ever heard in my life, which was if the film that you end up with is the same film that you imagined at the beginning of the process, then you didn’t listen to anybody along the way. And I think that that’s very true, cause when we made this film, we went to country after county, and we had plans and ideas of who we would talk to, those would fall through, suddenly three more people would pop up, they would point us to two other people, and just you snake through this story, this puzzle, and then when you get back in post, when you really start to put it together, you really don’t have any idea, and you do start to find it along the way, as you start to meet people in other countries, and we started meeting families and said “We should try and meet families in other places, and this is working out really well, and let’s not focus on politicians so much, and let’s focus on regular folks” and we started to see what really does play as the people back home are watching the footage.
Q: Have you thought about aligning yourself with any nonprofits in connection with the film?
A: We’ve talked to some, we haven’t aligned ourself with any, I’m not a fan of like saying “This is who I’m behind, these people” you know? So for me, I’d rather wait and see how the film does, if it does some, I don’t need to blow some trumpet and say I’m giving money to somebody, I’d rather us just take care of that, you know, on our own. I don’t need that to pat ourselves on the back and I don’t think it’s going to make more people go see the movie if they know we’re going to give money to charity. I think it’s a personal thing we should do.
Q: Are you still in touch with any of the people you interviewed?
A: We are, we still email the ones who are email-able, you know there’s a lot of people in Afghanistan of course that we can’t talk to cause, they don’t even have electricity, let alone running water or emails. But there’s people in Saudi Arabia that we still talk to and there’s people in Pakistan so I’m anxious for them to see the film, and hear their thoughts. I’m sure it’ll be bootlegged there quickly [laughter]. Which will be fantastic. Yeah, I mean it’s cool. [In] Saudi Arabia, there’s this incredible underground scene, like there’s so much stuff… I’ve a book that’s coming out the same time as the movie, because there’s just so much stuff we just couldn’t put in the film, and there’s so many things and so many stories that just happen behind the scenes and so much information, there’s a huge underground scene in Saudi Arabia of movies and music and parties and clubs and it’s just this whole other world from what you see, and it continues to reinforce that conflict between Western influence and you know, the real religious authority in that country.
Q: How do you reconcile the fact that there’s countries that have totalitarian regimes that the US supports that have great malls and then there’s places where we’ve actually intervened where they don’t have running water?
A: There’s a fantastic conundrum, as you see in this movie. And the question is, how do we fix that, how do we change that, and for me it is… You watch a film like this and you are completely torn because there are great people on both sides and there are people who are suffering on both sides, and you know I’m not a foreign policy expert, I don’t have the answers, but for me, I think that the biggest thing for me, as you travel around the world and we talk to people about this “war on terror” and the thing that we’ve really lost, more than anything, is the PR war on terror. The United States used to be a company– a country that was put up on a pedestal that people admired, that people aspired to emulate, and that doesn’t happen now. We’re not seen as beacon of democracy, we’re not seen as peace-keepers anymore. Throughout the world, we’re viewed as aggressors, we’re viewed with such negativity that it’s heart-wrenching to hear, especially when you sit down and have somebody tell you that. And I think that as we move forward, and for me, it would have been really easy to come in and make a film that could just bash what’s happened over the last seven years, but I think we need to be a little bit more forward-thinking now and we need to start saying “What’s next? What do we do now? How do we really change things? And I think whoever gets elected next, one of the big mandates has to be, we have to really start to look at our foreign policy, we have to start to get back to the time when we were seen as this great country of hope and inspiration. And I think it’s a tragedy that that’s been lost.
Q: Who are you voting for?
A: That’s between me and that lever. [Laughter]
Part 2:
[Part 2 video begins here]
Q: As a documentary filmmaker, how do you get around the fear that people won’t like your work, or that it will be controversial?
A: Well I think the biggest thing you have to realize is, everybody isn’t going to love everything you do. And that’s just something you have to come to terms with and you have to accept that. If you can get something that a lot of people like, and more than fifty percent like, then you’re doing great. If you can make something that only thirty percent of the people like, twenty percent, then you’re still doing great. It’s hard. And believe me, there’s already been people who have come out and said great things about this movie and there’ve been people who haven’t. But you can’t live your life based on reviews, you can’t live your career based on reviews, you have to continue to believe in your vision and your voice. That’s the thing I tell every filmmaker that I speak to, and they say “What advice can you give me?” The greatest thing you should do is be true to you. Be true to what you want to do, be true to your vision, what you want to accomplish, don’t try and be somebody else, don’t try to be something you’re not, you have to find your path and you have to stick to that. And it’s hard, and there’s going to be times when it’s great, and there’s going to be times when it’s awful, but you can’t give up.
Q: Tell us a little bit about the feel that you wanted the film to have and how you found people to interview.
A: [We wanted the audience] to really feel like everything was in motion the whole time, everything’s moving. We never put the camera on a tripod throughout the entire film with the exception of probably two shots in the whole movie. There’s very few times you’ll ever see the camera really settle and so there is a motion that I think continues through this whole movie and it is a documentary comedy action adventure… Osamady if you will [laughter]. Every country that we went to, even before we went there, we contacted local “producers,” whether it’s a production company, or a journalist, or some sort of local fixer, and these people would help us: work weeks in advance, and we would tell them “Here’s people that we’ve read stuff by, or people that we’d like to meet, people who think certain ways that we’ve seen on the internet, and maybe there’s people that you could recommend that also kind of have these viewpoints,” and they would help us source people out and once you get there and get on the ground is really when a lot of things really happen. It’s when you start talking to people mano-a-mano that doors really open for you. And so it was when we got to each one of these countries that I think things really started to catch fire. But if it wasn’t for those local producers and those local journalists and fixers that we hired, we would have been out of our minds, we’d have been lost. And there’s so many things that just happen along the way that you can’t predict. We were in the middle of Jerusalum, that day when rockets started falling like hail on Steralt, and I said “We have to go there immediately, we have to go right now.” And so we jumped in a car and we were down there that afternoon, we were in that school eight hours after it was bombed, I mean it was terrible. But at the same time, when you’re making a documentary film, you can’t predict what’s going to happen. And if somebody had said how do “I define what a documentary is?” For me, a documentary, cause I don’t really make historical films, I make documentaries that unfold in real time, and so I think a documentary is, you’re capturing events as they unfold in real time, and that’s really what tried to do.
Q: On a lighter note, does your mustache really have magical powers? [Laughter]
A: Does my mustache have super powers? Yes. Yes it does. I’m keeping them to myself though.
Q: You’re very present in your films. Tell us a little bit about your role in them as a character.
A: With Super Size Me, originally when I got the idea, we were going to try and find somebody to kind of be the guinea pig in that movie. That was the first thought: “We’ll get somebody else to do that and I’ll shoot the film and I can focus on directing the movie,” but once we started talking about it, I realized that there was no way I could trust that somebody else would not, like, at night sneak like a broccoli [Laughter]. “Ooh, he’s not around, I’ll have a carrot!” So that was the biggest reason why I was in Super Size Me to begin with. Cause I knew I wouldn’t cheat and I would probably not quit– I would try and see it through as best I could. And I didn’t expect it to take off the way it did. I mean the movie was received by people… It was like winning the lottery. It’s like suddenly we were at Sundance, at the Sundance Film Festival. I’d watched the Sundance Film Festival for years, watching the coverage, watching people take movies there, and every year you watch the person who takes this little movie, the movie blows up, it becomes the talk of everything, they sell it, the movie goes out and so suddenly here I am in the middle of Sundance and this little movie completely takes off and it hits me that wow I’m that guy. Suddenly you realize that you’re that person that this is happening to right now. And it’s overwhelming. And the whole process has been overwhelming ever since then. And I’ve been really fortunate to get to make the TV show for FX (30 Days), which comes back in June for its third season which we’re really stoked about. And you know, so long as I get to keep making movies, that’d be great.
Q: What do you say to film students who are going to get out of school and be in sort of a limbo phrase before they do something great?
A: Don’t give up. Don’t quit. I graduated from college in 1993, I started working on everything I could, any jobs I could get. I was working as a PA [production assistant] a schlub on any movie that would hire me, any commercial I could get a job on… But at the same time, I got to work on great stuff. I got to work on the set with great directors. I worked Bullets over Broadway and got to see Woody Allen work with actors, I got to work on Kiss of Death with Barbet Schroeder, who is a fantastic director, I got to work with Herb Ross who directed almost every single Neil Simon play ever made into a movie, because he did Boys on the Side. Yeah. For me, to get to watch people like that work, I’d never looked at anything as being a dead end, I looked at everything as being a stepping stone. And I think so long as you can kind of look at your life as what it is and where you are, and always keep your eyes in the prize of where you want to be and what you want to accomplish, then you [can] continue to turn everything that happens into a positive and into a step towards that.
Q: What would you have asked bin Laden, if you had been able to get an interview with him?
A: I would have really loved to have heard from him, how does this all end? How does it stop? We keep hearing about here’s all the things that are gonna happen, but how can we just make it end? How can the killing stop? How can the killing of innocent people stop? How can we start to turn the tides so that this just goes away? And maybe there would have been a real answer, there would have been like a real solution that we could actually hear. Or maybe it could have just been a whole conversation filled with coo coo la roo, you know, it would have just been a whole bunch of crazy. Who knows? But it woulda been awesome.
Q: Was there any one moment that happened while you were making this film where you had an epiphany and said “this is where I want to take this film”?
A: There were so many things along the way that when you’re in a moment, or you’re interviewing somebody and something happens, you’re like… It’s one of those things that for me, I don’t even reflect on it there, it’s like when you’re in the car on the way home, you’re like “That was incredible like when they said this…” Daniel, the DP (director of photography), Danny Marracino, who is one of the most fantastic DPs on the planet… When we got our blood test before we went over there cause we had to find out our blood type so we would know just for the military and in case anything happened we would be able to tell a hospital when we were overseas… Mine came back O-Positive, his was B-Positive, and he was so excited when he got back, he was like “Be Positive!” That’s exactly what he is– We’d be shooting for like nineteen hours a day and I’d be like “Come on, we’ve gotta get one more shot!” and he’s like “Sigh, all right.” He would be exhausted and tired and hate me, but at the same time he was always just go-go-go, he was “Be Positive.” But back to what I was saying, we’d be in the car, and he and I would just start talking about what had just happened and the scene that had played out, and that was when it would really hit us, like “That was great, that was a great thing.” And there’s so many things, the dinner with Achmed and Zorah that you see in City Muman, which is such a beautiful thing that just kind of… Who knew it was going to happen and be that way and the conversation would go the ways that it went? The bedoins that we stumbled upon in Afghanistan, as we were driving down the road, and I said to him, I was like, “Stop the car! We gotta go talk to them!” And we jumped out of the car and we went over and sat down and had tea with the bedoins in the middle of Afghanistan… You never know. And you just have to go with it and [Spurlock pretends to test a coin by biting it] “It’s gold!” You know, but you never know until you just kinda go.
We’ve all been there. With no late fees, it’s wayyyyyyyy too easy to keep a Netflixed documentary for far too long without watching it.