Lance Loud! Is Larger Than Life in ‘A Death in An American Family’

“I’m still big. It’s documentaries that got small.” — Lance Loud In 1973, PBS aired a ground-breaking series titled An American Family. Though the format sounds familiar today, then it was quite an innovation: A crew of filmmakers recorded events in the daily life of a family, in this case the Louds of Santa Barbara,…

The Fate of Documentary

A now-deleted article in the New York Press raises some gloomy questions about “the fate of documentary” and “the precarious position of documentarians.” The article provides some interesting perspectives on documentary, but I wonder if they are too narrow in their viewpoints. In many ways it is skewed toward reinforcing the dominance of mainstream fiction-based…