by ·Comments Off on Land of Silence and Darkness (1971, Werner Herzog)

We follow Fini, a deaf/blind advocate who visits her people in different family and institutional situations. It’s almost a public-service issues doc, showing sad disabled people and explaining how systems have failed them. But ever since watching Little Dieter I’ve known that Herzog likes to take his doc subjects to unusual places, and who else would take a party of blind women to a cactus garden?

Vogel: “confirms Herzog as the mysterious new humanist of the 1970s, light-years removed from the sentimentality of the Italian neorealists and the simplistic propaganda of untalented documentary film radicals.”

Hand communication:

by ·Comments Off on Listers (2025, Owen Reiser)

Absolute charmer of a birdwatching doc – free on youtube and better than most fest-premiering docs we’ve seen lately. Clear from the opening credits that Owen has got visual ideas to spare. His brother Quentin gets most of the face time and has got the charisma to back that up. Most importantly we see hundreds of beautiful birds.

by ·Comments Off on Space Dogs (2019, Elsa Kremser & Levin Peter)

I did not like the lab scene where they implanted an eXistenZ gamepod port into a dog’s underside. After that, I felt free to skip ahead during the other b/w lab horrors. Observational long takes of Moscow street dogs pays off when one is filmed catching and killing a housecat. Or maybe “pays off” isn’t the term, since Kedi played theaters across the country, and this one played nowhere. Narrator (the star of Leviathan) tells of Russia’s history of firing animals into space, intercut with observational doc scenes of Moscow street dogs. The directors followed up with another Moscow street dogs movie, and their first film about people debuts in a couple days at Locarno. The Tori Amos song > the movie… Katy’s least-favorite shorts director edited.

The directors didn’t have space in mind when they started filming [Seventh Row]:

Suddenly, when we found out that Laika had been living on the streets, the film became so rich. These street dogs we see in the film are real explorers. They have to be in order to survive. They have to understand every movement in the city. They have to know how the city is changing and how they can find a place to stay and survive. We found it interesting that there were similarities between these dogs and their ancestors, the heroic cosmonaut dogs.

by ·Comments Off on Paul (2025, Denis Côté)

Told K this isn’t a doc when she asked, but it turns out all of Paul’s social media stuff is real, oops. Paul’s in his oversharing era with public video diaries and Q&As with followers. The #1 thing I like about the movie is the record-crackle sound on certain edits.

by ·Comments Off on When the Levees Broke (2006, Spike Lee)

My blu-ray of Treme is arriving tonight and I just realized I’ve never watched its prequel. I know I started it at least twice, but pretty sure I’ve never made it to part two before, because I don’t recall armed police “defending” the bridges from residents of other parishes.

Historian Doug Brinkley: “I’ve never seen such a time when the US government turned its back on people in need to this degree, to have a people in such dire need getting such little help from the federal government while they’re screaming for help, I think it’s unprecedented.” Maybe in 2005/06 that was new, but it’s doubly depressing to watch this the week FEMA is getting dismantled. Movie opens with Mayor Ray Nagin under great suspicion, then by episode two he becomes a great populist hero fighting for the people, so imagine my disappointment when I pulled him up on wikipedia to see where he went next (to jail for corruption). Fighting for the people might now have gone permanently out of fashion. Very good music, at least.

by ·Comments Off on Homework (1989, Abbas Kiarostami)

Honestly a documentary about homework, interviewing kids about their homework in order to make points about schooling and parenting. AK discusses not knowing what kind of movie he’s making at the beginning (“it’s not really a film, more a piece of research”), and at the end he breaks up the format to engage more deeply with a boy who didn’t want to be interviewed.

Two kids’ ambitions:

During the interviews (the central bulk of the movie) he cuts to the cameraman really frequently, presumably for sound edits. My main takeaway was the kids answering yes/no questions with a clicking sound, which I like even more than the “mmm!”-with-head-nod I picked up from anime.

by ·Comments Off on Blue Velvet docs

Catching up with some Lynch-related artifacts, I’ve got two different behind-the-scenes docs about Blue Velvet.

Blue Velvet Revisited (2016, Peter Braatz)

Movies are magic, but making movies is dull. Occasionally has sync sound, asking unenlightening Qs to Lynch, or sometimes overlaying shoot audio, or sometimes just playing trippy music, flashing up the old footage with fancy titles – it’s tough when you’re trying to piggyback your art off one of my favorite films.

It’s a Strange World (2019, Shane Callahan & Benedict Fancy)

In the first five seconds someone says the town was like a character in the film. Director of the first doc appears in this doc. Props guys tell stories about the ear, the “In Dreams” worklight mic, the brain splatter, a steadicam shot on the stairs, some random little things.