Sport has been a subject of documentary since Edison’s and the Lumieres’ 1890s experiments. One of Edison’s first pieces is a boxing match between Mike Leonard and Jack Cushing. In the 1930s Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia showcased atheticism in the guise of propaganda. Today, ESPN’s 30 for 30 series has propelled sport documenatary to new popularity….
Author: Documentary Site
Engaging the Battle for ‘Hearts and Minds’
For the years during the war and for almost a decade after, Vietnam remained an almost untouched subject in the American popular media. Extensive television coverage of men fighting in the bush provided a collective experience accompanied by newscasters’ observations, but not until the late in the 1970s did memoirs, novels, and films begin to…
‘Grizzly Man’ and the Filmmaker-Subject Relationship
Grizzly Man (2005) is as much about the filmmaker-subject relationship as it is about the subject himself. The subject is Timothy Treadwell, a bear enthusiast who spent 13 summers living among them and recording more than 100 hours of video with them and himself. Treadwell and his then-girlfriend Amie Huguenard met their untimely deaths when…
Getting Down in the Trenches in ‘The War Room’
In 1960 presidential candidates John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon met on national television for the first in a series of debates. This meeting proved the latter’s downfall for while Kennedy, tanned and relaxed, impressed audiences with his confidence and poise, Nixon, pale and haggard, lost credibility because of his tired appearance. Unique at the…
An Invitation to Witness in ‘Cameraperson’
Cameraperson is an audiovisual memoir of documentary camera operator Kirsten Johnson’s 25-year career. It features a pastiche of images and occasional titles, but no voiceover or staged interviews. The film results in a deep meditation on creating documentary images and sound and their ethical implications. Cameraperson opens with a title that reads “For the past…
Lemming Lessons and a Case Study
In a leadership training session today, the facilitator showed the following cartoon: The cartoon depicts lemmings following each other over a cliff in a mass suicide. One lemming in the back says, “I’d like to question the leadership on this move.” Another lemming next to him says, “Shut up! You’re undermining the troops!” Arguably, the…
Documentary and Advocacy Connections in ‘We Rise’
Documentaries can play various roles in advocacy work. In the book We Rise: The Earth Guardians Guide to Building a Movement that Restores the Planet, Xiuhtezcatl Martinez cites several examples useful for illustrating the diversity of these roles. A documentary can evoke a wide range of emotions. Leonardo DiCaprio’s The Eleventh Hour chronicles the global…
10 Other Documentaries about the Vietnam War to Check Out
Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s The Vietnam War begins this week, though the 18-hour series is far from the first about the subject. Unlike Hollywood’s almost 15-year delay, documentary makers started trying to make sense of the war early on. The Vietnam War has been a cultural touchstone for generations, though it resonates most with…
An Ode to the City Symphony (so to Speak)
The most interesting periods of documentary history are the transition periods of adopting and adapting new technologies. The late 1800s saw the Lumiere brothers’ cinematograph capturing and projecting moving images from the backpack-size device. The 1930s saw the experiments with spoken words on the soundtracks. Sometimes they were recorded on location, but more likely they…
11 Sites about Documentary You Should be Reading
The landscape for documentaries and writing about them has changed immensely during the last 20 years. Back then, only occasional news stories or infrequent emerging blogs wrote about them. A respected resource, DocumentaryFilms.net took off when it became a collective blog. The writers behind The Documentary Blog drew a following. Christopher Campbell ran an independent…