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I have low tolerance for self indulgent artsyness and Tarkovsky films look superficially like they might be in this category, which is a shame because, as Tony the Tiger might say, they’re great. Nothing comes as close to a moving painting as a Tarkovsky film.
Here is a documentary where the director recounts his life and work.
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Total time: approx. 50 mins.
Jonny Kennedy lived 4 decades with a dreadful illness that causes unimaginable pain, before contracting terminal cancer. But he was not scared or bitter. For him this mortal coil was a burden that once lifted by death would set him free for an afterlife which would be wonderful.
Kennedy agreed to make a documentary of his last months, which is a groundbreaking for several reasons. It deals with a profound issue head on, with humor and insight and with neither clawing sentimentality nor morbid voyeurism. The success of the film is principally the result of the endearing personality of Kennedy, who narrates the path leading up to his own death as if he is speaking from the grave.
The moment when he briefly lets his guard down is one of the most emotionally powerful pieces of television I have ever seen. Jonny Kennedy lived a life to remember and left a film to help do just that.
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There should be plenty of things to watch about Darwin this year, as we mark 200 years since his birth, and 50 since the law (in the traditional sense) of Evolution by Natural Selection was first presented.
This is the first in a 3 part series, presented by Dawkins, with the following parts being shown on Channel 4 in the UK, next, and the following Monday.
Running time: 48 mins.
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Jon Ronson’s Documentary about Kubrick. What the hell is he talking about at the start?
If an artist painted each picture she did in a different style, we would think her a fraud, or at least derivative. One way of showing you meant something and to demonstrate a style is to repeat it. A single Jackson Pollock might have looked accidental and wouldn’t have made a splash, as it were.
Kubrick set out to create definitive films in different genres and with different styles (Sci Fi: 2001, Horror: The Shining, War: Full Metal Jacket, Epic: Spartacus). Astoundingly, he pulled it off.
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A touching documentary about Ian Shaw, whose daughter died on the Swiss Air flight 111 from New York to Geneva in 1998. Shaw, a very successful Geneva business man, moved on his own to the site of the crash in Novia Scotia, where he bought a diner.
My wife, who is from near Geneva, had a friend who died on this flight, on his way home after a year traveling.
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A refreshingly candid and fascinating view into what its like to be born rich, most specifically, to be born rich in America.
1 hr 7 min 49 sec Oct 25, 2006
“Born Rich”
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bbc
59 min 54 sec Mar 1, 2008 myspace.com
I’ll just repeat what I said about MacGowan in the Nick Cave post:
“The Pogues front man, although Irish, is a once preppy schoolboy from one of the most exclusive private schools in England, who created a fake persona of an Irish drunk, in the name of authenticity – to the point where it actually became real. MacGowan is, no doubt, both a genuinely troubled genius and self-indulgent, racist, self-parody of an Irishman.”
And that’s about someone I really like.
BBC Documentary Shane MacGowan
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On the one hand, I have always liked Nick Cave, as one of the more cerebral pop stars, on the other I can’t help thinking that he fits the mould of self inflicted misery that is ultimately a pose.
In broad strokes, but not in the details, Nick Cave shares something with Shane MacGowan. The Pogues front man, although Irish, is a once preppy schoolboy from one of the most exclusive private schools in England, who created a fake persona of an Irish drunk, in the name of authenticity – to the point where it actually became real. MacGowan is, no doubt, both a genuinely troubled genius and self-indulgent, racist, self-parody of an Irishman. Cave’s heroin raddled persona, epitomized by his cameo as the bohemian Berlin singer in Wings of Desire is similarly caught between gritty realism and pretentious poncery. I’m not sure which is real, but the music is nonetheless decent, proving, ironically, that neither image nor integrity is everything.
47 min 32 sec Feb 19, 2008
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A Smashing viewer suggested this great documentary about seminal electronic music composer, Tristram Cary.
Cary was involved in the design of a pre-Moog synth, created the distinctive Hammer House of Horror sound and composed music running the gamut of the UK film and TV industry from Ealing Comedies to Dr Who.
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When Evel Knievel died last year it felt like Elvis had died, finally. Knievel wore the same satin flared outfits as late period, paunched and side-burned Presley.
He was representative of a peculiarly American Maverick adventurer culture that I remember from childhood, where conservatives like John Wayne seemed cool to us would-be liberals. Unfortunately these True Grit types have been passed away leaving the anemic, conservative, cultural window-dressing of Pottery Barn, McMansions and Evangelical Christianity.
The documentary is presented by Richard Hammond from Top Gear, a program which is being brought from the UK to the US, largely as a result of its cult following via YouTube. 48 hours before the film crew arrived Evel had a stroke, he died 4 months after filming and the program was aired afterwards. Like Top Gear, the film is interesting even if you are not remotely interested in things like cars or motorbikes, only its a tad more cerebral.
BBC
58 min 57 sec Dec 26, 2007
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Its really hard to recognize what defines a decade when you are in it, but I would hazard a guess that mindless celebrity culture might be it. Obviously, celebrity has always been a huge component of culture, but recently it has become the dominant one. This has been a decade where America went to war and nobody paid attention because they were more interested in Paris Hilton’s court outfit.
There are three ways to become famous: create something, kill someone or take your clothes off in public. Paris chose the latter and, amazingly, managed to become a stable of mainstream TV, where you can’t say the word fuck, by actually fucking in front of millions. Paris Hilton is interesting because she wanted fame not fortune, she already had money. A person so utterly desperate for fame that she literally prostituted herself to bootstrap it, when she really didn’t have to turn any tricks.
I can’t get away with accusing Paris Hilton for her part in the downfall of Empire, like the decadents of latter day Rome, without a theory as to why that might be, so here it is:
It’s the Internet’s fault.
When you connect things together to make information flow more easily, you exacerbate the fame effect. No single theater actor had ever been as famous as Valentino had become, within a few years of the development of cinema. The Internet is an even bigger force for celebrity, but its not in the web savvy people’s interest to acknowledge, so people will automatically champion ideas of benign plurality like ‘the long tail’.
There is a long tail, but it is of finite size, the number of niches within it being defined by people’s natural grouping and competition for their attention. This fixed size is analogous to the distribution of species on earth which is incredibly constant. In other words there may be a place for a guy from Ohio who knows everything about folding bicycles to do very well on the internet, but only at the expense of the other folding bicycle niche sites. At the other end of the spectrum we have Paris Hilton, who occupies of of the niches that is larger than the entire long tail itself. Paris Hilton is a Gorgon monster whose fame is big enough to swallow whole, 99.9% of all the other niche celebrities put together by occupying the slice marked: mainstream.
There is a light at the end of the tunnel, thankfully. The Internet will create a more bland YouTube, celebrity clip culture, but like the span of clips themselves, the lifespan and churn of mega stardom with be faster than ever before. Life will be hard for celebrities as they realize that the meritocracy of the Internet is not in the ability to be famous, but the fact that fame and fall from grace are in the hands of the masses, like never before.
In 2018 most people will never have heard of Paris Hilton. But her fall into obscurity will be as traumatic as being shown fucking on YouTube would be for all of us who will, thankfully, always be obscure.
Here is a documentary that examines this morbid reality.
44 min 11 sec Jan 3, 2008
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A film about the murder of former Italian Prime Minister, Aldo Moro, by the Red Brigades in 1978. This was a seminal moment in Italy’s history, comparable to the assassination of JFK. Its also been the subject of so much fiction that its good to watch a documentary on the subject.
45 min 0 sec Dec 15, 2007
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A documentary about John Carpenter is the only setting where Kurt Russell’s appearance on screen doesn’t have me reaching for the off button.
Image Entertainment 59 min 58 sec Dec 11, 2007
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What’s most interesting about this documentary is not just the subject, but how representative it is of a particular 60s French style. In other words a very 60s French documentary about a Spaniard who worked in France and made timeless movies. The interviewees include Max Ernst.
Office de Radiodiffusion Television Francaise 37 min 25 sec Dec 30, 2006
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Margaret Mead was one of the world’s most celebrated anthropologists. After living with a small Samoan tribe, in the 20s, she published research which suggested nurture was more important than nature, a view shared by her supervisor at Columbia but few others.
This lead to one of the most famous controversies in science, after it was strongly refuted by another anthropologist, Derek Freeman. It’s a controversy that is still unresolved, although a dramatic documentary made in 1987 proved that her evidence was flawed.
Mead argued that the passage from childhood to adulthood in Samoa was a smooth and not marked by the angst and stress seen in the United States. One possible reason: Samoan women deferred marriage for many years while enjoying casual sex, but eventually married, settled down, and successfully reared their own children. Not the kind of society that had values that many Americans shared, in the 20s when it was assumed that less developed societies were primitive in all aspects.
Its very funny that the principal controversy perfectly describes most Western societies today, and yet the debate seems to have pushed this fact, that the initial conditions are now synchronized, into the background. There was no word for teenager in the 20s. Our societies seem to have more rite of passage angst and later settling down – or at least people singing about it. Without our Samoan style society there would be no Emo bands from Brooklyn, or double-wide strollers containing the result of fertility-enhanced, older-couple, pregnancies.
It is a classic case of where politics and science collide, and one that could surely be studied as an anthropological phenomenon in itself. The ‘meta’ nature of it is what appeals to me.
58 min 53 sec Feb 15, 2007
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Child prodigies, as exemplified by Marc Yu, a seven-year-old concert pianist.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” the child psychologist asks. “A psychiatrist” says Marc, adding “only joking”.
I particularly like the scene where he looks bored and turns away from the psychologist, rocking back and forth on a stool in a very ordinary childlike manner, except that he is playing Mary Had a Little Lamb, backwards, behind his back, on the piano. A song he picked out when he was two.
46 min 57 sec Aug 26, 2007
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1 hr 6 min 43 sec Oct 6, 2007 laurelandhardyforum.com
I’m not normally a fan of slapstick era humor, but Laurel and Hardy are an exception. Even better is the fact that this documentary features all sorts of other funny people. It is narrated by the legendary Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise. The video quality is not great, at the beginning.
Link
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This is an odd but fascinating movie. Derek Jarman was often self indulgent as a film maker, but he innovated, and some of what he did was great. He directed the seminal punk movie, Jubilee, many of the Smiths’ pop promos and a beautifully filmed portrait of the painter Caravaggio. The self indulgent stuff included the simultaneously hyper camp and mind numbingly dull Sebastiane, which was entirely in Latin.
Wittgenstein is an interesting subject, being one of the few philosophers that wasn’t entirely self indulgent.
BBC 1 hr 11 min 53 sec Sep 21, 2007
philosophy.dude.googlepages.com
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Even if information theory doesn’t become the cornerstone of Physics, an outcome that now seems plausible, Shannon’s contribution to science is immeasurable. The encoding in this video itself is a result of Shannon’s ideas.
People are just starting to put up statues of Shannon, in future he will surely be remembered as the most important home grown scientist of the 20th Century.
Trivia: Shannon was a distant relative of Edison.
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Great profile of the genre breaking Science Fiction author J.G. Ballard
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