from Facebook . . . .
Ondi Timoner
"The Guardian calls DIG! the #1 Music Film of All Time. Wow. It's a fun list too. Good ideas in here for your holiday
Dec 22, 2013
Dec 21, 2013
Bruno on Timoner (and Timoner on Bruno!)
A very nice turn: the author of the previous post, our own Mr. Christopher Bruno, published this new and in-depth piece
And then Ms. Timoner put it on her Facebook page.
And her friends like it. And not just with thumbs-up icons. But with Comments: "amazing," "lovely," "good shit."
Congratulations, C.B.
THE FILMMAKER IS PRESENT: AUTHORIAL IMMERSION AND INTERVENTION IN THE FILMS OF ONDI TIMONER
on his website, Considering Film: http://consideringfilm.com/2013/12/19/ondi-timoner/
And then Ms. Timoner put it on her Facebook page.
And her friends like it. And not just with thumbs-up icons. But with Comments: "amazing," "lovely," "good shit."
Congratulations, C.B.
Dec 19, 2013
On Content and Context
by Christopher Bruno
Among the very first packet of readings we were assigned were two pieces written by Terry Ramsaye for the Christian Science Monitor in 1922, "The Status of Non-Fiction Films" and "Non-Fiction Film as Propoganda." These pieces -- or, rather, my copies of them -- are unique among my Nonfiction Film History readings in that they are relatively littered with marginalia. I usually content myself with a highlighter, but in the case of these readings, I was equally liberal with a red pen. Part of it, no doubt, was that classes hadn't even begun yet and I was chomping on the bit to return to academia with fervor, having allowed seven years to pass between by undergraduate and graduate studies. But a bigger part of it was that I had found gaping holes in Ramsaye's argument and leaps of logic that I couldn't abide. If ten percent of my final grade was to be participation, my socially anxious and normally silent self could easily earn most of it discussing these two pieces alone.
Among my hastily scribbled notes were documentation? alongside Ramsaye's unsupported -- yet, surely, not entirely false -- assertion that "there are in most audiences patrons whose major interest is in the non-fiction subjects." Regarding Ramsaye's dismissal of the "star system" as "the simplest tool in the hands of the film salesman," I wrote presumptive and judgmental. And when Ramsaye surmised that "This preponderance of the dramatic picture is undoubtedly out of any proportion to the real taste of the public [as] indicated by the increasingly wide circulation of non-fiction book and periodicals," I wondered, Can such deductions be made across art forms? I took great umbrage with Ramsaye's dismissal of dramatic pictures as mere products of the star-based system of selling movies not only because of its bias and reductivism, but also because he neglected to posit what was to me and my red pen an obvious potential solution: What if stars were then involved in the producing and promotion of non-fiction works?
Ramsaye went on to make generalizations about the scant budget theaters allotted for nonfiction works ("usually less than 7 per cent... frequently less than 5 per cent") in relation to the screen time they occupied ("25 per cent") but made no concessions or considerations for the relative costs incurred in the production of a dramatic feature versus those of a nonfiction feature. Ramsaye is also presumptive about audience tastes, insisting that the preponderance of "dramatic features and 'comedies'" in many theaters is a product solely of the curatorial discretion of theater owners without any statistics to support his argument or consideration given to the tenets of supply-and-demand.
At the bottom of the page, I wrote, The last paragraph opens the issue up from distribution to production, however the author neither synthesizes the two, nor offers any elaboration upon the effect of a presumed overhaul of the non-fiction film production industry. While Ramsaye gently poked at these concerns in his next essay, he did so only through the rubric of "special interests seeking propaganda media." He asserts, with implied consternation, that "To a remarkable extent scenic, travel, and 'educational' pictures are vehicles for propaganda," to which my marginalia countered, Is this good or bad? Connotative vs. Denotative. And indeed, though he uses it frequently throughout the piece, "films of fact" remains a loose term, and the use of word "wholesome" implies a propagandistic intent on the author's behalf as well.
When it came time to discuss these pieces in class, however, I remained silent. Historically, anything I was assigned to read by a professor carried with it an air of authority; though we were asked to question and to engage with the material, what we were given was ultimately fact. One of the reasons I left my job as a high school teacher and abandoned my initial undergraduate pursuit of teacher certification was that I, to a great degree, believe in the lecture format and in the authority of the professor. A great deal of reform has gone on in the education field as of late which favors group and hands-on learning, and the adoption of these techniques was, in my estimation, detrimental to my efficacy as an educator. I, for better or for worse, still steadfastly believe that rote learning is in many cases the best way to receive and retain information. In a recent piece for The Atlantic ("Don't Give Up on the Lecture"), Abigail Walthausen argues that too much student-led discussion can be distracting and lead to misinformed dissemination of content. I've always liked a professor who tells me explicitly what they want and who exhibits authority through both lecture and through the readings he or she assigns.
One of the biggest steps in shifting my manner of academic application from undergraduate to graduate level has been in learning to process the meta-textual signifiers of any work under discussion. I remained silent about Ramsaye's works not because I suddenly thought my points were wrong, but because it was immediately apparent that the limitations and the perspectives of the time in which the articles were written was under observation as much, if not more so, than the articles themselves. It seemed superfluous and misguided to perseverate upon these textual errors once they were exposed as being endemic of the surrounding cultural climate. I was already accustomed to accounting for these kinds of qualifiers within films, but I had learned to do so through critical written work; it required an exponential expansion of my focus to accommodate critiquing the critique in such a manner.
This has been my greatest takeaway from this class: that fully contextualizing these works is a Sisyphean task that continually raises as many questions as it answers, if not more. Even when arguments and observations seemed self-evident to the point of obviousness -- as, I often felt, much of Jennifer Lynn Peterson's introduction to her book Education in the School of Dreams was, for example -- it became ultimately apparent that nothing about these works or their study can be taken for granted. A retrospective review of the syllabus yields a litany of roads not taken, of works both great and small, each with more to say than can ever be told.
Dec 18, 2013
CICERO MARCH (1966) named to the National Film Registry today
Timely as today's headlines....
We watched Cicero March as part of the Nonfiction Film History course quite recently. Today the Librarian of Congress announced it has been added to the National Film Registry, along with Men and Dust (1940, which we also watched;
http://www.nyu.edu/orphanfilm/orphans8/mov8/Men_and_Dust.mov) and Roger and Me (1989, which is kinda where we began the discussion, with the essay Matthew Bernstein -- also a National Film Preservation Board member, by the way).
By some definitions, these 3 titles are only documentaries on this year's list of 25 films (unless you count Mary Poppins). Frank Stauffacher's Notes on the Port of St. Francis (1951) might be pigeonholed as an "experimental" film, but it is certainly in the nonfiction mode, an impressionistic portrait of San Francisco (narrated by Vincent Price!) and somewhat related to the city symphony tradition.
The list also includes the entry Martha Graham Early Dance Films (1931-1944), which are four silent film recording of the dancer in performance.
Cicero March (1966)
During the summer of 1966, the Chicago Freedom Movement, led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., targeted Chicago in a drive to end de facto segregation in northern cities and ensure better housing, education and job opportunities for African Americans. After violent rioting and a month of demonstrations, the city reached an agreement with King, in part to avoid a threatened march for open housing in the neighboring all-white town of Cicero, Ill., the scene of a riot 15 years earlier when a black couple tried to move into an apartment there. King called off further demonstrations, but other activists marched in Cicero on Sept. 4, an event preserved on film in this eight-minute, cinema-vérité-styled documentary. Using lightweight, handheld equipment, the Chicago-based Film Group, Inc. filmmakers situated themselves in the midst of confrontations and captured for posterity the viciousness of northern reactions to civil-rights reforms.
Is it an apt characterization of what you saw and heard in the film?
-- Dan Streible
___________________
-- Dan Streible
___________________
p.s.
e-mail today from Matthew Bernstein, re: Roger and Michael:
" As I am on Michael Moore’s email list, I received this. Good work, everyone, on this year’s registry additions and best wishes for the holidays! Matthew"
Michael Moore
" As I am on Michael Moore’s email list, I received this. Good work, everyone, on this year’s registry additions and best wishes for the holidays! Matthew"
Thank You, Library of Congress: 'Roger & Me' to Be Added to National Film Registry
…a note from Michael Moore
Wednesday, December 18th, 2013
Friends,
This morning it was announced by the Library of Congress and the National Film Preservation Board that my first film, 'Roger & Me', has been placed on the National Film Registry -- the official list of films that are, according to an act of Congress, to be preserved and protected for all time because of their "cultural and historical significance" to the art of cinema. It is, to say the least, a huge honor that for me ranks right up there with the Oscar and the Palme d'Or at Cannes. The National Film Registry is a slightly rarefied list of movies in the history of cinema. Of the tens of thousands of films that have been made since the 1890s, only 600 are on the preservation list. Today, in addition to 'Roger & Me', the films that were announced selection to the preservation list include 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?', 'Mary Poppins', 'Pulp Fiction', 'Forbidden Planet', 'The Quiet Man', 'The Magnificent Seven' and 'Judgment at Nuremberg'. These films plus 'Roger & Me' now join 'Citizen Kane', 'The Graduate', 'Dr. Strangelove' and a host of other classics that make up the National Film Registry.
The news comes at just the right moment for 'Roger & Me'. The upcoming year, 2014, is the 25th anniversary of the film's debut.
But last year I learned that there was not a single print of 'Roger & Me' in existence. [emphasis added. -- DGS] Anywhere. I was stunned. I had received a call from the New York Film Festival asking if I knew where they could find a 35mm copy of the film. They were told there were no usable prints in North America -- all of them had been damaged or destroyed or had faded in color. How could the largest grossing documentary of all time in 1989 just have vanished? Poof. Gone.
And if this could happen to 'Roger & Me', what kind of shape are other films -- especially documentaries -- in? I called up the good people of Warner Bros. to help me fix the problem -- and they did. In the end ten new prints were made and are now being donated to archival vaults at UCLA, the Motion Picture Academy, the Museum of Modern Art and the George Eastman House.
But now, with the protection offered by the Library of Congress, 'Roger & Me' will be in good hands and around for a long time to come.
You should know that there is a serious film preservation crisis afoot and I've volunteered to help do something about it. I often hear of other films whose prints are all gone. I have personally paid to have new prints made for a number of films ('Hair' by Milos Forman, the old Roy Rogers classic 'Don't Fence Me In', etc.) where not a single print exists. I have donated them to one of the above archival houses and I plan to keep doing this for other movies (Next up: Dalton Trumbo's 'Johnny Got His Gun').
As for 'Roger & Me', if you haven't seen it, check it out on iTunes or Amazon or (for a few hours for free) here. This movie, as most of you know, was my first chapter in a series of eight films that, in part, explore (often satirically) the crazy stupid thing we call "capitalism" -- a never-ending quest by the wealthy to take as much as they can, while leaving the crumbs for everyone else to fight over. Today, according to the polls, more young people say they favor the ideals of socialism over capitalism. I hope to God I played a small role in making that happen, and I look forward to the day when the rich are forced to share the wealth created by their employees. It will happen. In our lifetime.
I thank the Library of Congress and the National Film Preservation Board for this honor. And I encourage all of you to watch my film, a film that, sadly, is every bit as relevant today as when I made it 25 years ago.
I hope all of you are well and enjoying this holiday season.
There is much work to do in 2014!Yours,
Michael Moore
MMFlint@MichaelMoore.com
@MMFlint MichaelMoore.com
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)