Magnus Isacsson – Page 2 – Documentary Field Notes and Flashpoints

Controversy in Montreal after Wiseman’s ‘Crazy Horse’ opens RIDM

The Rencontres Internationales du Documentaire de Montréal opened last Wednesday night. This is an event which allows you to see great documentaries from around the world, films which you rarely see on TV. This year’s program is great.

But the choice of opening film has created a huge controversy in the documentary community here. Veteran U.S. documentarian Frederick Wiseman has made a career of observing the life of institutions, from the mental asylum to the boxing club. In his new film Crazy Horse, Wiseman documents the preparation and execution of a show at the eponymous nude dance palace in Paris. There are some revealing and interesting moments from the behind-the-scenes creative process. The choreographer, the set designer and the costume designer are captivating an complex characters, and we get to know them.

But this more-than-two-hour film is mostly made up of interminable scenes of erotic dancing, beautifully lit and filmed, but repetitive and soon boring. (The photos show here – graciously supplied by the festival – emphasize the aesthetic, but actually a lot of the film is made up of very tight shots.) One could argue that the film shows up the sexism of the milieu, where the ‘physical assets’ of the dancers count more than anything else. But rather than taking a critical look at this state of affairs, Weisman becomes complicit with it by exploiting these same ‘assets’ endlessly.

And where the film really falls down is that you never get to know the dancers. After two hours, you know next to nothing about their backgrounds, their aspirations, their opinions, their feelings. Disappointing!

You have to assume some people liked the film. But others left the screening while in process. Others were bored. And some were outraged. A letter of protest was signed by some twenty producers and directors, myself included. The RIDM leadership has agreed to a meeting to discuss the issues after the festival is over.

In the debate which has raged since opening night, red herrings have proliferated. Some people have denounced the Wiseman film as pornography, which it obviously isn’t. On the other side, some people claimed the critics want to censor the film – just a way of avoiding the real issues, as no one has suggested the film should be banned. Others again have defended this choice of opening film saying it was perfect because it generated a debate. Unfortunately this is not the way it was presented – the choice was explained as an attempt to reach out to new audiences – and there was no room for discussion after the screening.

The question I ask myself at this point is whether this controversy will be a useful one which leads to a better understanding of some of the issues, or whether it will just be divisive.

Thanks to Tobi Elliott for her help with this blog.

The Grannies and the Cuban Hat

Four Montreal Grannies — The four Montreal grannies who helped shoot our pitch

Documentary film funding is not what it used to be. With broadcast windows few and far between and cutbacks everywhere, we doc-makers are turning to other sources, using other methods. And one of the new ways is web-based participatory, or crowd funding. This week I am participating in the Cuban Hat on-line pitch in the framework of the Rencontres Internationales du Documentaire de Montréal.

GRANNY POWER, the project I am pitching (see the video pitch here on Vimeo) together with my colleagues, is a feature length English-language film on the Raging Grannies. This film has been in the works for eight years – and it might as well be crowd funded, because no English-language broadcaster will support it. Could it be that politicized elderly ladies are not the flavour of the month?

The Grannies form a very original protest movement, singing for social justice, peace and environment. They will celebrate their 25th anniversary next summer. The film portrays the movement, but also opens a window on the challenges of remaining active as a citizen as you grow older. Our main characters are between 65 and 80.

Checking out the projects and pitches presented at Cuban Hat is interesting, and the more people vote, the greater the chance that the best projects will become finalists and have a chance to win post production services. Hope you can find the time!

Tobi Elliott, who helps with this blog, is one of the producers of the Granny Film. It was her idea to pitch Granny Power to the Cuban Hat.

Dix fois Dix de Jennifer Alleyn

J’ai toujours été fasciné par la peinture et la musique de la République de Weimar, la période d’entre les deux guerres mondiales en Allemagne. Mon amie Jennifer Alleyn a un film sur un des artistes le plus représentatifs de cette période, Otto Dix, et le film prend l’affiche cette semaine à Montréal et à Québec. C’est un film en dix tableaus, d’où le titre Dix fois Dix.

Jennifer est la fille du peintre Edmund Alleyn sur lequel elle a fait un excellent film, ‘L’Atelier de mon père’. Après la sortie de ce film, l’histoire d’un tableau de Dix retrouvé à Montréal l’a mis sur la piste de ce nouveau film. Inspiré par Nietszche et par sa propre expérience en tant que soldat dans la première guerre mondiale, et par ce contexte de crise économique et politique qui allait mener à la montée du nazisme, Dix confronte les sujets les plus durs : la guerre, la prostitution.

Jennifer raconte :

Après ‘L’atelier de mon père’, il me fallait un sujet fort. En fait, je me demandais vraiment ce que je pouvais faire après. J’attendais de retrouver la même certitude, un lien très fort au sujet. L’univers d’Otto Dix, en plus de dépeindre des réalités dures et malheureusement criantes d’actualité (la guerre, la prostitution), comportait des aspects de mystère qui m’ont happée complètement. Pour me distraire, je suivais un cours d’histoire de l’art et c’est là que j’ai découvert le Portrait de l’avocat Hugo Simons,1925 d’ Otto Dix, qui est dans la collection du MBAM.

Ce tableau a eu beaucoup d’effet sur moi. Il m’inquiétait et m’envoûtait à la fois. C’est ce sentiment paradoxal, d’horreur et de beauté, de frayeur et d’attrait, qui m’a donné le goût de creuser l’oeuvre.

J’ai alors appris qu’une grande exposition allait se poser à Montréal, au MBAM et me suis dit que si j’obtenais la permission de filmer les tableaux, la création de l’exposition, l’accrochage, j’avais une porte d’entrée dynamique et cinématographique. Puis l’idée de greffer des épisodes de la vie de l’artiste, par des incursions dans ses lieux (maison de famille à Hemmenhoffen, Galerie à Berlin, etc..) ont fait sortir le film des murs du Musée.

L’histoire du Portrait de l’avocat Hugo Simons, 1925, était tellement romanesque, avec ce procès et la fuite de l’avocat juif vers le Canada, la correspondance soutenue sur plus de vingt ans entre l’artiste et l’avocat, m’ont convaincu qu’il y avait, derrière, tout une charge émotionnelle qui enrichissait l’oeuvre. Comme une archéologue, je suis partie à la recherche de ce terreau fertile qui donne aux oeuvres cet aura de mystère, bâti par le temps, les mouvements de l’Histoire, la vie humaine.

Il y avait un certain défi à explorer la trajectoire d’un homme qui a tué (Dix était soldat en 1914 et encore en 1945) et son oeuvre fait état des traumatismes qui l’ont poursuivis toute sa vie. J’ai été attirée par la force, le courage qui émanait de son parcours. Considéré comme un artiste dégénéré par les Nazis, il n’a pourtant jamais cessé de peindre. De dire et de montrer les horreurs dont il avait été témoin.

Dans mes recherches, je suis tombée sur cette phrase de Nietszche : “L’art nous est donné pour nous empêcher de mourir de la vérité”. Sachant que Dix avait été très touché par la philosophie de Nietzsche, cette phrase qui a trotté dans mon esprit pendant un an et guidé mon film. Je crois qu’elle offre une vrai clé pour comprendre l’oeuvre de Dix.

J’avais je crois besoin de me dépayser mentalement, me confronter à un univers plus cru, plus choquant de la peinture.

PROJECTIONS:

‘Dix fois Dix – un portrait du peintre allemand Otto Dix’ prend l’affiche du cinéma Beaubien à Montréal et du cinéma Le Clap à Québec avec en avant programme, La vie imaginée de Jacques Monory, un autre film de la réalisatrice Jennifer Alleyn. Du 4 au 10 nov. 2011

” C’est très fort. Rythmé. Inattendu. Profond. Émouvant. Surprenant.” – Nancy Huston

Voir la bande-annonce.

Lauréat du “Prix tremplin pour le monde Artv” – FIFA 2011.

Sélection officielle Pessac (France) – Festival international du Film Francophone en Acadie 2011

A McLaren film for the 21st Century: Philippe Baylaucq’s 3D film ORA

The other day I went to see two exceptional films in 3D at the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma in Montreal. Millions of words have been written already about Wim Wenders’ film about the amazing choreographer Pina Bush, and I don’t have anything to add.

But that film was preceded by another extraordinary dance film, Philippe Baylaucq’s ORA. Shot with infrared cameras which capture only the heat of the bodies, with no light source whatsoever, it creates totally original images of translucent bodies dancing to a score by composer Robert Marcel Lepage. Philippe had chosen this project for his two-year residence in the National Film Board of Canada’s French program. I asked him what motivated this choice.

“The project started with the idea of marking the first century of abstract painting. I re-read Kandinsky and wanted to explore that period of painting and set design (Diaghilev, etc) when the human figure was still present in environments that were becoming increasingly abstract.

Initially I was interested in exploring the relationships between the human figure, dance, colour and space. I wished to work again with my friend and colleague dancer-choreographer José Navas and met up with him before applying to the NBF for one of their two year residencies. I was lucky, I got in and began to read up on my subjects. Soon I became aware of what was being done at the NFB StereoLab where I was blown away by what I saw, by what I was shown by Munro Ferguson. It became clear to me then that my two years spent at the Board would have to lead to a film that could be done there and nowhere else. Hence the 3D.

I had a full year of tests before opting for a world technological first: 3D thermal cinematography.

One does not really tell stories in the linear sense with dance. One does however have to be aware that most film spectators expect a storyline of some kind. I started with the title of one of Paul Gauguin’s most famous paintings: Where do we come from, who are we and where are we going? For optimal formal freedom, I wanted my dancers to evolve in a non-naturalistic setting, giving me the chance to be more audacious with gravity, depth, light, texture, movement.

From then on, I was interested in working in the “Norman McLaren” fashion which is to say that the filmmaker is led to his story-line through the interaction with the tools, materials and technologies that he is exploring. Our work with thermal imagery led us to discover very interesting phenomena that spoke of larger themes such as Darwinian evolutionary theory and classical myths such as Prometheus and Narcissus. Slowly, through the fundamental research with the technologies, a story immerged and eventually a film… It was fascinating.

2. A lot of the comments have been about the striking technical achievement, but the structure of the piece, with the music and choreography, must have been a considerable challenge. How did you work with composer, choreographer, dancers?

Working with me on this kind of subject is a trapeze act without a net. From the start, everyone becomes aware of the exploratory aspect of what we are doing. People are generally stimulated by uncharted ground, it gets them out of their routine and forces everyone to be ingenious, to extend further out and test their talents. Again I was blessed with many many inspired collaborators. I worked with people that also work in the documentary field and this is very important because it signifies that they know what it means to be open to chance and aware of what is there, in the world and not strictly on the pages of a script.

The film was loosely written, but my main collaborator José Navas, his magnificent dancers, my DOP Sebastien Gros, my musician Robert Marcel Lepage, my sound designer Benoît Dame, my editor Alain Baril, and many others, everyone was open to the idea that this piece was going to evolve until the very end of the very last stages of post production.

This requires a lot of patience and a very open minded producer. René Chénier did a remarkable job accompanying me through this open ended process. Despite the cutting edge, high-tech aspect of our novel technology, we tried to keep our feet on the ground and not get swept away by the myriad possibilities that both the camera and postproduction computer input might provide us. We tried to never lose sight of the organic, human aspects of our on screen subjects: the dancers. They are all that we see as they at once both the subjects and the light sources that define the subjects: they carry the light, they are the light.

The film is probably one of the very first films to have ever been shot without a single light source: no fire, no sun, no electricity; only heat, the heat of the body, biological light, the light of living things, the light of life itself.

Thanks to Tobi Elliott for her help with the blog.

Kazimi on 3D: part 1

Ali Kazimi is an award-winning filmmaker. Since 2008, he has been researching stereoscopic 3D digital cinema at York University, where he is an Associate Professor in the Department of Film.

Q. Why is there this sudden groundswell of interest in 3D?

The current stereoscopic 3D is propelled by the exponential rise in digital technology in film production, coupled with the phenomenal success of James Cameron’s Avatar. Really, much of the growth in S3D is due to Cameron’s championing and use of digital S3D. Cameron himself did not come to S3D overnight, he spent the decade before Avatar experimenting with making underwater docs with different degrees of success. In fact, his underwater experience reveals itself not only in the very comfortable 3D experience he was able to deliver, but also in the flora of the imagined world which looks and behaves very much like underwater plants do.

However, it is his S3D experimentation that is critical to acknowledge and it is instructive in many ways – or to put it differently, S3D has a steep learning curve. The biggest challenge I feel is getting a grasp on the fundamentals of perception, how we see depth. Stereo vision, or ‘stereopsis’ as it is known scientifically, is the process by which the brain takes in the 2D images from the left and right eye and fuses them together into a single 3D image. However, stereopsis is only one way in which in the human brain perceives depth. We also use a number of other visual cues, called monocular cues, such as perspective or the familiar size of objects to determine spatial relationships.

Technically, S3D camera systems mimic the way we see. We use two cameras each offset by a certain distance, called the inter-axial (IA) distance, to generate two identical from images from slightly different perspectives, similar to those between our two eyes. The images have to be in perfect sync with identical focus, depth of field, colour and contrast, this is easier said than done. The mechanism for shooting stereoscopic 3D, known simply as rigs, therefore consists of two cameras either side-by-side or at right angles to one another with a partially silvered mirror at 45 degrees in the middle.

In terms of both composition and pacing there is much that is still unknown, filmmakers have to learn how to see the world around us with the z-axis in mind.

A couple of months ago just I saw a screening of shorts, commercials and music videos screened at the TIFF Bell Lightbox. The program, called ‘Selected Package’, had a wide range, from those with high production values to lo-tech DIY retro-inspired music videos. The latter were screened with the Red/Blue, anaglyph format. I have rarely come out of a screening with such acute eyestrain and headache. Once again, these music videos painfully drove home the difference between bad 2D and bad 3D, in that poorly produced S3D can be uncomfortable and even painful. Filmmakers have to recognize that their S3D work can have an immediate physiological impact on the audience. In fact this is the very reason why filmmakers have to step way back and truly re-examine how we see.

On the other hand, Wim Wender’s film Pina is a real masterwork and a true landmark in S3D filmmaking. In my view, the first feature film made solely for S3D, one that explores its immense possibilities with such inspired grace and virtuosity.

Wenders’ keynote address at our Toronto International Stereoscopic 3D conference was one of the most amazing artist talks, and a truly inspirational speech on how he came to 3D and how filmmakers should engage with 3D (read the transcript here). Pina is exciting because it was designed solely as a 3D film, whereas I have long maintained the almost all other 3D content is designed to work in 2D as well. Consequently there can only be limited exploration of a new cinematic language. More on Pina a bit later.

What is it that you have to learn? Theory or hands-on?

On the technical side, digital projection has made it possible to deliver a pretty seamless 3D experience, it is another matter that many cinemas don’t have proper projectors resulting in relatively dimmer image. Of course this is the last but crucial stage in the entire digital workflow.

In some ways the ‘Avatar effect’, as I often refer to it, has been a mixed blessing. The studios and the television manufacturers all jumped on the bandwagon. S3D sets are now increasingly on the market and prices are coming down fast, the problem is the dearth of content. To create content one needs more than tech, training and accessibility is critical. As I have said earlier, S3D has a steep learning curve and there are no short cuts, it will take time to develop a critical mass of filmmakers and technicians.

The most critical position is that of the stereographer – a stereo expert who should ideally be at least consulted during pre-production, who is on the set during production working with the camera rig and who then again at least consults through post-production and during the final colour and stereo-grading. Stereographers are hard to find, in this new field many people claim to be one after doing a workshop or two, one has to be really careful. Errors made in production such as the depth of a shot are impossible to “fix in post”.

Thanks to Tobi Elliott for her help with the blog.

The Interrupters at Cinema Politica

Ameena Matthews in "The Interrupters" by Kartemquin Films

The other night I went to see The Interrupters at another full-house Cinema Politica screening at Concordia University in Montreal, with the filmmaker in attendance. Cinema Politica regularly gets hundreds of people out to see socially and politically relevant documentaries – in this case 650 people on a Monday night! Kudos to organizers Ezra Winton and Svetla Turnin.

The Interrupters is a terrific film by veteran filmmaker Steve James. Initiated thanks to an article by Alex Kotlowitz, it tells the story of three ‘violence interrupters’ who intervene in violence-ridden, mainly black neighbourhoods in Chicago – the ones which became a national symbol of urban violence in the U.S. a couple of years ago.

It’s a classical ‘vérité’ film, tracking the main characters in many tense and emotionally raw encounters with both victims and perpetrators. The director is also the DOP, and the film is beautifully shot – and has excellent sound recorded in often difficult situations. James’ views on documentary making and the relationship between filmmaker and subject are very close to my own. For example, he spoke about the impact of the camera on the subjects as being sometimes negative, sometimes positive.

Steve James directed Hoop Dreams, a truly impressive and inspiring film. There was a controversy about Hoop Dreams not being nominated for an Oscar, something it definitely deserved. Hopefully that mistake will be made up for by an Oscar nomination for Interrupters.

At IDFA in Amsterdam Steve was given a carte blanche to show his top list of documentaries, see here.

The Interrupters was produced by a truly excellent company called Kartemquin Films. Last year I met Gordon Quinn, one of the founders. I remember asking him whether he felt that the new digital environment had any negative implications for filmmaking ethics.

Quinn said: ‘It’s true that the context is changing, but I think the underlying sets of responsibilities are still there. You owe ethical consideration to your subject and to the intended viewer, and these things can be in contradiction. We spend months or years with our subjects, and so our concerns for them have to be greater than if we were just parachuted in for an hour, or worse just grabbed something from the net. I do worry that pieces of our films could be used out of context and portray our subjects in a dishonest light.”

Thanks to Tobi Elliott for her help with the blog.

Making soup on a nail

For the last two years, I have been working on a film about a man who can be described as a footnote to history, Honoré Joseph Jaxon, alias William Henry Jackson.

An enigmatic figure, his life was full of drama. He admired the Métis and participated in the Northwest Rebellion of 1885, acting as a secretary to Louis Riel. While Riel was hanged for treason, our man was declared insane and let go. He escaped the insane asylum and found himself – less than a year later – involved with the labour movement in Chicago, the fastest-growing industrial city in the U.S.

When anarchist leaders were accused of causing the Haymarket Riot of 1886 – the events which led to the choice of the 1st of May for the annual socialist labour march – he took their defence. Again, his associates were hanged.

Jaxon was an impostor, declaring himself to be a Métis when he was actually born William Henry Jackson of an Ontario methodist family. But he was a visionary, imagining and fighting for a just multicultural society. He ended his days in New York City, where he was evicted from a basement apartment with his huge collection of archives at age 91. He died only a few weeks later.

Jaxon’s story is little known, but Calgary historian Donald Smith has written a terrific book about him, published by Coteau books. Also, Quebec anthropologist and radio host Serge Bouchard did an excellent radio program about him. My own knowledge of Jaxon goes back to the seventies, when I made a series of radio programs about the U.S. labour movement, notably with the help of my friend Pat Quinn, then the Chief archivist at Northwestern University in Evanston/Chicago.

There are of course no moving images of Jaxon, and only a dozen photos. That’s why I say this project is like ‘making soup on a nail,’ recalling an old Scandinavian folk tale about a vagrant who gets himself invited to stay overnight at farm houses by offering to make soup with a nail. ‘If we can just add a little piece of potato, this will be even better….’ You get the idea.

My partners in crime in this undertaking are, among others, scriptwriter Peter Haynes and animator Philippe Vaucher. Here is one of Philippe’s images.

Thanks to Tobi Elliott for her help with the blog.

Uncovering the hidden history of the Roma in the Holocaust

Going to the Montreal World Film Festival is a hit-and miss kind of affair. One easily has the impression there is no serious programming effort, it seems like anything goes, and screening some of the films gives you a strong impression nothing would ever be turned down. But there are also some excellent films.

At the most recent edition went to see a couple of documentaries which had interesting subject matter but which seemed unfinished. But I also saw one really excellent doc, A People Uncounted, produced by a team of filmmakers which includes several children or grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, most of them Jewish, at Urbinder films.

Shot in eleven countries, it tells the horrific story of the Roma – often known as Gypsies – as little-known victims of the nazi death camps. I found it to be a very compelling and very unusual film, sort of a hybrid between an information-heavy current affairs doc and a very sophisticated beautifully shot film. Another peculiarity about this film is that it was made with – anonymous – private money.

One thing about the film really bothered me, as you’ll find out in my second question to the director Aaron Yeger, who had this to say:

About the style and structure of the film, I agree that it is not conventional. The film does have a dramatic story arch with three acts, however the arch doesn’t follow any particular person or event, but rather the experience of an entire people, the Roma. All the various people who appear in the film collectively represent that experience.

With that in mind, the structure is patterned more after a scripted drama than most documentaries, and it somewhat epic in scope. The first act lays out who the Roma are, both in terms of fact and fiction and shows how they are seen and represented. The second act jumps back in time to the Holocaust to explain by way of both the personal and historical/factual how they were murdered in that genocide. The third act takes us back to the recent past and to the present to explain how the present day situation for the Roma, which is rife with persecution, is a reflection of what happened during the Holocaust. The arch rises and falls with the level of drama and nature of the material, rather than the experience of one person or event in particular.

… We wanted to show what happened to the Romani people during the Holocaust, what’s happening to them in present day, the connection between the two, and what this says about humanity and racism in general. And to make matters more complicated, so little is known about the Roma in general audiences that we also needed to show who they are and what they are not.

So in the end it is a very diverse array of content with a lot of people and a lot of places and topics of exploration, but still with the goal of making the experience as cinematic as possible. It’s a film with one foot in education and the other in cinema and popular culture.

Magnus: You go out of your way to be inclusive, to make links between the experience of Jews and Roma, to refer to other experiences of discrimination and genocide… and yet there (as far as I remember) not a single reference to the gays who were also targeted for extermination by the nazis and sent to the death camps. Given the extremely thought-through inclusiveness of the whole film, this cannot be an accident. (I did notice the little line in the end credits about people whose story was covered…)

Part of our goal was to make a film that elevates the Roma from a footnote in Holocaust history to a place of dignity. The point of the film was to focus on the Romani experience in the Holocaust and present day. Having said that, it’s impossible to show their experience in the Holocaust without drawing connections to the Jewish experience. This is partly because most people when they hear “Holocaust” think of the Jewish experience, so it’s pertinent to note the similarities in the style of the various acts of genocide and the Nazi rhetoric (such as that many Nazi policy statements referred to the [final solution of the Jewish and Gypsy question/problem] together in the same sentence.

The other reason is that organically, it came up time and time again in our travels and meeting lots of Roma that many of them feel a kinship and solidarity with Jews in the aftermath of the Holocaust.

We also chose to relate the present day civil rights struggles of the Roma to the African-American civil rights movement in the past, for the purpose of hoping to inspire people today to change things for the better. The similarities are startling. Roma in present day Europe often suffer from school segregation, lack of access to jobs and institutionalized racism, as well as openly pejorative rhetoric in the political and media mainstream. They are stereotyped as criminals who are unwilling to work. And they were slaves in the past, emancipated at approximately the same time as African Americans.

I agree that telling the story of the genocide of gays, as well as many other groups is very important, which is why there is that statement at the end of the film. But we didn’t want to make anyone into a footnote in this film. Gays and other groups murdered also deserve the dignity of a film dedicated to their suffering and I would like to see that film made.

Thanks to Tobi Elliott for her help with the blog.

Worthwhile articles on documentaries

Werner Herzog filming 'Into the Abyss' which screens at TIFF this week.

I can already imagine what my webmestre Kim Gjerstad might say about this post: “Magnus, I told you, only original material!”

But in my defense, these articles are very interesting, for different reasons. It’s disappointing however that the one about the abundance of docs at the Toronto International Film Festival doesn’t mention any Canadian docs, such as Surviving Progress. Maybe one reason is that TIFF programs very few Canadian docs?

Anyway, enjoy the reading.

Captivating Films, Complicated Truths – the New York Times writer A.O. Scott explores the implications and importance of five new documentaries: Errol Morris’s Tabloid, James Marsh’s Project Nim, Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams, John Turturro’s Passione and The Interrupters, Steve James and Alex Kotlowitz’s “eagerly anticipated, much-admired examination of violence in Chicago’s poor neighborhoods based on an article Mr. Kotlowitz wrote for The New York Times Magazine.”

A Bounty of Documentaries at Toronto Festival – focusing on the documentary offerings at TIFF, but in particular Werner Herzog’s film Into the Abyss, about the execution of death-row inmate Michael Perry. While editing, “Herzog said he was too shaken by his encounters with Mr. Perry, his associates, his pursuers and the family of his victims to work on the film for more than a few hours each day.”

The Documentary.org article Three New Studies Prove that Docs can Change the World puts the spotlight on three studies analyzing the impacts of the documentary films such as An Inconvenient Truth and Waiting for Superman.

Another NY Times article reviews a book by filmmaker Errol Morris, “Believing is Seeing” about the limitations of photographs. “Each of its six chapters originally appeared, in different form, in the Opinionator blog of The New York Times, and each centers on a photo or photo set: two slightly different pictures taken by Roger Fenton during the Crimean War; the infamous Abu Ghraib images, over two chapters; Depression-era photographs by Walker Evans and Arthur Rothstein; pictures of children’s toys lying in the rubble after Israeli airstrikes on southern Lebanon in 2006; and an ambrotype of three young children that was found clutched in the hand of a dead Union soldier at Gettysburg in 1863.”

Thanks to Tobi Elliott for her help with the blog.

Caravaggio, Kieslowski, Jarl: Inspiration

At a filmmaker lunch last year, my very creative friend Don McWilliams told this story. About fifteen years ago, the famous Polish filmmaker Kryzstof Kieslowsky gave a conference at Concordia University. After his presentation, a professor asked him what his greatest sources of cinematic inspiration had been.

His answer: Molière and Dostoyevsky. The professor found this very annoying, and came back to insist that this was a serious question. And Kieslowsky in turn explained that his was a serious answer. “You have to expose yourself to the arts and the world outside of the cinema,” is the way Don remembers his reply.

What brought this anecdote to mind was my visit to the terrific Caravaggio exhibition at the National Gallery in Ottawa. Caravaggio was a rebel, and the way he revolutionized the visual arts at the end of the 16th century has double relevance for documentary filmmakers. In times when the traditional treatment of religious motifs dominated the arts, he brought the turbulent realities of his contemporaries, ordinary folks included into his paintings: tax collectors, disaffected soldiers, prostitutes, street merchants… It was a breakthrough for realism, but a highly creative form of realism.

Caravaggio’s use of and depiction of light was equally revolutionary. One of the filmmakers who has most inspired me, the Swedish documentarian Stefan Jarl, has this to say about Caravaggio’s use of light:

‘Caravaggio is a master of light and shadow. There is a fantastic painting which describes how Jesus asks Matthew to follow him, in which the light from the window illuminates the characters in the shades. It’s one of the most vibrant paintings ever made. Everything he did during his tumultuous and much too short life was of the highest order when it came to lighting. Filmmakers have much to learn from him…’ (My translation, from a book by Cyril Hellman.)

If you have a chance to see the Caravaggio exhibition before it closes, you should!

Thanks to Tobi Elliott for her help with this blog.