During this time, the people of the United States were reluctant to back President Roosevelt in leading the country into the fray, and it was evident that a propaganda war needed to be waged on the side of the Allied forces as well. People were learning that the medium of film had a strategic power to galvanize and reinforce ideologies in the population. However, the United States was slow to mobilize for war in nearly all aspects, this one included. It was only after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 that opportunities to counter the likes of Leni Riefenstahl emerged. This was due to the fact that some of Hollywood’s most prominent filmmakers signed up to fight, and wanted to utilize their skills and expertise in service to their patriotism. Many famous filmmakers made documentaries for and funded by the U.S. government in order to keep the troops motivated and educate the population on just who the good guys and the bad guys were in the war. Mark Harris provides a history of this period of time in chronicling the journey of five such Hollywood filmmakers, in a book that has been turned into an excellent Netflix documentary series […]

As many of you know, my documentary is about transportation. These new bike sharing companies are attempting to solve what people call the “Last Mile Problem.” I’m interested in seeing where this goes. Here’s a Wall Street Journal article about the pros and cons of such a system.  From the article:  “If dockless bike-sharing works, it could be a big help for many people. San Francisco’s hills, New York’s traffic, Los Angeles’s sprawl, all become easier to handle on the seat of a bike that does most of the work. Where a bus might get you close, and an Uber even closer, a bike gets you all the way there.” https://www.wsj.com/articles/uber-for-bikes-is-a-commuter-dream-when-it-works-1520955508

Makoto Fujimura, a fine art painter, from whom I draw a lot of insight in my book (he’s got a great book called “Culture Care” that I highly recommend) here writes an excellent piece on the devolution of the practice of Presidential Portrature. From the article: “Artists, then, are futurists. And good ones intuit and, in some ways, create the future. Great art makes you believe. One might say that a good artist, through the visage of a face, captures the time that is now while also invoking the future, anticipating that many throughout the centuries will gather to honor such a gift. One might go even further and say that great art does more than invoke the future; it influences it. Great art motivates us toward escalating decisive action: we design a frame to protect it, enlarge a wall to honor it, create a building to enhance it, and ultimately shape a nation around it.” http://www.fathommag.com/stories/which-presidential-portrait-would-you-save-from-fire

The next major development in documentary was mixed up with what was happening in the world in the coming decades, the ugly reality of world war and the rush to control the dominant narrative in western civilization. During World War II, war photographers, for the first time on a large scale, began filming right in the middle of the battles, capturing more of the actual fighting than ever before. The United States was fighting what they considered to be a propaganda war for the sympathies of the American people. The question was how to present the footage of the war and the events leading up to the war in a way that did not compromise the war effort. This propaganda war was largely a response to German films in the 1930s that were designed to advance Nazi ideology. The most prominent German filmmaker in this regard was Leni Riefenstahl, who in 1935 produced Triumph Des Willens or The Triumph of the Will. Triumph of the Will is a feature length film that follows Hitler as he travels to Nuremberg to deliver a speech to the Hitler Youth about the future of the German people. It is, like Flaherty’s films, engaged […]

The national Endowment For The Arts is under attack once again. As a member of the camera guild, I’ve signed a petition to appeal to congress to remember the value of the arts in all areas of life, both aesthetic and economic. https://actionnetwork.org/widgets/v3/petition/save-the-nea

LA 92 is a documentary that grieves.   In Act I it grieves for Rodney King, and marvels at the preposterous idea that a man can be beaten to such a degree, filmed on video and known to the world, and yet no justice is served. It presents the blatant injustice of a court system that would allow a Korean woman who shot a young black teen point blank in a convenience store, clearly on camera, to go free. It allows the anger for the disrespect of humanity to sink in.  In Act II it grieves for the world, for humanity and the tendency that we all have to repay violence with violence, to let the anger spill out into violent acts, the continuation of the cycle, and the sense that our fragile sense of security loses out to chaos, which bubbles up from from our collective Id, our rationality and morality gone, as seething anger erupts in a collective expression of frustration and rage.  LA 92 is a documentary comprised entirely of found footage, from news broadcasts in and around Los Angeles in 1992, surrounding the Rodney King trial and the subsequent LA Riots. The only commentary offered is the […]

Recall our discussion in the introduction of the historical use of narrative to engage with the truth: testimony, confession, celebration or lament and investigation. We might think of Rain as a celebration or ode to the rainstorm and the city, a depiction of the harmony between nature and human culture. It provides the viewer with images of what a rainstorm is like, from many different perspectives, sometimes above the buildings looking down, sometimes from inside a train looking out, sometimes from in the middle of the street or over the canals. When watching Rain, one finds oneself becoming pensive, as memories events or moments in life that were surrounded in some sense by raindrops are called to mind, and the mood becomes very meditative. Ivens here is making a comment on the wonder of the rainstorm in encountering the city. In this way, Ivens can use the language of cinema to get beyond the simple, single-shot actualities of the previous period, and construct a visual poem. He also uses these advanced filmic techniques to craft a plot, and create forward movement in the story. By organizing the footage in terms of a sequence of events, the gathering storm clouds, leading […]

Discussing Robert J. Flaherty, who was hired in the early 1900’s to document the vanishing lifestyle of the Eskimos in Alaska. Upon his return to America and the release of his movie, the film enjoyed great success with audiences. However once people learned certain facts about his filming technique, there was doubt as to his integrity as a documentarian. The controversy surrounding his film was due to the fact that he had staged most of the action, as opposed to simply “documenting” what he saw. Audiences loved the film when they thought that it was observational. But they balked when they learned what Flaherty had in fact done. Flaherty, for his part, defended himself by explaining that he was actually trying to document events farther in the past, events that represented the vanishing lifestyle of the Eskimos. He self identified as belonging to an anthropological movement called “salvage ethnography” which had as its romantic goal the preservation of human practices on the verge of becoming obsolete. Essentially, what Flaherty had done, was massage the footage (some would say deceptively) in the service of an ideology (salvage ethnography). While this may have been a worthy cause, what was revealed was the […]

In the nonfiction world, documentary filmmakers also began making films that were less tied down to specific places and specific times, and using montage to create mood or expression in a more poetic way. For example the Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens constructed stylized documentaries in the late 1920’s that consisted of disparate images juxtaposed against each other. Rain (1928), a carefully constructed experiment in avant-guard cinema, is an ode to the passing rainstorm across the city of Amsterdam, blending shots of the city captured over a period of two years. First we see the city in sun, the people, ships and cars moving in and about the city. Then we see clouds gathering on the horizon, the wind beginning to pick up, and shop owners closing their windows. The wind increases in strength and raindrops begin to plop down into the canals, and people start heading for cover and pull out umbrellas. As the downpour increases in strength, we are treated to a litany of images, details that someone might notice while it rains, the water drops on a window, the drip coming off the roof, the reflection of light off of the wet streets, et cetera. Finally the raindrops […]