Documentaries List Discussion & Suggestions (Genre Project)

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domino harvey
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Re: Documentaries List Discussion & Suggestions (Genre Project)

#476 Post by domino harvey » Thu Oct 08, 2020 2:24 pm

After having seen a great number of its rip-offs, I finally watched the original Mondo Cane and it's surprising how much more vulgar and ridiculous it is than any of the antecedents I've seen-- a real accomplishment! I watched it with the English narration, which was so consistently and ludicrously white supremacist that it quickly became comical. Like all the fake Mondos that came after, a lot of the things we see are clearly bullshit set up by the filmmakers, but that's part of the "fun"-- though, to be honest, I didn't think this was nearly as fun as I'd hoped. I guess I'm not super into watching hogs slowly get beaten to death by sticks or snakes skinned alive, et al. The broken glass religious martyrs were the ones that really got me to squirm in my seat, though. Good lord, I don't need to see someone raze their legs with glass and leave bloody puddles in their wake.

All of these kind of movies do remind me with better pleasure of that great 80s TV treat Ripley's-- Believe It or Not, hosted by Jack Palance and equally a mix of bullshit and weird repurposed footage. But Palance is so entertaining as the host and the narration so much fun that they're a real treat. Unfortunately there's only a few episodes up on YouTube but I've been thinking about picking up a bootleg DVD-R set of the series from the online black market. You'd think one of these labels like Severin would license and release the series, it's completely in line with their kind of tastes.

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colinr0380
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Re: Documentaries List Discussion & Suggestions (Genre Project)

#477 Post by colinr0380 » Fri Oct 09, 2020 4:22 am

I remember spending an entire Saturday watching that Blue Underground set back in October 2003 and felt much the same way about the Mondo Cane film and its sequel. There is that really ridiculous revelling in the superficial surfaces of extremes of behaviour (getting at nothing much deeper than a "Look at these weird foreign customs. Aren't you glad that you don't live there, have to eat that or have to mutilate yourself in that way? But also look at these beautiful women too" approach) that kind of gets expressed in the film by that constant almost bi-polar shifting back and forth revelling in moving without warning between the sweet and the sour, going from a subject so tame and twee on the one hand and then lashings of gore, corpses, self mutilation and animal violence on the other. I guess that the films are partly fulfilling that desire to see less sanitised material that would never pass the broadcast standards of the mainstream news media of the day (plus a much more partisan voice over narration than I think could ever pass muster in a 'news reportage' piece!) and partly a strange outgrowth of those Cinerama travelogue films, replacing widescreen vistas with other forms of more gruelling spectacle from around the world.

As far as I can recall Women of the World struck me as being really underwhelming, especially sandwiched in between the screenings of Mondo Cane and Mondo Cane 2 since that film, as implied by its title, is minimising the 'extreme' content to the utmost and instead padding out its run time entirely with the boring tame and twee female navel gazing stories instead. I am in no hurry to return back to that one any time soon but I seem to recall long sequences of white South African ladies in bikinis bouncing up and down on trampolines and the 'empowering' sight of Israeli female soldiers whilst the narration twitters incredulously about how deadly and dangerous they must be for simply being in an army (but yet they are still beautiful women too, just look at how they fill out their uniforms!).

All of that felt relatively tame even back in 2003 before YouTube existed but especially now with the internet and so much more extreme, and far more 'real', video material available at the click of the button there is really no particular need for these kind of films anymore (or even really television programmes either which is where this material really migrated to in the 1980s and 1990s with all of the programmes about police chases and people being arrested, along with the 'funny' home video clip craze, whilst the much more mondo stuff became the subject of underground video tapes).

But then later on during that fateful Saturday evening in October 2003 I reached Africa Addio and Goodbye Uncle Tom which are simply jawdropping. It is hard to describe Africa Addio's mixture of verite footage, bluntly biased narration (which is quite drastically different in content between the English and Italian soundtracks!), staged sequences (including staging real executions?), real footage of aftermath of civil wars, and the inevitable animal violence when the human death toll just doesn't appear to be high enough. Which leads to the astonishingly saccharine digression into saving a baby giraffe whose mother has been killed by poachers and then helicoptering it off into the sunset whilst the most romantic ballad there has ever been warbles on! That deliriously over-emotional sequence alone, especially coming after all of the real carnage on display, has seared the film into my memory!

And then what to say about Goodbye Uncle Tom, the film which tackles the subject of slavery through a dramatic conceit of sending documentary filmmakers back through time (and immediately allying them with the slavers) to do an unflinching mondo-style view on the practices of the trade (through staged re-enactments involving hundreds of extras under the auspices of Papa Doc's regime) that ends up being more harrowing and upsetting than any number of worthy, less exploitative historical dramas about the same subject. Just that moment when Riz Ortolani's gorgeously syrupy musical ballad number "Oh My Love" (which later got appropriated for a scene in Nicholas Winding Refn's Drive) rises up as the documentarians fly in in their helicopter (mirroring certain shots in Africa Addio) over a cotton plantation, buffeting all of the extras around and sending slaves sprawling for cover in the wake of the rotors as they simultaneously pretend to be happily welcoming their time travelling visitors to the Deep South, is absolutely astonishing!

I don't know how to describe them as nothing seems to come close to the whiplashing tonal shifts on display in those last two films. Just the word "audacious" does not seem to cover it. Neither does "daring" or "opportunistic", though they are undoubtedly somewhat applicable, as are "exploitative" and "dangerous". They are blundering, bizarre and certainly not for the faint hearted or easily offended, but I think they are absolutely fascinating as a kind of unfiltered look at the world and mid-1960s, early 1970s meditation on the end of colonialism and the upheavals in Africa which both preceded and followed that period through the psyche of a pair of white Italian filmmakers, which is certainly a perspective I don't think I had been exposed to before! Much like Cannibal Holocaust I think they are (inadvertently? self implicating? or simply emotionally moved at specific shocking moments rather than intellectually curious, as in the earlier Mondo films which are much more focused on emotional impact on the audience) delineating some kind of outlying boundary between fictional and staged footage and the dangerously fine line between accepting images (and narration!) at face value, and they are perhaps at their most valuable for puncturing that lofty sense of 'safe documentary distance' from events in the most extreme ways possible.

I cannot in good conscience recommend them, but I will certainly never forget them either!
Last edited by colinr0380 on Thu Oct 15, 2020 1:48 pm, edited 3 times in total.

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domino harvey
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Re: Documentaries List Discussion & Suggestions (Genre Project)

#478 Post by domino harvey » Fri Oct 09, 2020 9:19 am

Those later phony docs sound perversely fascinating, as I can’t think of any filmmakers I trust less to talk about race relations than these ones! Great point about these being an evolution of the Cinerama travelogues. They also show just how good and smart the Reichenbach film on America and Rouch’s work are as active and playful ethnographies without a lot of the baggage of these kind of movies (or so say I, knowing full well many modern scholars disagree on Rouch). I have Mondo Cane 2 and the women one on the docket, but I’m even less optimistic than I already was!

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colinr0380
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Re: Documentaries List Discussion & Suggestions (Genre Project)

#479 Post by colinr0380 » Fri Oct 09, 2020 12:24 pm

I would love to see TCM attempt to do a 'contextual introduction' to Goodbye Uncle Tom some time!

For something a bit 'tamer' ( :D ) I would also highly recommend Prosperi's 1983 solo effort Wild Beasts, which appears to be trying to be a kind of environmental allegory, but is on similarly shaky ground talking about treating animals well as he was on colonialism and African civil war! That is what makes those films so jaw dropping though, as they feel like parodies but done with an entirely straight face and dealing with literally deadly serious material!

I wrote the experience of watching it up a couple of years back in the Severin thread.

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domino harvey
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Re: Documentaries List Discussion & Suggestions (Genre Project)

#480 Post by domino harvey » Fri Oct 09, 2020 11:50 pm

In a real twist, I actually quite enjoyed Mondo Cane 2, which has a cheekier sense of humor and weird anti-British sentiment throughout, apparently in response to the first film being banned there for the dog eating scene. This is addressed head on by the film as the narrator tells us there won't be any more footage of dogs being mistreated... after this first scene, which they included upfront to make the British censor's job easier! (And fear not dog lovers, it's just footage of an alleged dog vocal chord removal surgery) I'm guessing the first film caught shit for all the racist crap too because this one even sneaks in a pretty good progressive dig after showing a Southern town joyously celebrating a cowboy festival together, as the narrator slyly notes that "this year they left out the lynchings of negroes." And what the hell was up with that out of nowhere great single take traveling shot of all the bloody tableaus being photographed for pulp magazines, which coupled with the fun last ten minutes seems to come from a much better film? Also, per my rec of Ripley's-- Believe It or Not!, I was tickled to see that the show actually lifted the face slapping recital from this movie as an uncredited repurposed segment! Overall, this was much milder but far more entertaining than the original. Not a great movie, but definitely on the higher end of these kind of films.

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dustybooks
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Re: Documentaries List Discussion & Suggestions (Genre Project)

#481 Post by dustybooks » Tue Nov 24, 2020 1:41 am

Maybe a strange place to post this but I had to vent about a frustrating experience. Remembering an excellent documentary about punk rock that I saw on PBS in the late ‘90s, I thought I’d traced it to the Time-Life/Warners DVD box The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll, which I picked up used and have been enjoying, though it seemed a little more superficial than the episode I remembered. Lo and behold, the punk episode is entirely different from what I saw. So investigating online it turns out that there are two very similar documentary miniseries, released in consecutive years (1995 and 1996), and the one I was looking for was produced by WGBH and the BBC and is simply called Rock & Roll (or, in the UK, Dancing in the Street). Unfortunately it doesn’t appear the latter has ever been on DVD... a VHS edition exists but is quite rare; some very low quality rips are on YouTube and bootleg DVD sets occasionally appear. I rewatched the punk episode on YouTube and was again very taken with it — in depth, intelligent, with clips and interviews well chosen — but good heavens, what a drag the quality is. Anyway, if you can find a better version anywhere it seems like a terrific series (and please let me know if you turn one up...).

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therewillbeblus
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Re: Documentaries List Discussion & Suggestions (Genre Project)

#482 Post by therewillbeblus » Sun Feb 14, 2021 4:43 pm

Why Beauty Matters (Louise Lockwood, 2009): I hesitated to put this in the documentary section (it really belongs more in the Faith list), as it’s essentially an essay film arguing that beauty in all its forms (love, art, architecture, human bodies, nature etc.) is the closest we as human beings can get to the spiritual; the ordinary of the natural that elicits symbolic revelations. I love the historical fusion of science, philosophy, and spirituality, and the framed tragedy in how modern science and ensuing skepticism dissolved the space set aside for enigmatic values and ideas, deviating all attention into measurable, palpable functionality. Roger Scruton can't cover enough material in under an hour for a strong documentary, but as a passionate charge for us to re-incorporate an important and neglected vision of spiritual significance in our current, exponentially-disconnecting era, it's magnificent. I can already see the masses of people critiquing this film on the grounds of inherent objective meaning as ill-fitting with our postmodern understandings of personal truths and even at-odds with the individualized experiences of engaging with the transcendental stimuli, but they're missing the point because this thesis is to make room for objective beauty that affects us all in our individual ways. The counter point to this is the idea of art being art "because I say it is" - which erases the unification in beauty, that may give us personalized meaning but binds us together as a people too. The late statement that pushes for us to consider beauty's importance as the vital place where "the real and ideal can still exist in harmony" extends that harmony for us to connect with one another, and I took this film to be less of a call to abandon our current frameworks for meaning-making and more to loop in this historically yet timelessly significant lens as well. It exists whether we pay attention to it or not, but paying attention to it makes life so much richer, and gets us closest to the meaning of life; that I believe, and that is all Scruton is really passionate about in his persuasion. Max Richter's Vladimir's Blues, later expanded upon for The Leftovers, is also used majestically here- and for those who have seen that show, it's no surprise it was repurposed there since the piece is drenched in the awe of abstract spirituality seen in the corporeal!

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senseabove
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Re: Documentaries List Discussion & Suggestions (Genre Project)

#483 Post by senseabove » Sun Feb 14, 2021 7:48 pm

Two recommendations: based on what you describe liking in that, search out Gabriel Josipovici's On Trust, and, if you haven't already, read some more about Scruton before getting too excited about him. It's been faaaaar too long for me to make anything like a detailed argument, and I have no desire to refresh my memory because just seeing his name still makes my skin crawl—my first impulse was to reply to your post with a vehemently simple, "Nope, fuck Roger Scruton right to hell"—but I read a fair chunk of him back in the day, and his fundamentalism is intrinsic to his aesthetics. There are critics who have endeavored to salvage beauty as a valuable feature of aesthetic experience and to balance modern skepticism without grounding their efforts in a worldview that enthusiastically embraces a retrograde religious fundamentalism as Scruton does—perhaps not in that doc, but certainly elsewhere. Josipovici is one of them, and was my perpetual ally during knock-down, drag-out arguments about Scruton's aesthetics with a grad school professor of analytic aesthetic philosophy who assigned and argued for him (and who has since become one of the foremost TERFs in British academia, fwiw).

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therewillbeblus
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Re: Documentaries List Discussion & Suggestions (Genre Project)

#484 Post by therewillbeblus » Sun Feb 14, 2021 8:16 pm

I totally get that, and his fundamentalism certainly shines though in the way you describe- which is again why I think this is not good if viewed as a documentary, as he's spinning his wheels towards some pretty extremist rhetoric. The guy's points are so easy to challenge when taken as mutually exclusive from the building blocks of our current critical thinking skills, and from that angle he's begging for people to ravage his argument. However, it was easy for me to overlook the dogmatic dismissals of our current culture and see that there's room for both- the man has some great points when we see these outlooks as not mutually exclusive but important complements. So yes, it's a bit like religion that way- we don't need to bow down to its extremism or even become a student of its church in order to grasp valuable principles from it. I think simply writing his ideas off because they at times involve the invalidation of our current processing patterns is unfortunate, though understandable since it's triggering by nature- though it means we miss out on the good points next to the problems. For me this essay film was not one to rally behind in its literalism, and more of a reminder of a missing piece perspective that has great truth to glean from.

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senseabove
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Re: Documentaries List Discussion & Suggestions (Genre Project)

#485 Post by senseabove » Mon Feb 15, 2021 1:47 am

I'm not writing his ideas off because they "at times involve the invalidation" of currently dominant thought patterns; I'm writing them off because I engaged with them pretty extensively over a period of several months in an academic setting explicitly and entirely focused on his primary field, analytic aesthetic philosophy, and found them to be fundamentally dependent on a bigotry which, stem to stern, I want absolutely no part of. (And that was before I read about his arguments that moral condemnation of homosexuals is justifiable because sexual attraction is founded on an appreciation of difference and therefore to be sexually attracted to sameness is a perversion of nature. So... )

But to reiterate, it sounds like a lot of what Scruton reveals as "missing" that you find valuable overlaps a lot with what I found very literally life-changing about Josipovici's ideas when I found them. Scruton is arguing from a conservative, analytical position against viewpoints that Josipovici argues are themselves a misinterpretation of and reaction to capital-M Modernism. In other words, they're both trying to salvage elements of culture—both artifacts and mindset—that many witting or unwitting inheritors of Modernism have written off as forever lost to us. Referencing the dead-horse caricature of Duchamp that art is art "because I say it is" as Scruton's straw man is a perfect example of the kind of sunderance both are arguing never actually occurred, for entirely different reasons. "Fountain" was a specific argument made in an extremely specific context, one which Josipovici explores, only briefly (in Whatever Happened to Modernism?, not On Trust, though he also wrote a novel loosely based on Duchamp), but it's an excellent, succinct example of how Modernism was egregiously misread by those who came after, whether they claimed to be in support or opposition—whether Koons or Scruton. The more interesting element of his argument, though, is that Modernism was the flowering of half a millenium of artistic development, not a sudden break at the turn of a century, and his exploration of that continuity is where it sounds like you'd find something of interest and more broadly valuable. You mention Scruton's argument about "the real and ideal" coexisting within beauty, so I'll point specifically to Josipovici's reading, in On Trust, of Proust's comparison of Giotto's depiction of Caritas with a young servant girl.

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therewillbeblus
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Re: Documentaries List Discussion & Suggestions (Genre Project)

#486 Post by therewillbeblus » Mon Feb 15, 2021 1:59 am

Sorry senseabove, I should clarify that I meant writing the ideas off as such within the context of this film, not within the context in which you consumed his more in-depth ethos (I've read quite a few reviews of Why Beauty Matters and that shallow triggering is the thread running through them, mostly all negative). The film only threatens viewers on that vague surface level, but I can absolutely believe that his philosophy extends to some very problematic places, and it sounds like- as a more thorough examination of this film's 101 offering- On Trust is worth seeking out. I appreciate the rec, it's now on my (exceedingly long) book list.

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Lemmy Caution
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Re: Documentaries List Discussion & Suggestions (Genre Project)

#487 Post by Lemmy Caution » Wed Sep 01, 2021 2:03 am

Richard Brody in the New Yorker: Sixty-two Films That Shaped the Art of Documentary Filmmaking
A very interesting list with short write-ups. Plenty of docs I was totally unaware of.

“Strange Victory” (1948, Leo Hurwitz) about black soldiers returning to the apartheid America after fighting in WWII for freedom.
“The Children Were Watching” (1961, Robert Drew) about integration in New Orleans (and violent white opposition)
“Belarmino” (1964, Fernando Lopes) about a Portuguese boxer
“A Time for Burning” (1966, William Jersey) -- religious racism
“Marjoe” (1972, Sarah Kernochan and Howard Smith)
In this film, which won an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature before disappearing from circulation (it was restored and reissued in 2005), Marjoe Gortner, who had been a child-star preacher, returns to the pulpit as an adult for a farewell tour, which he uses to repudiate the world of organized religion. His riveting stage persona fills the screen with the ecstasy and the skepticism of the age of rock; he collaborates with the filmmakers to reveal the tricks of his trade and, in on-camera discussions, discloses the painful story of his exploitation.
“The Police Tapes” (1977, Alan and Susan Raymond) - embedded with South Bronx police mid-70's

and more ...


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therewillbeblus
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Re: Documentaries List Discussion & Suggestions (Genre Project)

#489 Post by therewillbeblus » Tue Mar 28, 2023 8:05 pm

My friend's son is about to direct a one-act play and asked for suggestions for a movie or doc about the creative process of directing. Anyone have any suggestions? I'm sure I know a few but my mind's drawing a blank

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kuzine
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Re: Documentaries List Discussion & Suggestions (Genre Project)

#490 Post by kuzine » Tue Mar 28, 2023 8:13 pm

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One?



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zedz
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Re: Documentaries List Discussion & Suggestions (Genre Project)

#491 Post by zedz » Tue Mar 28, 2023 10:53 pm

kuzine wrote:
Tue Mar 28, 2023 8:13 pm
Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One?
That should scare him off!

Drive My Car, Gang of Four, Vanya on 42nd Street, various Wiseman and Pennebaker documentaries?

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swo17
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Re: Documentaries List Discussion & Suggestions (Genre Project)

#492 Post by swo17 » Tue Mar 28, 2023 11:01 pm

Pacino's Looking for Richard would seem to address your question directly. Or, if you prefer to be abstract, El sol del membrillo!

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therewillbeblus
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Re: Documentaries List Discussion & Suggestions (Genre Project)

#493 Post by therewillbeblus » Wed Mar 29, 2023 12:16 am

Thanks! Not sure if this kid will wanna do this anymore if he watches most of these (good-to-great films!) but Drive My Car is actually a really interesting rec

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