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OldTennisCourt
Sep 11, 2011

by VideoGames
For those who have seen that Thought Crimes documentary HBO did this week on the Cannibal Cop case, what are your thoughts on it? I found it really interesting but it annoyed me when it tried to be funny by having long chat logs of what he wanted to do and then cut to him cooking bacon or something.

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96 spacejam
Dec 4, 2009

Cocoa Ninja posted:

I shouldn't have waited as long as I did to watch The Two Escobars,, I built it up hugely in my mind. It was just OK.



The way the Zimbalist brothers weaved together that story through two men with opposite world views but happen share the same last name is simply fascinating. It's easily one of my favorite documentaries. When I was watching it I realized that I was actually at the game where Columbia lost to Romania at the Los Angeles World Cup in '94. My memory of that day has always been pretty foggy since I was only 8 years old but I remember two things, the awful traffic getting into the game where I had to pee into a Gatorade bottle so we didn't lose our spot and some player who had the most insane jheri curl afro I've seen to date. Any recommendations for similar docs?

Also I'm sure it's been talked to death here but I finally got around to seeing Supermensch: The Legend of Shep Gordon and it was good, definitely worth a watch if you're into pop culture since Shep Gordon is very much the most famous non-famous dude behind the dude. One criticism would be that it started to go overboard with Michael Douglas literally hopping on this man's dick. At one point I checked IMDB to see if Shep was listed as a producer it became almost too much. I would be much more interested to hear the first hard stories he has with all these mega-bands that he basically enabled and partied with for the last 40 years.

96 spacejam fucked around with this message at 02:05 on May 17, 2015

AGirlWonder
Oct 24, 2010
I got done with watching Constantine's Sword yesterday. There was a lot in the documentary that I'd never considered or heard of before, so I can't say it wasn't educational. The biggest issue with the film is that it's two different studies in one documentary: the historical antisemitism of the Roman Catholic Church vs. current antisemitism by American Evangelicals. American Protestantism has very little to do with Roman Catholicism, especially today, so there needs to be a lot more to bridge the gap in-film. The film begins and ends focusing on Evangelical targeting of Jewish students at the Air Force Academy, but the creators don't do much analysis of that in-between, instead focusing on historical issues with Rome. Both stories are interesting, but they don't connect very well.

Herv
Mar 24, 2005

Soiled Meat

Viginti posted:

As someone who likes Nirvana's music but never bought into the Cobain as Christ Mythology the Gen X's had, is it worth the time? Should I see the Broomfield instead?

Same, I never really got why they were so big when they were really watered down, pop'ed out punk/hardcore that was rolling for a decade before. Timing I guess.

Lurdiak
Feb 26, 2006

I believe in a universe that doesn't care, and people that do.


Does anyone have a recommendation for a good documentary about raver culture, PLUR and all that? Preferably a modern one about the west coast scene.

mod sassinator
Dec 13, 2006
I came here to Kick Ass and Chew Bubblegum,
and I'm All out of Ass
It's more focused on the 80's/90's british rave scene/second summer of love but this BBC documentary The Chemical Generation is fantastic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxBCaMvBH5c

It's hosted by Boy George and he has a lot of great anecdotes about the scene.

Lurdiak
Feb 26, 2006

I believe in a universe that doesn't care, and people that do.


That's as good a place to start as any.

Pingiivi
Mar 26, 2010

Straight into the iris!

Lurdiak posted:

Does anyone have a recommendation for a good documentary about raver culture, PLUR and all that?

Better living through circuitry might fit that definition.

Kull the Conqueror
Apr 8, 2006

Take me to the green valley,
lay the sod o'er me,
I'm a young cowboy,
I know I've done wrong
There's a real nice transfer of Huston's Let There Be Light from 1946 on the 'tube. Much of the stuff shown is adorably arcane but the early interviews with shaken veterans is devastating stuff. I'm really kind of astounded by the photography in this. It portrays real moments in a classical Hollywood style that documentaries would not often emulate.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiD6bnqpJDE

HUNDU THE BEAST GOD
Sep 14, 2007

everything is yours

Kull the Conqueror posted:

There's a real nice transfer of Huston's Let There Be Light from 1946 on the 'tube. Much of the stuff shown is adorably arcane but the early interviews with shaken veterans is devastating stuff. I'm really kind of astounded by the photography in this. It portrays real moments in a classical Hollywood style that documentaries would not often emulate.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiD6bnqpJDE

Holy poo poo.

Cocoa Ninja
Mar 3, 2007

Kull the Conqueror posted:

There's a real nice transfer of Huston's Let There Be Light from 1946 on the 'tube. Much of the stuff shown is adorably arcane but the early interviews with shaken veterans is devastating stuff. I'm really kind of astounded by the photography in this. It portrays real moments in a classical Hollywood style that documentaries would not often emulate.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiD6bnqpJDE

You might know this but this doc was half of the inspiration for The Master.

Kull the Conqueror
Apr 8, 2006

Take me to the green valley,
lay the sod o'er me,
I'm a young cowboy,
I know I've done wrong
You wanna know what's really loving crazy about it? From Barnouw's Documentary: A History of the Nonfiction Film (which is an amazing read if you're at all interested):

Erik Barnouw, p. 164 posted:

Huston looked back on this project as "the most hopeful and optimistic and even joyous thing I ever had a hand in. I felt as though I were going to church ever day out in that hospital." All patients portrayed in the film approved its release. But the army--with various explanations--banned it except for showings to psychiatrists. One explanation was that the film was not the sort of film that had been intended; that Huston had 'pulled a fast one.' Another was that the War Department wished to avoid raising false hopes for incurable cases. But perhaps Huston had again brought the viewer too close to war and its human toll.

I mean, talk about a film that should be viewed by the public to help them to understand the psychological toll of wartime, and they just squelch it moronically.

Viginti
Feb 1, 2015
An amazing documentary and remarkable how much Anderson just stole directly from it (I don't view stealing as a bad thing in cinema).

I want to add my vote to all the others supporting Dawg Fight as worth a watch. It went on a little long, or at least it stretched itself in directions that didn't work as well for me but the initial concept and the treatment of it is great.

Also watched Sherman's March today and rather enjoyed it. Are any of his other films worth watching or is this the only one that manages to balance his very precarious style?

Dr.Caligari
May 5, 2005

"Here's a big, beautiful avatar for someone"

Kull the Conqueror posted:

There's a real nice transfer of Huston's Let There Be Light from 1946 on the 'tube. Much of the stuff shown is adorably arcane but the early interviews with shaken veterans is devastating stuff. I'm really kind of astounded by the photography in this. It portrays real moments in a classical Hollywood style that documentaries would not often emulate.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiD6bnqpJDE

Wow, that was something. Could you recommend any more documentaries that have the same subject matter ? Anything WWI thru now would be ok.

Lurdiak
Feb 26, 2006

I believe in a universe that doesn't care, and people that do.


mod sassinator posted:

It's more focused on the 80's/90's british rave scene/second summer of love but this BBC documentary The Chemical Generation is fantastic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxBCaMvBH5c

It's hosted by Boy George and he has a lot of great anecdotes about the scene.

God this was one hour of nothing. "Acid House was good because it had music, but it was bad because people died. In closing, Acid House was a land of contrasts."

cloudchamber
Aug 6, 2010

You know what the Ukraine is? It's a sitting duck. A road apple, Newman. The Ukraine is weak. It's feeble. I think it's time to put the hurt on the Ukraine

Dr.Caligari posted:

Wow, that was something. Could you recommend any more documentaries that have the same subject matter ? Anything WWI thru now would be ok.

I haven't seen it yet, but there's a film that was shown at Cannes last year, called Of Men and War, about soldiers trying to readjust to civilian life after returning from Iraq.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Of_Men_and_War

96 spacejam
Dec 4, 2009

Did a quick search and no results for SF Docfest which is surprising because last night I got through about twenty of the seventy trailers and so far only one has looked mediocre.


In Country - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmDVWCISOjo"
Vietnam war reenactment looks insane.

Pedals in the Dust - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0QyZEY1UF4
Systematic slaughtering of Indian woman and the survivors who are fighting against it. Eyes definitely got a bit moist watching this one.

One Child: The River and the Bush - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KUQqSWh_Nc
Tribe that murders what they view as cursed children. There is literally a car chase to save a baby from being butchered in the trailer. Heavy.

20 Years of Madness - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SeA9lHeP3uI
Public access jackass-esque show that the creators seemingly can't part with.

As I wade through 50 more trailers this weekend I'll happily post the stand outs if there is any interest.

This is my first year attending and I'll be going solo for most of it so if any other goons are attending PM me and we can see if we have any crossover in our schedules.

SeanBeansShako
Nov 20, 2009

Now the Drums beat up again,
For all true Soldier Gentlemen.
The Vietnam one actually looks interesting, I'll have to hunt that one down.

BiggerBoat
Sep 26, 2007

Don't you tell me my business again.
Does Koyaanisqatsi count as a documentary? Cause that movie's pretty great.

Kull the Conqueror
Apr 8, 2006

Take me to the green valley,
lay the sod o'er me,
I'm a young cowboy,
I know I've done wrong

BiggerBoat posted:

Does Koyaanisqatsi count as a documentary? Cause that movie's pretty great.

City symphonies are a bona-fide documentary tradition.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zg353U4QpxA

(made more revelatory today thanks to the fact that this version of the city would be obliterated in less than two decades)

Raxivace
Sep 9, 2014

Berlin: Symphony of a Great City and The Man With a Movie Camera are both fantastic and cinephiles should watch them, but I've always felt their inclusion among the documentary genre to feel a bit forced. They're closer to experimental films (If we can call that a "genre") IMO.

Raxivace fucked around with this message at 19:54 on May 30, 2015

Kull the Conqueror
Apr 8, 2006

Take me to the green valley,
lay the sod o'er me,
I'm a young cowboy,
I know I've done wrong
Explain the difference satisfactorily and I'll buy you a beer.

Raxivace
Sep 9, 2014

Kull the Conqueror posted:

Explain the difference satisfactorily and I'll buy you a beer.

I'm still sort of working out how I feel about it, so I'm not sure I can explain how I feel to you satisfactorily to gain that elusive beer.

I guess the best way I could put it is that if you were to describe something like The Man With a Movie Camera to someone that had never heard of the film before, just calling it a documentary and than plopping it into the DVD player would be a bit misleading (Or at least, this is how I felt when this happened to me exactly). The film has such a focus on formalism that we just don't see in documentaries usually, to the point where we have footage of someone editing it together onscreen. Modern documentaries seem more about directly delivering content in an almost journalistic way. In comparison the city symphonies feel like visual poetry, where the focus is more about how they're speaking to audiences through experimental practices like extreme montage, and less about giving insight into what life was like in 1920's Russia or Berlin or whatever.

Raxivace fucked around with this message at 22:56 on May 30, 2015

Ropes4u
May 2, 2009

Finally got around to watching Dawg Fight. Nice flick that reminded my of my youth, just swap out the offenders for bored middle class white kids without YouTube or cameras.

Pretty good show but they could have left out some of the side shows.

Kull the Conqueror
Apr 8, 2006

Take me to the green valley,
lay the sod o'er me,
I'm a young cowboy,
I know I've done wrong

Raxivace posted:

I'm still sort of working out how I feel about it, so I'm not sure I can explain how I feel to you satisfactorily to gain that elusive beer.

I guess the best way I could put it is that if you were to describe something like The Man With a Movie Camera to someone that had never heard of the film before, just calling it a documentary and than plopping it into the DVD player would be a bit misleading (Or at least, this is how I felt when this happened to me exactly). The film has such a focus on formalism that we just don't see in documentaries usually, to the point where we have footage of someone editing it together onscreen. Modern documentaries seem more about directly delivering content in an almost journalistic way. In comparison the city symphonies feel like visual poetry, where the focus is more about how they're speaking to audiences through experimental practices like extreme montage, and less about giving insight into what life was like in 1920's Russia or Berlin or whatever.

Everything you're saying is accurate, but doesn't it seem kind of weird to identify a movement starting from the present and then going backwards? Documentary and avant-garde film grew up together, weaving in and out of each other's histories. Some countries encouraged this kind of experimentation; before the state went really nuts on censorship by the 30s, the Soviet Union was the place to be, and as many artists of the 1930s, especially those interested in nonfiction, would attest, Man with a Movie Camera was an earth-shattering game-changer in the same way Battleship Potemkin was for narrative fiction. There are, no doubt, different kinds of documentaries, but their style and/or isn't really what puts them into that category. It's pretty much just the notion that they're somehow negotiating with 'the real' in some form or fashion. Hell, Bill Nichols, one of the bigtime documentary scholars, doesn't even disinclude classical Hollywood fiction in his typology of documentary styles; they're still showing us something that happened, but the cultural paradigm is that we have to accept it as fantasy and performance rather than people acting insane. Anyway, not picking on you or anything, I just love talking about this stuff. It's incredible to see how little the discourse surrounding nonfiction has changed so little in 100 years; folks still use the term propaganda in same way, point out flaws in the reality of the frame as though that matters in absolute terms, and find themselves driven to take a stand on whether documentary should be one thing or the other instead of just seeing how diverse and beautiful it is in all its forms.

BiggerBoat
Sep 26, 2007

Don't you tell me my business again.
Good points.

I'm not sure I'd call Koyaanisqatsi a documentary in the modern traditional sense but it felt like one when I was done watching it and had reflected on it. I'd say it qualifies because it feels like it's trying to tell you a true story but without the usual narrative trappings, voice overs, captions, interviews and statistics. It certainly tells a true story and gets its point across.

It's also equal parts amazing/depressing to watch on acid or mushrooms.

I'll have to check out Man With A Movie Camera. Never heard of it.

Cocoa Ninja
Mar 3, 2007
Kull -- I was going to feel smart and make this point but then you hit on it: the history of documentary is very tied up in the history of propaganda as well.

I'm with Herzog that ultimately documentary is at its best when it takes the power of what we consider traditional fiction techniques to impart feeling, conflict and catharsis, rather than presuming DOCUMENTARY as a moving picture version of a NY Times editorial exposé.

I think most people approach fiction as something that should move them emotionally, whereas they believe good documentary should convince them intellectually without "resorting" to emotions. And yet it seems clear that, for the top works in both genres, the distinction is moot — the best documentaries leave you aware of deeper truths of the human experience, whether true as a piece of reportage or not, and the most outstanding fiction performances are convincing because they reflect our own understanding of the human experience.

We could say genre is almost always a reductive description unless we use it to easily communicate how a particular work challenges those same boundaries.

Raxivace
Sep 9, 2014

Interesting post, Kull.

We both agree the Vertov film is revolutionary, but it seems we have a slightly different conception as to why! That's what makes art discussion fun!

Kull the Conqueror posted:

Everything you're saying is accurate, but doesn't it seem kind of weird to identify a movement starting from the present and then going backwards?
Sure, I have reservations about how I am defining genre. That's why I'm trying not speak authoritatively on the subject here.

quote:

It's pretty much just the notion that they're somehow negotiating with 'the real' in some form or fashion. Hell, Bill Nichols, one of the bigtime documentary scholars, doesn't even disinclude classical Hollywood fiction in his typology of documentary styles; they're still showing us something that happened, but the cultural paradigm is that we have to accept it as fantasy and performance rather than people acting insane
This quote here seems to be the heart of your post.

I guess my first question would be about what exactly you mean by "negotiating with 'the real'". I'm not directly familiar with Nichols off of the top of my head, but you mention his argument about not disincluding classical Hollywood fiction in documentary styles. Do you accept his argument, and if so to what extent? Does it merely include biographical films, like Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln? Is it extended to neorealist works that attempted to touch on "real" issues and living conditions through fictional narratives like Bicycle Thieves or that HBO show The Wire? Or what about one of the predecessors to the documentary's development, like Nanook of the North? In other words, how real is 'the real'?

If I'm understanding the argument right (And correct me if I'm not), it just seems like an awfully broad way to categorize films into a genre. Maybe it should be broad though, or perhaps redefined in a way. I kind of like the label "nonfiction" better than "documentary".

Cocoa Ninja posted:

Kull -- I was going to feel smart and make this point but then you hit on it: the history of documentary is very tied up in the history of propaganda as well.

I'm with Herzog that ultimately documentary is at its best when it takes the power of what we consider traditional fiction techniques to impart feeling, conflict and catharsis, rather than presuming DOCUMENTARY as a moving picture version of a NY Times editorial exposé.

I think most people approach fiction as something that should move them emotionally, whereas they believe good documentary should convince them intellectually without "resorting" to emotions. And yet it seems clear that, for the top works in both genres, the distinction is moot — the best documentaries leave you aware of deeper truths of the human experience, whether true as a piece of reportage or not, and the most outstanding fiction performances are convincing because they reflect our own understanding of the human experience.

We could say genre is almost always a reductive description unless we use it to easily communicate how a particular work challenges those same boundaries.

This is a good post. I really dig what Herzog has been doing with documentaries for the last decade or so, but I tend to still think even his films are kind of journalistic. Just more in the "Op Ed" sense and less of the "Serious front page story with hard reporting" sense.

Raxivace fucked around with this message at 21:28 on Jun 1, 2015

Ramrod Hotshot
May 30, 2003

MeinPanzer posted:

Just finished The Jinx, and it strikes me that in an odd way it and The Act of Killing are similar in some ways. Both deal with individuals who ostensibly showed no sign of remorse for having killed people and gotten away with it; both deal with confronting those individuals over and over again with the details of what they did and the lives of the people they killed; and both end with the killer vomiting after realizing how the process of producing the documentary has affected them.

I was struck by this similarity as well. Of course, the Act of Killing is about much more than one man, but Anwar Congo did indeed remind me of Bob Durst.

Michaellaneous
Oct 30, 2013

Not sure if it is okay to ask this here, but I've seen a - I think BBC - documentary about slow motion. Basically a few hours of really great scenes, nature spectacles and stuff in slow mo.

Any idea what doc that could be?

Allyn
Sep 4, 2007

I love Charlie from Busted!

Michaellaneous posted:

Not sure if it is okay to ask this here, but I've seen a - I think BBC - documentary about slow motion. Basically a few hours of really great scenes, nature spectacles and stuff in slow mo.

Any idea what doc that could be?

I didn't see it but it sounds like Richard Hammond's Invisible Worlds

Michaellaneous
Oct 30, 2013

Allyn posted:

I didn't see it but it sounds like Richard Hammond's Invisible Worlds

Nah that wasn't it sadly. It had a narrator, but never really anyone on screen.

Ropes4u
May 2, 2009

Hot Girls Wanted is up on Netflix. I'm not really sure what to say other than its another depressing look at the porn industry.

A few things that stood out for me.

First there are apparently thousands of willing girls ready to enter the industry. I was also a little shocked at how ignorant many of them appeared to their actual future.

Most of the girls only last 2-3 months and a long term career is considered 12 months.

Something else that stood in my mind is how prom is slowly getting more degrading.

Lastly, the Unprotected sex and lack of concern for getting pregnant were also a little surprising in 2015.

Links would not post from my phone - http://www.hotgirlswantedmovie.com

The Bramble
Mar 16, 2004

Went to go see an after-midnight showing of The Nightmare, a horror-documentary on Sleep Paralysis, last night. It was a pretty great horror experience, though a poor documentary, as nothing was ever really explained by experts, and we just had the interviewees explanations for their experience to go off of. But their descriptions and the filmmakers re-enactments of their nightmares is pretty disturbing, nonetheless. The documentary air of the whole thing lends it some creepy credence, and I think a lot of people left the theater worried it could happen to them. A couple jump scares are thrown in for good measure, but a lot of the stories and scenarios depicted in the movie touched a few things in my subconscious I had forgotten about - childhood fears and such. I'd recommend seeing this alone and at night!

If you're in the Boston area, Coolidge Corner Theater is doing the after-midnight showings for the rest of this week. Only $12 to get in, and the theater is worth a trip all on its own - beautiful place.

mod sassinator
Dec 13, 2006
I came here to Kick Ass and Chew Bubblegum,
and I'm All out of Ass

The Bramble posted:

Went to go see an after-midnight showing of The Nightmare, a horror-documentary on Sleep Paralysis, last night. It was a pretty great horror experience, though a poor documentary, as nothing was ever really explained by experts, and we just had the interviewees explanations for their experience to go off of. But their descriptions and the filmmakers re-enactments of their nightmares is pretty disturbing, nonetheless. The documentary air of the whole thing lends it some creepy credence, and I think a lot of people left the theater worried it could happen to them. A couple jump scares are thrown in for good measure, but a lot of the stories and scenarios depicted in the movie touched a few things in my subconscious I had forgotten about - childhood fears and such. I'd recommend seeing this alone and at night!

If you're in the Boston area, Coolidge Corner Theater is doing the after-midnight showings for the rest of this week. Only $12 to get in, and the theater is worth a trip all on its own - beautiful place.

Yeah I caught this a few weeks ago at SIFF and had similar feelings. The director is the same person that did Room 237, so it's really well done with good production values. But as a documentary about sleep paralysis you really won't learn anything at all about the subject.

The Bramble
Mar 16, 2004

mod sassinator posted:

Yeah I caught this a few weeks ago at SIFF and had similar feelings. The director is the same person that did Room 237, so it's really well done with good production values. But as a documentary about sleep paralysis you really won't learn anything at all about the subject.

Yes, I'd overheard he did Room 237 as well, and I see its on NetFlix! I'll check it out tonight.

Edit: Just watched Room 237. I think Rodney Ascher is a very interesting film maker. I also have a new appreciation for Stanley Kubrick.

The Bramble fucked around with this message at 03:22 on Jun 8, 2015

Kull the Conqueror
Apr 8, 2006

Take me to the green valley,
lay the sod o'er me,
I'm a young cowboy,
I know I've done wrong

Cocoa Ninja posted:

I'm with Herzog that ultimately documentary is at its best when it takes the power of what we consider traditional fiction techniques to impart feeling, conflict and catharsis, rather than presuming DOCUMENTARY as a moving picture version of a NY Times editorial exposé.

Absolutely. Renov makes what almost sounds like a plea to the doc culture to stop being so stodgy about aesthetics:

Renov, Theorizing Documentary, P. 35 posted:

[T]he realm of filmic nonfiction is a continuum along which can be ranged work of great expressive variability—from that which attends little to the vehicle of expression (the not-so-distant apotheosis of cinema verité—surveillance technology—might serve as the limit case) to that which emphasizes the filtering of the represented object through the eye and mind of the artist.... [T]he ability to evoke emotional response or induce pleasure in the spectator by formal means, to generate lyric power through shadings of sound and image in a manner exclusive of verbalization, or to engage with the musical or poetic qualities of language itself must not be seen as mere distractions from the main event. Documentary culture is clearly the worse for such aesthetic straitjacketing.

Raxivace posted:

I guess my first question would be about what exactly you mean by "negotiating with 'the real'". I'm not directly familiar with Nichols off of the top of my head, but you mention his argument about not disincluding classical Hollywood fiction in documentary styles. Do you accept his argument, and if so to what extent? Does it merely include biographical films, like Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln? Is it extended to neorealist works that attempted to touch on "real" issues and living conditions through fictional narratives like Bicycle Thieves or that HBO show The Wire? Or what about one of the predecessors to the documentary's development, like Nanook of the North? In other words, how real is 'the real'?

I'm gonna fall back on some Renov again:

Renov, p. 25 posted:

Given the truth claim which persists within documentary discourse as a defining condition (‘what you see and hear is of the world’), the collapse of sign and historical referent is a matter of particular concern. Our attempts to ‘fix’ on celluloid what lies before the camera—ourselves or members of other cultures—are fragile if not altogether insincere efforts. Always issues of selection intrude…the results are indeed mediated, the result of multiple interventions that necessarily come between the cinematic sign (what we see on the screen) and its referent (what existed in the world).

That's a much more eloquent way of describing what I called the negotiation with the real. Documentary always, more accurately, involves a negotiation between truth and beauty, something that fiction works have less endemic incentive to indulge. Let's trying rolling with the word 'truth.' Nanook is 100% a documentary. We're not looking at natural depictions, "direct" portrayals, if you will. But Flaherty spent years getting to know Nanook intimately before he shot that film. For all its 'fabrication,' it's an undeniably truthful work, much more so than the thousands of repugnant, touristy ethnographies that would follow it in decades to come.

My point was a little muddled but in Nichols' typology of documentary 'modes,' classical Hollywood narrative, that is to say the style of fiction that we all know and accept as the standard, is something that documentary artists can access to evoke truth, and not absolute truth but the truth you can know intrinsically. Look at the triumphant Notes on Blindness from last year. Is it any less a documentary because all of its visual representations are fabricated? Does it matter when it's accompanied by the stark reality of Hull's confessions?

Similarly, Koyaanisqatsi or Berlin: Symphony of a City feature photography with no construction, no fiction. What about their assemblage denies them the qualification as documentary? The way they're edited? It seems no less a betrayal of reality than the way standard persuasive documentarians put together a narrative. Is it the orchestral scores, which drives the pictures? I just don't see why poetic documentary could be any less defined as nonfiction than, you know, Grey Gardens.

Qtotonibudinibudet
Nov 7, 2011



Omich poluyobok, skazhi ty narkoman? ya prosto tozhe gde to tam zhivu, mogli by vmeste uyobyvat' narkotiki

The Bramble posted:

Went to go see an after-midnight showing of The Nightmare, a horror-documentary on Sleep Paralysis, last night. It was a pretty great horror experience, though a poor documentary, as nothing was ever really explained by experts, and we just had the interviewees explanations for their experience to go off of. But their descriptions and the filmmakers re-enactments of their nightmares is pretty disturbing, nonetheless. The documentary air of the whole thing lends it some creepy credence, and I think a lot of people left the theater worried it could happen to them. A couple jump scares are thrown in for good measure, but a lot of the stories and scenarios depicted in the movie touched a few things in my subconscious I had forgotten about - childhood fears and such. I'd recommend seeing this alone and at night!

I was fine with the lack of expert explanations--they'd make sense for a science TV show/talk but not something I'd watch as a feature film. I figure it'd be mostly talking heads entirely, as trying to visually show "here is what neurons are doing" is hard and much less interesting than shadow monsters.

I experience sleep paralysis myself and have already read over the scientific explanations, and The Nightmare does justice to the subjective experience that the science doesn't. Knowing what's happening neurologically doesn't really matter when it actually happens; your brain is still going to do crazy terrifying poo poo to try and make sense of what's going on.

The_Raven
Jul 2, 2004

Upon this a question arises: whether it be better to be loved than feared or feared than loved?

MonsieurChoc posted:

Just watched Whitey on Netflix. Is... is that legit? Because it's got pretty frightening implications.

I couldn't get through that loving farce. You could see the lawyer/mouthpiece feeding Whitey his lines, for Christ's sake...

"Now James, tell the nice man that you never ever were an FBI informant..."

"I was never ever an FBI informant."

This whole thing was solely intended to give some veneer of credence to his complete bullshit story of never being a rat. He picked off the Italian Mafia in Boston like he was taking target practice, by approaching them to work together and then ratting them out like the rat gently caress he was, getting them put behind bars with the help of his bootlicking buttboy Connolly. Both those loving rat bastards need to die in a fire, along with half the Boston FBI, a couple of US Attorneys and his corrupt-as-gently caress brother Billy.

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The Saddest Rhino
Apr 29, 2009

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What's the thread's view on The Look of Silence (done by the same people who did The Act of Killing)? There's a screening I'm meaning to go on Sunday https://www.facebook.com/events/445355628979601/ but I have conflicting plans on the day itself, and need to weigh my priorities.

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