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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.
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