Just as the history of cinema is filled with questions and contestations — did the Lumière brothers invent motion pictures, or does the Edison company’s kinetoscope deserve the credit? — so too is the history of documentary.
Documentary
Posted inArt
Woman of Mystery: Finding Vivian Maier
Today, the name “Vivian Maier” is far from unknown. People around the world have seen and read about Maier’s photographs, taken in New York, Chicago, and countless other places during the second half of the 20th century.
Posted inArt
A Cape-Wearing Futuristic Architect Gets a Documentary
Sporting purple sequins and proposing buildings with moveable dragon fly wings, Eugene Tssui wants to redefine the way we live through an “evolutionary architecture.”
Posted inFilm
Why a New Film on Particle Physics Is Essential Viewing
In terms of understanding the very nature of our world, it’s hard to overestimate the significance of the Large Hadron Collider, and a new documentary makes a very convincing case.
Posted inOpinion
Kung Fu Grandmas in Kenya
Kung Fu Grandma, a new short documentary by London-based director Jeong-One Park, explores a group of elderly Kenyan women who have studied kung fu to protect themselves from rapists.
Posted inArt
All Style, No Substance: Williamsburg in 3D
Stereoscopic, or 3D, vision is a technique usually associated these days with blockbuster movies. But, using a simple stereo camera, Carlton Bright rollerbladed around Williamsburg from 2003 to 2013 documenting a series of “modules” or “vignettes” about the neighborhood he loves and calls home.
Posted inArt
How to Paint Like Vermeer, as Explained by a Techie
CINCINNATI — Tim Jenison is an imaging software engineer who talks like Oracle founder Larry Ellison but looks like artist Chuck Close. Jenison believes he has solved one of the greatest mysteries in art: how did 17th-century Dutch Master Johannes Vermeer paint so photo-realistically 150 years before the invention of photography?
Posted inArt
When a Documentary Film Unveils a Massacre
In 1965–66, Indonesia’s military set off a killing spree. A new documentary film, The Act of Killing, has begun to illuminate the events in an unprecedented way.
Posted inFilm
Cell Phone Images of the War of Terror
The NSA surveillance scandal has, in a short term, made a lot of people feel depressed and/or worried about the state of governance in America. This is both good and bad for Jeremy Scahill’s new documentary, Dirty Wars, which is directed by Richard Rowley and is also the title of a simultaneously released book by Scahill. Good because it casts all of the revelations in the movie in a now easily believable light. Bad because most people don’t want to spend their Friday nights falling even deeper into depression, and that’s what the film will do. Currently playing in select theaters across the country, Dirty Wars will wring you of whatever wide-eyed, wholehearted faith you may have had left in President Obama.
Posted inOpinion
Building Parity: On Women Architects
LOS ANGELES – Too many documentaries on architecture feature the same faces, and they’re mostly male. Same goes for panel discussions, lectures, and exhibits. The new documentary Coast Modern does a better job, yet there’s still far to go.
Posted inArt
Pussy Riot: The Documentary
CINCINNATI — The trending wardrobe of choice for aspiring female protest artists consists of Day-Glo leotards and matching ski masks. Credit the young punk rock performers known as Pussy Riot, feminist activists who led late 2011 civilian protests in Moscow following Vladimir Putin’s controversial reelection as Russia’s president.
Posted inArt
The Many Truths of Nonfiction
Film, like writing, is split categorically between “fiction” and “nonfiction.” This nomenclatural divide most likely stems from a perceived obligation to the audience on the part of nonfiction — the title conveys a promise of vérité. Stories We Tell, the new documentary from Sarah Polley (Away from Her , Take This Waltz ), successfully asserts that there is no objective truth to be found anywhere in “nonfiction.” Polley isn’t the first documentarian to upend audience expectations of reality, but Stories We Tell needs no novelty to succeed; it is a beautiful film.
