truefilm

In case you haven’t noticed, there haven’t been any truefilm posts in the least couple of weeks. Busy with work and family.  But truefilm 2.0 is coming, and you all will be the first to know about it.

-Jim

The controversy surrounding the absence of Hispanic soldiers from Ken Burns’ upcoming PBS documentary The War may or may not be over. But Burns appears to have done all he’s going to do. The Associated Press reports that Burns added 28-minutes to the seven-part film.

Profiles of two Hispanics will conclude the first and sixth episodes of the roughly 15-hour, seven-part “The War,” debuting Sept. 23 on PBS, Burns told a news conference. An Indian soldier’s story will be at the end of episode five, he said.

“There’s been a hot political battle, and we tried to rise above and take the high road and respond as best we could,” Burns said.

“It doesn’t alter the vision of the film that we made and completed a year and a half ago,” he told a meeting of the Television Critics Association. …

Antonio Morales of the American GI Forum, a Hispanic veterans group, welcomed the inclusion of two Hispanic veterans.”The two Latino Marines who are part of the documentary ‘The War’ represent the honor and patriotism of all Hispanic-Americans,” he said in a statement.

The Washington Post has a story covering the same press conference.

Despite the the controversy around The War, Burns remains committed to PBS. Bill Harris writing in the Edmonton Sun says, “there’s one very simple reason why [Burns] hasn’t wound up working for one of the major U.S. television networks.”

“The commercials,” Burns said. “It seems so obvious. There are none of those here (on PBS). (On network TV) every six minutes you interrupt to sell eight different things. All of broadcast television is skywriting: The first breeze comes along and it’s gone.”

“I’ve had lots of offers through the years, in Hollywood and things like that,” Burns said. “But I sit around the table with my friends who are A-list directors who you would recognize and they’re complaining, ‘Oh, they took it away, I couldn’t do this, I had to use this music.’

“And I’m looking around going, ‘I haven’t had that.’ If you don’t like any of my films, it’s all my fault. But who would want it any other way?”

Finally, a PBS press release announced that many of Ken Burns’ documentaries will be available in his own page on Apple’s iTunes Store.

The Ken Burns area within the iTunes store offers all of the Ken Burns-related multi-media available in the store, such as documentaries, music, audiobooks and podcasts, including one for Burns’s upcoming documentary THE WAR, airing on PBS beginning September 23, 2007.

There are episodes from his Jazz, America, and American Lives series. Episodes cost $5 to $10 each.

Writing in the Scotsman (may require free registration), Paul Whitelaw says:

WHENEVER a documentary series boasts “cutting-edge computer graphics” as one of its selling points, I can’t help but suck a thoughtful tooth. Give a documentary team a brand new box of toys, and you can virtually guarantee that they won’t resist the temptation to show them off, even at the expense of their subject matter. Ever dreamed of taking a psychedelic journey through the upper colon of the Mongolian blowfish? Well now, thanks to Paintwizard X3000, you can!

That’s the lede to his review of two BBC doc programmes, Fight for Life and Wildlife Detectives. He says the first episode of Fight for Life deals

with the potential hazards of birth, concentrating in particular on the incredible resilience of the human body, even in its infant state. Taking a handful of real-life cases into account, this had the potential to inspire as well as educate. But I was too busy reeling from the relentless barrage of computer imagery and wham-bam camerawork to concentrate.

The NPR radio program On The Media has a story exploring how producers get people to sign releases for reality-crime shows:

Before TV programs can air images of people who have just been arrested or experienced some other embarrassing spectacle, they have to get a release from that person. Why would anyone agree to sign? Bob puts the question to the professional signature hounds.

You can listen to the 8-minute story here.

Jack Handey, of Deep Thoughts fame, shares his treatment for My Nature Documentary in the July 2 issue of The New Yorker. Handey begins:

Show monkey in a tree. Narrator says, “The monkey, proud and smart, in his native habitat. But one thing he does not have . . .” Show a giraffe. “. . . is a long neck, like the giraffe. Which is why nature has allowed them to combine forces.” Show monkey on giraffe’s neck. (Note: Monkey may have to be tied on.)

You can find the rest of his treatment on this newyorker.com page.

OK, Taggart Siegel’s film rode the festival circuit a couple years ago and was on PBS last June. But in a flip of the usual order of events, The Real Dirt on Farmer John is now getting a national theatrical release.

The film tells the life story or John Peterson, a third-generation farmer, “whose inspirational story of revolutionizing his family farm and redeeming his own life has won accolades and awards at film festivals around the world.”

That blub is a bit over the top. But the trailer for the film is nice and the film itself is dandy.

You can find a list of screening dates for the rolling release here. And there’s more info at the film’s website. Finally, the Independent Lens site has a nice Q&A with the filmmaker in which “Producer/Director/Director of Photography Taggart Siegel talks about the challenges of editing down 50 years of footage, getting his protagonist’s enemies to open up on camera and dismantling preconceived notions of farmers.”

Andrew O’Hehir says in Salon that the music documentary Gypsy Caravan is much much better than he expected:

It’s a two-hour movie, and I’m only sorry it isn’t two or three times as long. Let me read your thoughts: You’re not much interested in Gypsy music, and the historical and cultural stuff might be pretty dry. That’s what I thought too: Wrong and wrong.

What begins as a concert-tour doc about a varied group of Roma musicians (aka Gypsies, a term rejected by some Roma and embraced by others) as they travel the United States keeps getting broader, richer and deeper until it becomes a cinematic and musical experience that’s absolute magic.

O’Hehir’s opinion is supported by the film’s trailer (as it should be). You can view QuickTime and Windows Media versions of the Gypsy Caravan trailer here. And you can find more information about the film at the Gypsy Caravan website.

Boyd Williamson, writing at PopMatters, thinks Michael Apted’s Up documentaries “have lost their spine when confronting the class issues.”

Seven Up! was first created as a one-off documentary for World in Action, a current affairs program on British television. It was conceived as a sociological investigation into how Britain’s class system is maintained. The narrator introduces [fourteen seven-year old British] children by declaring that the “shop steward [a rank-and-file union representative] and the executive of the year 2000 are now seven years old.” In the first three installments, the children are asked about their plans for their future, their feelings on private versus public education, which political party they favor, and their thoughts on labor unions.

…

This critical focus on class has become less and less pronounced with every installment since 21 Up. Apted attributes this shift to a revelation he had after showing the movie in the United States. In his director’s commentary for 42 Up, Apted says that he was initially fearful that the series, with its uniquely British vocabulary of class, wouldn’t translate to an international audience. However, after he saw the positive reaction 21 Up received within the US, Apted had his American epiphany: He was not making a “political document,” as he had originally thought, but instead, a “humanistic film”.

…

The project’s built-in limitations aside, it’s questionable whether Apted, who has also directed films such as The World Is Not Enough, a James Bond movie, and the Jodie Foster vehicle Nell, was ever completely interested in the series’ foundational concern—class.

You can read the rest of the article at PopMatters. You can read more about the Up series of documentaries in this Wikipedia article. And you can view a QuickTime version of the trailer for the most recent film in the series, 49 UP here.

We can all now add comments to any truefilm post. So truefilm can stop being a one-way street. Check it out.

And if you find truefilm at all useful or interesting, can you do me a favor? Invite some friends to check it out and perhaps subscribe. Even in its current skeletal state, the blog takes a bit of work, and there are some concrete plans to expand truefilm into something more like an online magazine. The more people who read it, the easier it is to justify the effort.

Thanks,

Jim

Four years after her death, two new biographies of groundbreaking documentary filmmaker and Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl have sparked some interesting coverage.

The New York Review of Books has a good article by Ian Buruma built around reviews the two new books. Buruma begins, “That Leni Riefenstahl was rather a monster is not really in dispute. And if it ever was, two new biographies provide enough information to nail her.”

Steven Bach, the author of one of those books, Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl, discusses his well-received biography in this audio interview on the NPR show Fresh Air. The tag for the interview says, “Bach details Riefenstahl’s ruthless, opportunistic ambition, analyzes her ’self-righteous entitlement,’ and explores her relationships with Hitler, Goebbels and Albert Speer.”

A couple relevant films:

Triumph of The Will, Riefenstahl’s beautiful, innovative, and frightening propaganda film documenting the 1934 Third Reich Nuremberg Rally can be found at Amazon and Netflix.

The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl, Ray Muller’s 1993 great documentary where Riefenstahl defends her work and denies knowledge of what was going on around her is available on DVD through Amazon, Netflix, and elsewhere. You can watch the trailer here on the New York Times website (registration required, I think).

You can get some more background info (from one point of view) at the Leni Riefenstahl website.

Josh Caldwell and Hunter Weeks quit their jobs so Josh could ride a Segway scooter from Seattle to Boston while Hunter shot and directed a documentary about the 100-day trip (Josh edited the film). The resulting doc, 10 MPH, just came out on DVD.

I don’t know if I could handle this for 90 minutes, let alone 100 days. But the trailer for 10 MPH is good enough to make me think I might.

Doc makers take note: The website for the film is well done. Some of the text is a bit breathless. For example, “10 MPH captures the epitome of not settling for the mundane, but instead seizing your opportunities and doing the thing you are meant to do.” But the apparent sincerity alleviates the over-cooked prose.

The filmmakers lined up a wide range of sponsors, including of course Segway who issued a press release about their participation. The site may strike some as a bit slick, but as a promotional and sales tool, it’s effective.

A review on the Fox News website calls Michael Moore’s new documentary investigating the US healthcare system, “brilliant and uplifting.”

The review, by Roger Friedman, continues

“Sicko” works because in this one there are no confrontations. Moore smartly lets very articulate average Americans tell their personal horror stories at the hands of insurance companies. The film never talks down or baits the audience.

Now I’m really interested in seeing the film.

Also, the trailer for Sicko is now available all over the web. The best-quality version I’ve seen is this YouTube version.

Islam vs. Islamists, a controversial film that focuses on struggles between moderate and less-moderate Islamic groups, will be distributed to US public broadcasting stations by Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB).

The controversy in brief: The film was funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) to be part of the America At A Crossroads project, but wasn’t aired with the first batch of films from that project. Depending on whom you ask, the film either was censored because of its conservative content or the film wasn’t finished. You can read more about the controversy in an earlier truefilm post.

It looks like a compromise has been reached. An OPB press release issued yesterday reads:

Portland, OR, May 23, 2007 - Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) today announced that it will distribute Islam vs. Islamists: Voices from the Muslim Center to public television stations under an agreement reached between The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) and Oregon Public Broadcasting.

Islam vs. Islamists addresses very difficult issues,” Steve Bass, president and CEO of Oregon Public Broadcasting. “We are pleased to facilitate a dialogue on one of the central issues in the world today in conjunction with the broadcast.”

“As stewards of the investment in public broadcasting, this fulfills our responsibility to the taxpayer,” said Patricia Harrison, president and CEO of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

The Washington Times report includes some quotes from OPB president Steve Bass:

“We plan to distribute the film to any public broadcasting station that wants it. We’ll package it and also produce some sort of discussion to accompany the film, and give it some context,” OPB President Steve Bass told The Washington Times yesterday.

“There has been a lot of debate on whether this program needed editing. Some said yes, some no. When you’re dealing with an object of controversy, it is better to let the audience draw their own conclusions,” Mr. Bass said.

The Free The Film website appears to be the main clearing house for promotional information on the film and efforts to get it aired. You can download a Windows Media version of the trailer here, and you can watch a streaming Flash version (along with a preamble by a conservative commentator) here.

The film will reportedly be available to PBS stations in a few months.

Les Blank, who has directed three dozen documentaries, will receive the Edward MacDowell Medal for 2007. The MacDowell Colony’s announcement says of Blank:

Regarded as one of the seminal figures in documentary filmmaking, Les Blank’s career has spanned a range of subjects that profile passionate people at the periphery of American society and the heart of its folklore.

You can find out more about Blank and his three dozen films at his Flower Films website.More information about the August 12 ceremony, open house, and other free Medal Day activities at MacDowell’s Peterborough New Hamshire site can be found here.

According to this story in the Washington Post:

Filmmaker Ken Burns reached an agreement yesterday with two advocacy organizations that have pressured him to amend his World War II documentary to include more material about Latinos’ contribution to the American war effort.

The agreement between Burns’s production company, Florentine Films, and the two Latino groups appears crafted to enable both sides to declare victory in the long-running war over “The War,” which is scheduled to air on PBS in September.

…

Burns yesterday called the new content “an additional layer of storytelling” that does not tamper with “my vision” for telling the story of the war. But he offered no new details about how it would be used.

…

Not everyone involved in the controversy was satisfied. Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez, a University of Texas professor who initiated the protests against Burns last year and who leads a grass-roots group called Defend the Honor, was skeptical.

“I’m not sure how [Burns’s] position has moved from what he said last month,” she said. “In the end, if it really means that Ken Burns is going to include the Latino perspective in a meaningful way, then, yes, it’s a wonderful thing. But until we get some clarification, we’ll withhold judgment.”

You can download a copy of the press release from the three groups (American GI Forum, the
Hispanic Association of Corporate Responsibility, and Florentine Films) as a PDF file here. In the style of press releases everywhere, the wording is a bit vague, but it appears resolution is closer. It will be interesting to see how the new stories are integrated into the “focus on four towns” structure of the film.

The US Treasury Department is reportedly investigating Michael Moore’s trip taking ailing Sept. 11 rescue workers to Cuba for medical treatment. The trip forms a segment of Sicko, his upcoming documentary that examines the health-care industry. (Sorry, I can’t find a web site for the film).

A story by the Associated Press says:

The Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control notified Moore in a letter dated May 2 that it was conducting a civil investigation for possible violations of the U.S. trade embargo restricting travel to Cuba. A copy of the letter was obtained Wednesday by the AP.

“This office has no record that a specific license was issued authorizing you to engage in travel-related transactions involving Cuba,” Dale Thompson, OFAC chief of general investigations and field operations, wrote in the letter to Moore.

A copy of the two-page letter is posted on Moore’s website here and here.

Also on Moore’s website, Meghan O’Hara, producer of Sicko writes:

The efforts of the Bush Administration to conduct a politically motivated investigation of Michael Moore and ‘SiCKO’ will not stop us from making sure the American people see this film.

President Bush and the Bush Administration should be spending their time trying to help these [9/11 first-responder] heroes get health care instead of abusing the legal process to advance a political agenda.

I don’t know enough to evaluate the seriousness of the investigation. Could be it will result in something similar to last year’s $6,000 fine levied on Oliver Stone by the Treasury after he visited Cuba to make his Castro documentary.

Sicko opens next month, so it seems to me news of the investigation will, if nothing else, promote awareness of the film.

The controversy about Ken Burns’ WWII doc, its lack of Hispanic viewpoints, and what people have offered/threatened to do continues. In case you haven’t been following all this, here’s a background story about the controversy from the Associated Press. And here’s a link to previous truefilm posts about all this.

While your correspondent has been traveling, moving offices, and meeting deadlines, more has happened.

Politco.com had this story:

The Congressional Hispanic Caucus has joined a campaign to include Hispanics in an upcoming PBS documentary on World War II, vowing to “put the squeeze” on top public television executives.

“We’re very much concerned about the lack of Hispanics in the documentary,” Chairman Joe Baca (D-Calif.) said. “That’s appalling. That’s a no-no to us.”

The Hispanic Caucus and other Latino interest groups have been troubled that the 14-hour series — “The War,” by renowned filmmaker Ken Burns and scheduled for broadcast in September — features no Hispanics, even as it highlights African-Americans and Japanese-Americans. They note that 500,000 Latinos served in World War II.

Garrett Moewe at the conservative National Review complained

About the editorial pages of America’s newspapers, which usually can be counted on to take note of such outrageous forms of censorship, even if it means ticking off a few special interests groups? Again, near total silence. The Boston Globe ran an op-ed that attacked PBS and Ken Burns over their “lack of connection with our increasingly multicultural society.”

Perhaps the silence can be explained by one simple fact: the censorship was coming from a group of leftist Hispanic organizations who called themselves “Defend the Honor.”

Moewe also tosses some complaints against Bill Moyers, MoveOn.org, and other “Left Censors” who aren’t, in his view, appropriately angry (in the right way) about all this.

Charlie McCollum, TV critic for the San Jose Mercury News, makes some more even-handed comments but worries that

PBS and Burns may have opened a Pandora’s box by bowing to outside pressure and making changes to programming not only after the work was finished but in a way that could fundamentally change the film’s original intent….

Rod Dreyher of the Dallas Morning News concurs:

This is not about denigrating the noble sacrifice of Latino soldiers. This is about corrupting art through politics….The point is, Hispanic veterans are absent from this documentary not because their sacrifice isn’t valued. They weren’t included because they didn’t fit the perfectly legitimate storytelling frame chosen by the artist.

Mr. Burns argues that when working in public television, one has to take the views of the public into consideration. That’s true. If taxpayers don’t want to pay for this or that kind of art, they shouldn’t have to – even Ken Burns documentaries. But once a publicly funded artwork is approved, both art and artist must be protected from political interference. Massaging history or art to assuage grievance is intellectually corrupt.

And now some up-to-date news about all this. Paul Farhi of The Washington Post writes:

Leaders of the Hispanic Association for Corporate Responsibility, an umbrella organization of 14 groups, on Tuesday asked representatives of General Motors Corp. and Anheuser-Busch to disavow their sponsorship and remove their corporate logos from Burns’s “The War,” a 14-hour documentary scheduled to be shown on PBS stations in September, coincidentally during Hispanic Heritage Month.

In Farhi’s article, Manuel Mirabal, chairman of the association is quoted as saying:

We should all be working to resolve this issue together. We understand that Ken Burns has his artistic principles, but in this case taxpayer dollars were used to make this film and it is flawed. Ken Burns can make as many films as he wants, but the buck stops here because he’s using our taxpayer dollars.

Patricia Aufderheide reports that the Chubb group of insurance companies, “has now joined the group of insurers that recognize fair use claims for documentary filmmakers.” Chubb’s key requirement, as with the other insurers, is that a lawyer verifies that the filmmaker follows the Best Practices in Fair Use document distributed by the Center for Social Media.

And Viacom said they will “take steps to protect fair use on YouTube” according to a press release from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. But then, it took a lawsuit filed by the EFF and Stanford Law School’s Fair Use Project on behalf of MoveOn.org Civic Action and Brave New Films (BNF) to get Viacom to see the light.

But that doesn’t mean every copyright holder will agree to accept CSM’s guidelines or follow Viacom’s lead. Jackson West, in an article for NewTeeVee, describes the problems Brett Hanover encountered with his film The Bridge, “the first feature film about Scientology.”

West writes:

The premise and script were helped by efforts from former Scientologists and anti-cultists to craft an allegorical critique of the Church of Scientology.

The movie features all sorts of insider references, including clips from videos produced by the church, church practices such as auditing, and even the church’s custom web filter.

A few weeks [after posting the film online], Hanover pulled the movie from his site and requested that other people who had posted it remove it also, with statement saying only “due to copyright issues, I ask that this film be withdrawn from circulation… Do not contact me concerning this film, I am no longer supporting it.” That statement, and all other traces of the film, have since been removed from his site, other sites which promoted the film and even the Internet Archive, which cited rights issues.

Longtime anti-Scientology activist Mark Bunker of XenuTV suggested that Hanover was pressured by the church to pull the footage, which certainly isn’t far-fetched. The church has a legacy of using copyright issues to try to silence opposition, relying on the DMCA to lobby everyone from Google to a Canadian ISP to purge documents and links to those documents it considers infringing or promoting infringement.

Did Hanover’s use fall under fair use? I don’t know. I’m not a lawyer and it looks like I’m not going to see the film. The Bridge might not be an example of future fair use battles. Or it might. West concludes:

If an organization like Scientology can use copyright law as a bullying tactic to censor video content like The Bridge, imagine what a national party, government or international corporate conglomerate could do.

The Oxford American just released their 2007 Southern Movie Issue. One article lists 13 more essential Southern docs. More? An article from a previous movie issue, in 2002, listed 13 essential doc about the US South.

In that 2002 issue, an editors’ note introduced the list:

Our contention is that documentaries—not the Hollywood-Comes-to-the-South extravaganzas—may be the true Southern cinematic art form. How else to explain the startling number of remarkable documentaries that emanate from this region? Even the realization that there are many other daring films that we could have discussed here—Harlan County USA, The Band, Freedom on My Mind, Laylee’s Kin, Speed Racer, 4 Little Girls, Benjamin Smoke, Fast Food Women, etc.—helps prove this point.

Documentaries are an invigorating, challenging medium: in the right hands, they get us closer to unscripted truths and moments and people. In the right hands, they seem like gifts.

No argument from here. As with just about everything in Oxford American, both articles are very nicely written. Worth a look.

A bit more news on yesterday’s story about the PBS promise to amend the upcoming Ken Burns World War II doc to include stories about US Latino veterans.

The Associated Press has a longer story.

The Defend the Honor Campaign issued a victorious press release. And their website has a whole bunch of background material and links.

And the PBS ombudsman runs a whole lot of letters about the issue.