Full
Exposure
This
selection of new documentaries is a rare chance to peer into
the lives of those on the fringes of history. Theirs are
the stories behind the story; the images that only a skillful
director can capture, exposed and ready to be discovered.
Wednesday,
September 2, 2009
Until
the Light Takes Us
dir.
Audrey Ewell and Aaron Aites, US, 2008, video, 85 mins, color
Directors
Audrey Ewell and Aaron Aites in person
In
1991, Norwegian churches started to burn down. While reporters
and police scrambled for answers, more and more churches went
up in flames. They had no leads until Varg Vikernes, one of
the architects of an underground music-art-political scene known
as “Black Metal” took credit and was quickly arrested. The media
ran with a largely fabricated story of satanic rituals, abductions
and sacrifices. Soon others took these cues, creating an escalating
cycle of fiction-fueled reality. This film reveals the true
story behind the music, murders and church burnings, and shows
what happened when these young men, who tried to change the
world using music, art and violence, found that they could not
control what they created.
Wednesday,
October 7, 2009
The
Windmill Movie
dir.
Alexander Olch, US, 2008, video, 82 mins, color
Director
Alexander Olch in person
Dusty
boxes of film, 200 hours of footage, a broken editing computer:
these were the parts of filmmaker Richard P Rogers’ daring attempt
to make his own autobiography. He died in 2000, leaving behind
a lifetime of filmed memories. Working with Wallace Shawn, Bob
Balaban and acclaimed photographer Susan Meiselas (Richard’s
wife), student and protege Alexander Olch began to make an impossible
film out of the pieces. An autobiography that isn’t; a documentary
which is fiction; a lifetime of questions, finally answered.
Wednesday,
November 4, 2009
FLicKeR
dir.
Nik Sheehan, Canada, 2008, video, 72 mins, color & b/w
Created
by poet, artist, calligrapher and mystic Brion Gysin in 1961,
The Dream Machine looks simple enough – a 100-watt light bulb,
a motor and a rotating cylinder with cutouts. But Gysin believed
The Dream Machine would offer a drugless high that would revolutionize
human consciousness. Users just in front of it, close their
eyes, and wait for the visions to come. With a custom-made Dream
Machine in tow, director Sheehan takes us on a journey into
the life of Gysin – his art, complex ideas and friendships with
some of the 20th century’s key counterculture figures.
Featuring
writer and Dream Machine enthusiast William S Burroughs, singer
Marianne Faithfull, singer/artist Genesis P-Orridge, punk rocker
Iggy Pop, filmmaker Kenneth Anger and artist/turntablist DJ
Spooky, FLicKeR is a truly hypnotic documentary that
asks crucial questions about the nature of art and consciousness
and imagines a humanity liberated to explore its creativity
in complete freedom.
Wednesday,
December 2,
2009
Nollywood
Babylon
dir. Ben Addelman
& Samir Mallal, Canada, 2008, video, 74 mins, color
“Nollywood”, a play on
Bollywood and Hollywood, is a film genre that speaks to the
everyday experiences of Nigerians. Nollywood produces 2,500
films a year that tell urban stories infused with voodoo and
magic and reflect the collision of traditional mysticism and
modern culture, including Christian evangelism. Nigeria’s contemporary
film industry, which just began in 1992, is now the third-largest
in the world after India and the United States. Nollywood Babylon
with a booming soundtrack of 1970s African underground music,
takes viewers into the chaotic Idumota market, and introduces
them to Nigerian filmmakers, stars and fans.
Wednesday,
February 3, 2010
Paradise
dir. Michael Almereyda,
US, 2009, video, 82 mins
Director Michael
Almereyda in person
Paradise is an astonishingly beautiful
and poignant sketchbook, a collection of fragmentary episodes
captured during ten years of travels. It is a gathering up of
intimately shared moments with friends and strangers, rendered
with a sense of mystery, wonderment, and sly humor. Almereyda
has noted that over time, Paradise became “less a self-portrait
and more of a panoramic group portrait of children and their
adult counterparts. A description of the world we inherit, fumble
around in, and grow into.” Shot in roughly two dozen cities
in nine different countries, episodes are linked, the director
writes, by “the idea that life is made up of brief paradisiacal
moments – moments routinely taken for granted, and always slipping
away.” – MoMA
Wednesday,
March 3, 2010
Promised
Lands
dir.
Susan Sontag, US/Israel, 1974, video, 87 mins, color
Susan
Sontag’s only documentary, Promised Lands scrutinizes
the Arab-Israeli conflict and the growing divisions within Jewish
thought over the question of Palestinian sovereignty. Shot in
Israel during the final days and immediate aftermath of the
1973 Yom Kippur War, Promised Lands is undoubtedly
one of Sontag’s most incisive examinations of contemporary Jewish
consciousness. She considered it her most personal film. The
film alternates between two sets of images - observational sequences
detailing moments from modern Israel - desert landscapes, patrols
of roadside soldiers, old men and women at the Western Wall,
etc. These are intercut with conversations with two intellectuals
- writer Yoram Kaniuk, a supporter of Palestinian rights who
sees Israel shifting from its socialist roots to an American-style
commercial culture and physicist Yuval Ne’eman, who argues for
the endemic nature of Arab anti-Semitism.
Though
the film has no Arab or Palestinian voices, its clear elaboration
of the debate prompted Israeli censors to ban its initial release,
claiming it would be "damaging to the country's morale."
Stateside, critic Stanley Kaufman praised the film’s Hegelian
quality, writing that it presents "not a struggle between
truth and falsehood but between two opposing, partial truths."
Wednesday,
May 5, 2010
The
Hand of Fatima
dir.
Augusta Palmer, US, 2009, video, 75 mins
Director
Augusta Palmer in person
The
Hand of Fatima is
a double portrait of a rock critic and his favorite band. Robert
Palmer (1945 – 1997) was America’s pre-eminent music writer,
best known for his book Deep Blues and his work for
The New York Times. Morocco’s the Master Musicians
of Jajouka play music older than history, and jammed with Ornette
Coleman and Sonic Youth. Using Palmer’s writing about the band
as her guide, his daughter Augusta set out for Morocco in 2005
hoping to find out what happened when her father first met the
Master Musicians of Jajouka on assignment for Rolling Stone
in 1971.
The film intercuts verite footage of the filmmaker’s journey
with animations of Robert’s experiences in the 1970s, allowing
the filmmaker (and the audience) to glean the truth between
the lines of Robert’s mystical journey and to understand his
all-consuming need for musical transcendence. That need was
more than met by the Master Musicians, who were introduced to
expatriate Tangiers society by the artist Brion Gysin in the
1950s, and then popularized by Rolling Stone Brian Jones, who
recorded an album in their village which became a cult favorite
upon its release shortly after his death. Encounters with Yoko
Ono, Donovan, Anthony DeCurtis, and the elder Palmer’s four
wives round out a journey that culminates with the Master Musicians’
indelible performance in their remote Moroccan village.
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