Posts tagged ‘film’
Buster’s Best
The General. 1926. USA. Directed by Buster Keaton, Clyde Bruckman
These notes accompany the Buster’s Best program, which screens on March 17, 18, and 19 in Theater 3.
The career of Buster Keaton (1895–1966) is both one of the cinema’s glories and one of its greatest tragedies. If one measures auteurism by a director’s ability to visualize an alternative personal universe on film, then Keaton ranks near the top. Buster’s vision of a world where machinery and Nature perpetually challenge human ingenuity and survival is made credible by his uniquely precise mastery of both the mechanics of his art form and the musculature of his own body—and his establishment of a link between the two. In a sense, he was a bionic man a half-century before Lee Majors. Read more
1 Comments | Tags: auteurist, Buster Keaton, Charles Chaplin, film
The Documentary Expands
Grass: A Nation’s Battle for Life. 1925. USA. Directed by Merian C. Cooper, Ernest B. Schoedsack
These notes accompany The Documentary Expands, which screens on March 10, 11, and 12 in Theater 3.
Calling Merian C. Cooper (1893–1973) and Ernest B. Schoedsack (1893–1979) auteurs may seem like fudging a little bit, but I don’t think it is. Yet the doubt creeps in on two levels. First, while film is undeniably a collaborative medium, the auteur theory argues that there is a singular dominant creator. The bond between these guys, however, seems so seamless in their films as to be almost unique. The other reason for hedging is that they first made their collaborative mark in documentary film, a form that presupposes that the director cannot mold his material as freely as can the maker of narrative films. (It has become obvious in subsequent decades that even the most “pure” cinéma vérité is subject to manipulation at the hands of masters like Jean Rouch or Fred Wiseman.) And it is, of course, true that immediately after Grass, Cooper and Schoedsack began to move away from authentic actuality. Read more
0 Comments | Tags: auteurist, documentary film, Ernest B. Schoedsack, film, Joris Ivens, Merian C. Cooper
Cubicle Critic: Oscar-Nominated Documentary Shorts
The prized Academy Award® statuette. Image courtesy Oscar.com
“The Oscars are my Super Bowl”—it’s something of a cliché in our media-obsessed world, especially among twenty-something women such as myself, but there you have it anyway. I’m not a football fan, and to me March madness refers to the stir-craziness that inevitably accompanies the last weeks before spring. But a celebration of the silver screen, of stars established and emerging, of glamorous dresses and fashion flops—that I can get behind.
So it’s with particular relish that I see the annual screening of Academy Award–nominated short documentaries at MoMA each year. Apart from being an invaluable research tool for my local, all-in-good-fun Oscar Pool, seeing the nominees in some of the smaller categories is a great way to add some interest to the ever-lengthening Oscars telecast (not to mention the serious cinematic cred it garners you among your friends). Read more
2 Comments | Tags: Academy Awards, documentary filmmaking, film
An Eisenstein Double Bill
Battleship Potemkin. 1925. USSR. Directed by Sergei Eisenstein
These notes accompany the Eisenstein Double Bill program, which screens on March 3, 4, and 5 in Theater 3.
Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948) is a special case in many ways. He was undeniably one of the geniuses of the early cinema. As a theoretician, he wrote voluminously, positing his theory of montage (editing), derived from the work of D. W. Griffith (most notably from Intolerance). Eisenstein’s theory, which directly contradicted the German Expressionist approach most successfully promulgated by F. W. Murnau, was enormously influential on countless directors, although it did not always produce satisfactory results. Read more
1 Comments | Tags: auteurist, film, montage, Sergei Eisenstein, Soviet film
King Vidor’s The Big Parade
The Big Parade. 1925. USA. Directed by King Vidor
These notes accompany King Vidor’sThe Big Parade, which screens on February 24, 25, and 26 in Theater 3.
In his autobiography A Tree Is a Tree, King Vidor recounts the origins of The Big Parade. Having made some good but ephemeral films for the fledgling M-G-M, Vidor told Irving Thalberg, “If I were to work on something that…had a chance at long runs…, I would put much more effort, and love, into its creation.”
If there is anything wrong with The Big Parade, it is that Vidor put too much into it. The film is at once a grand epic, an intimate romance, a comedy of camaraderie, and a savage polemic. Somehow, Vidor managed to hold all this together, and seemingly overnight became the leading “serious” director in America, assuming at age thirty-one the mantle which had fallen from D. W. Griffith’s shoulders when the Master was forced to sign a contract with Paramount earlier in 1925. Eighty-five years later, The Big Parade still dwarfs virtually every film made about World War I, and it is arguably Vidor’s finest achievement. Read more
1 Comments | Tags: auteurist, film, Irving Thalberg, King Vidor, Laurence Stallings
Documentary Fortnight: MoMA’s International Festival of Nonfiction Film, Week 2
Sleep Furiously. 2008. Great Britain. Directed by Gideon Koppel
The second week of Documentary Fortnight begins this Wednesday, February 24, and runs through March 3. The selections now turn to look at communities around the world, including a special thematic focus on Iran and Afghanistan. First up is Gideon Koppel’s Sleep Furiously. The film depicts Treufurig, a hill farming community in Wales where, many years ago, Koppel’s parents found a home as refugees. The daily life, landscape, and mannerisms of the people and place are captured with attention to small details such as conversational patter, eccentric hobbies, and music by Aphex Twin. Read more
1 Comments | Tags: Documentary Fortnight, film
