As neighborhoods in the United States begin to explode and disappear off the face of the earth due to a rapidly disintegrating infrastructure, distract yourself for moment and watch this film of how San Francisco looked just after the earthquake and fire of 1906. Incredible footage. These days stuff like this happens without even having an earthquake. You’re just sitting at home in America watching your TV and suddenly your children are on fire in their bedrooms and your entire neighborhood is an inferno.
Tag Archives: documentary
A Film About the Secrets of Alchemy
With all of the talk recently about religions that forbid the fundamentally human act of drawing, it is perhaps refreshing to think about a spiritual pursuit that not only encourages the act of drawing, but expresses itself almost entirely through drawings. Alchemy is the subject of this fascinating film. It’s in eight parts and well worth clicking through all the way to the end. The later part of the film features some comments by Carl Jung and there are tons of illustrations to puzzle over. If you can get past some of the slightly amateurish narration, you will be well-rewarded with a presentation of ideas that might be completely new to you. The film gets more interesting toward the last three parts.
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8
What I like about alchemy is the sense I get of people working toward something. The entire history of alchemy is one of people searching for what amounts to a spiritual understanding of themselves through constant questioning and investigation. This seems to me to be superior to most religious practice which primarily involves people accepting instructions from an outside and unverified source.
Thinking About Underground Film – Part 1
If you live in Los Angeles you’ve probably seen it many times: the caravan of white trucks parked along the block and around the corner, diesel generators roaring, cables strung along the gutters, piles of lights, rolls of cables, racks of costumes, makeup trailers, bored extras, bored crew members, bored motorcycle police, and fascinated passersby.
That’s all you need to see to know that something mainstream – feature film, TV show, or commercial – is being made.
But what’s an underground film?
Bad Lit, my favorite site devoted to underground film, has an article about the problem of defining something as slippery as ‘underground film’ in which several definitions are offered by different people. Mike Everleth, the site’s editor, defines underground film this way:
Essentially, I believe it is a film that is a personal statement by one person and a film that dissents radically in form, or in technique, or in content, or perhaps in all three. However, that dissension can take on any number of forms.
I agree with that, but would add the requirement of hostility. There should be an element of combativeness which attempts to counter a much larger established force. There must be some rebellion in the work. It can be very subtle – nearly imperceptible – but it’s usually there somewhere. In fact, I think the hostility should even tend to include the general culture surrounding the filmmaker/s. Dissent, by itself, can be rather subdued, soft-spoken and shy. I think underground film requires a willingness not only to dissent but to kick apart.
While thinking about all this mainstream versus underground stuff, I went searching around on YouTube for something that might fit the discussion. I found this peculiar British documentary film about filmmaker Donald Cammell who co-directed, along with Nicolas Roeg, the 1968 film Performance. The film is one of those odd mixtures of underground and mainstream. It features Mick Jagger and involves a lot of mind-bending drugs, sex and criminal underworld shenanigans. It’s actually impossible to forget once you have seen it.
This film contains adult subject matter, language, nudity and sexual situations.
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
The documentary, Donald Cammell: The Ultimate Performance, describes a time when a group of intensely creative artists from various disciplines could operate on the fringes of the mainstream to create an essentially underground film with something resembling support from a mainstream production company. It’s a scenario that does not exist today. If you watch all 7 parts of the film, you will be immersed in that strange hybrid world of the ‘popular underground’ that defines much of what was happening in the 1960s and 70s. Today, if it cannot be jammed into a mall and sold with Sour Patch Kids, it won’t get any money. That holds as true for ‘independent’ films as it does for summer blockbusters.
Watching this documentary makes me wonder why so many filmmakers seem to have such trouble making the films they really want to make. After all, one can purchase a cheap camera and make exactly what one wants regardless of what one’s career and money-earning responsibilities might be. Tormented filmmakers who are battling studois for creative freedom should simply make films with video cameras during their spare time. This would not only foster a healthy underground, but it would quite possibly prevent a few tragic endings.
Documentary: Hollywood in the Beginning
Film: Die Schneider Krankheit
This 2008 film was written, produced and directed by Javier Chillon of Madrid, Spain. The director of photography was Luis Fuentes. Artistic direction by Ángel Boyano. In the fifties, a Soviet cosmonaut chimpanzee crash-lands in West Germany. Within weeks, a deadly virus has spread across the country and confounds all the scientific experts. The film is composed of entirely original footage made to look like a fifties documentary or newsreel. The very first shots with the camera tilting down through the trees to show us the crash site at long range is a nearly prefect rendition of old documentary style right down to how the camera would move. You have to really know what you are doing to come up with shots like that. Very fine work.
This is science fiction that is a deadly accurate portrayal of the calm, governmental, ponderous yet urgent, carefully-framed and full-of-import quality found in mid-century documentary films. The humor is sly and builds its effect gradually. It’s also somewhat frightening.
Found at No fat clips!!!
Huffington Post Presents Advertiser’s Commercial as News
I go over to The Huffington Post, a site that defines the words ‘mess’ and ‘indecipherable’ better than any dictionary could, looking for some news, and I come across a story entitled Secret Oil Rigs in Los Angeles Uncovered. ‘Ho ho!’ I thought. ‘Here’s something interesting and probably full of nasty secret pollution and damage to our health by oil companies!’ And of course I went stumbling right into the fake news trap. Watch the ‘documentary’ above. Notice how the young fellow doing the talking and walking is dressed kind of down with his jeans and boots. Notice how the camera has a tendency to swoop to his feet. To show the boots. A lot. The documentary, which purports to uncover the hidden oil rigs pumping crude from underneath Los Angeles, is presented on Huffington as being by Palladium Boots. Unless you click on the link, you don’t realize that Palladium Boots is not the name of a fantastic little production outfit making cool films, but rather a boot company selling… boots.
So now we’ve got a major news and political opinion site putting up an article that looks like news about hidden oil wells in an urban center, but is really an advertisement. The implication is that we are going to see the documentary confront issues surrounding these wells. Issues like how many children would die if one of these things blew up next to their schoolyard. Or how many people each year will get cancer because of oil wells nextdoor. Instead we get a guy tramping around LA asking insipid non-questions and only hinting at darker possibilities. We get a smattering of LA history and a lot of amazement at how well-hidden the wells are. Frankly, if you’re in LA for more than 48 hours and don’t know about the wells, you are hopefully just passing through on your way to Orange County. The real problem here is that a film produced as a corporate advertisement cannot confront real issues because the producers don’t want to create any real disturbance. So they dodge all the important questions. You’d think, after watching this ad, that oil drilling in LA is something just dandy. Wonderful! They’re pumping oil from under junior’s school! Lovely! We’re all better off for it!
But we’re just watching a boot commercial. That’s it. It’s not a cool citizen news report or hip internet filmmaking. It’s just a company hawking its crappy boots to nitwits who think they are learning something. A simple illustration of why this is so bad is to imagine your reaction if you found out that I had been paid by this boot company to write this very blog post. You would never trust me again. So what does that tell us about the Huffington Post site?
A smarter idea for this fake-news documentary would be to film a barefoot reporter who walks into the oil company executive’s office and politely asks him if he’d like to sit his own children down next to an oil well for a few years to see if they drop dead of cancer. When thrown out of the oil company’s offices, the barefoot reporter would stagger down the street begging for a pair of shoes. He’d end up with a pair of pink stilettos that fit him perfectly. Just like Cinderella.
That would be my fake-news commercial.