Tag Archive for: documentary

Starting ‘Money Puzzles’

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Parthenon bis

The thought can hardly be original, but visiting the Acropolis during a recent trip to Athens, I couldn’t help but see it as a symbol of the condition of Greece: under renovation, but work currently suspended. At the end of April, the liquidity crisis forced the government to stop payment on public works because the European funding they relied on has dried up. Greece is being punished by the obstinate, pig-headed, anti-democratic plutocracy of the EU and the IMF for the crime of electing the wrong government, a government that opposes austerity as an unworkable policy that creates unpayable debts and has indefensible consequences for the mass of the people. Read more

Salute to Fernando Birri

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There was something magical about the first time I met Fernando Birri, who celebrated his 90th birthday a few days ago. I had just arrived in Cuba for the first Havana Film Festival in 1979. Checking in to the Hotel Nacional in the late afternoon, I looked for a bar to quench my thirst, where I found this strange but very friendly figure—all the more mysterious in the dim light—with his long straggly beard and wearing the hat which I later discovered he never took off. I found out who he was—happily still is—over the following days. Three years later, he became a key figure in the documentary I made for Channel Four about the New Cinema movement in Latin America, of which Fernando is one of the founding figures. This portrait is drawn from those films (with a snippet—the short sequence with Fidel—taken from the film I made a couple of years later on the Havana Film Festival with Holly Aylett, also for Channel Four.) Enhorabuena, Fernando!

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/122417391[/vimeo]

 

Best Docs?

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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

Spirit of Coutinho

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This video presents an overview of the work of the Brazilian filmmaker Eduardo Coutinho (1933-2014), one of the most original documentarists of recent decades, whose films remain shamefully little known in the English-speaking world.

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/99022268#[/vimeo]

Read an accompanying discussion of the themes and preoccupations of his work here.

Thinking Creative Practice on Campus

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The symposium on audiovisual creative practice held at Roehampton University on June 14th, ‘Image Movement Story’, threw up an issue that reflects the incoherence of the research policies that fund our activities. On the one hand, judging from the wide range of projects under discussion, including work by supervisors of creative practice PhDs as well as their students, the sector is in rude health.  On the other, as Eric Knudson pointed out in his keynote, the research council is now disbursing more money to fewer projects than it used to. Why is this a problem? Because what the sector is now achieving is in good part the result of years of nurturing it through a range of small research grants, which have largely disappeared with the new emphasis on large scale collaborative projects with the potential for something called ‘impact’ (which I’ve written about before). This leaves open the question of support for smaller projects, early career researchers, etc.—and the perennial problem of doctoral funding. Read more

Avi Mograbi: A fly in the soup

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 Here’s a piece I’ve written on the Israeli documentarist for Sight & Sound:

Variety calls him a “gadfly documaker” and Cineaste quotes his own self-evaluation: “If some [filmmakers] see themselves as a fly on the wall, I see myself as a fly in the soup”. In short, he is a performative documentarist, like Nick Broomfield, Michael Moore or Nanni Moretti, who acts himself up on screen: a playful and self-deprecating video diarist with attitude — and split-screen personality disorder. Part of this attitude is a rejection of Zionist orthodoxies and solidarity with the Palestinians; part is a deep distrust of the orthodox idea of objectivity. Reality isn’t punctual. As Mograbi puts it, it is never there in itself and it’s always already being interpreted for us all the time. Besides, there is no such thing as a transparent camera; no way, for example, you can introduce a camera at a checkpoint without the soldiers noticing. The camera has a certain power: ”You can almost blackmail everyone into behaving better.” Whatever the situation, people respond to the camera, whether explicitly or not.But the intervention of the camera also has a tendency to backfire on you.

Read the full article: Chanan on Mograbi

Avi Mograbi

Avi Mograbi is a special guest at Open City Docs Fest in London (17-22 June). See opencitydocsfest.com for details.

Did Allan Francovich get it right?

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A forgotten documentary about Lockerbie

On the eve of the 25th anniversary of the Lockerbie bombing, Channel 4 News has broadcast a very interesting report claiming that  Abdelbaset al-Megrahi wasn’t the Lockerbie bomber, and Libya wasn’t the country responsible, but that the bombing was actually carried out by a Palestinian terrorist group backed by Hisbollah, to avenge the 290 lives lost when Iran Air flight 665 was accidentally shot down by a US battleship over the Persian Gulf a few months before Lockerbie. The claims were made in recently discovered US court depositions by a CIA agent, Richard Fuisz, at the request of defence lawyers for al-Megrahi and Lamin Fhimah, who were on trial at the time for the bombing, but they came too late to be used at the trial.

This is substantially the same interpretation of events that is put forward in great detail in a forgotten documentary, The Maltese Double Cross (1994), by the American director Allan Francovich (1941-1997), who was also responsible for a number of films about the CIA, including the award-winning  On Company Business (1980). Read more

Screening at Chile on Film

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Saturday 23rd November, Centre of Latin American Studies, University of Cambridge (advance registration required).

http://www.latin-american.cam.ac.uk/events/chile-on-film

Includes the first screening of my new video, ‘Chile: Divided Generations’ – a study of the politics of memory in Chile, extracted from a longer film, Interrupted Memory, on memory and politics in Argentina and Chile, coming soon.