The film Comedian is exhausting, in part in a good way and in part not so much. The “good” exhausting comes from watching Jerry Seinfeld try to develop a new…
The following in no way intends to demean documentary film as something less than (that misnomer) narrative film. With that out of the way, Ibolya Fekete’s film Chico seems to…
Andrzej Wajda’s Man of Marble (Człowiek z marmuru) is defined by discourse of the most cinematic kind, both extra- and intra-. The true-story based documentary couched in the narrative of…
Trinh T. Minh-Ha says that she set out to make Reassemblage as an ethnographic film that paid no heed to conventions of documentary. It seems from interviews with her that…
Had the opportunity to take in a piece of “ethnographic” history today: Robert Gardner’s Deep Hearts. The film is well-known not for being a particularly early documentary (made in ’79)…
The question while viewing The Body Beautiful from Ngozi Onwurah was whether or not it’s a documentary. Certainly a difficult one to answer, the film is clearly more than a…
Don’t usually do this, but here is a review of Religulous, the trailer of which sufficiently communicates its fundamental problems: cynicism, mockery, intellectual superiority, closemindedness, disrespect, and ad hominem/straw-man arguments…
A 1936 documentary on the dark side (read: graveyard shift) of the British postal service, Night Mail glorifies English and Scottish postal workers if not their postal work and effectively…
Cinéma vérité is one of those topics of film studies that doesn’t exactly have a definition, on account of the many different manifestations of it. However, as the term implies,…
Errol Morris’ fine documentary Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. begins as a foray into the life of a solitary man who works on death…
