PUTNEY DEBATER
A personal blog
Remembering Richard Attenborough
This is how I remember Richard Attenborough—setting up a shot for Oh! What a Lovely War, in a photo I took myself. He’s the one in the hat. The news of his death takes me back to where I started, because that first film of his as director was also the occasion for my own first effort at filmmaking, and I’m eternally grateful to him for the chance (rare in those days) to have made a film of the filming.
Best Docs?
When Sight & Sound sent out their invitation to contribute to their best documentaries poll, I’m afraid I bottled out, and sent this response.
Dear Nick,
Thanks for inviting me to contribute to Sight & Sound’s best documentaries poll. I’m afraid the task has defeated me. There are certainly some films which come to mind immediately, starting with classic titles like Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera, Ruttmann’s Berlin, Symphony of a City, and Vigo’s A propos de Nice—if you’ve written about documentary history, you start thinking chronologically, but the result would be ten or a dozen films for each decade. I’ve already got a list like that—I give it to my students—but it’s not what you want. Yet it includes a good number of little known gems—for example, Les Raquetteurs by Groulx and Brault, Marisol Trujillo’s Prayer, Jorge Furtado’s Island of Flowers—which for me encapsulate essential aspects of documentary. Should these be dropped in favour of bigger numbers, like, I don’t know, Pennbaker’s Don’t Look Back, Jean-Pierre Gorin’s Poto and Cabengo, Paul Leduc’s ABC del Etnocidio, or Moretti’s Dear Diary? OK, that’s ten titles already, and I haven’t even started. Read more
Chile: Divided Generations
This is drawn from from a longer project, ‘Interrupted Memory’, an inquiry into the character of political memory filmed in Chile and Argentina in 2013.
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/102417704[/vimeo]