![]() The Best Documentaries of All Time | Sight & Sound. Introduction. The new Sight & Sound Documentary Poll is the result of a ‘why didn’t we think of that before’ moment. In the light of the amazing recent success and cultural impact of several nonfiction films, a group of curators, myself included, were chewing over what the BFI might do specifically for documentary films and television. It soon became obvious that we were not sure exactly what it was that we were trying to discuss. I’m usually loath to do anything that takes lustre away from Sight & Sound’s ten- year poll of the Greatest Films of All Time but a new poll seemed to me the most obvious solution to getting a full view of the documentary canon. Approximately four months later I’m delighted with the quality of what more than 2. John Akomfrah, Michael Apted, Clio Barnard, James Benning, Sophie Fiennes, Amos Gitai, Paul Greengrass, Jose Guerin, Isaac Julien, Asif Kapadia, Sergei Loznitsa, Kevin Macdonald, James Marsh, Joshua Oppenheimer, Anand Patwardhan, Pawel Pawlikowski, Nicolas Philibert, Walter Salles and James Toback) have come up with in terms of choices and commentary and I’m very proud of the team of advisors, BFI colleagues and S& S editors who have worked so hard to produce this poll edition. Ladds of New England. Genealogical resources tracing the descendants of Daniel Ladd, (1613-1693)and his brother Joseph Ladd (1620-1683). Of late years the position of woman in human society has given rise to a discussion which, as part of social unrest, is known under the name of the "woman question. ![]() Archives and past articles from the Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Daily News, and Philly.com. The Moline Advance - January 26, 1928. MR. RAMON SALES - Submitted by Dan Durbin. RAMON SALES KILLED. Mexican Santa Fe Yardman Victim of Fatal Accident. What’s remarkable about the Top 5. One in five of the films chosen were made since the millennium, and to have a silent film from 1. That allusive essay films feature so strongly throughout demonstrates that nonfiction cinema is not a narrow discipline but a wide open country full of explorers. The current special documentary edition of S& S contains further features and reflections on our poll; the real explorers among you will also want to browse all the individual votes and comments over on our dedicated interactive web page. The top 5. 0Dziga Vertov, USSR 1. Michael Nyman)1. 00 votes. David Abelevich Kaufman is documentary’s Jumpin’ Jack Flash. Indeed, there is a photograph of him caught in mid- air, jumping. His pseudonym ‘Dziga Vertov’, which translates as ‘spinning top’, could not be more apposite. And his masterpiece, Man with a Movie Camera (Chelovek s kinoapparatom, 1. It has taken more than 8. Man with a Movie Camera is a ‘city symphony’ film of a kind not uncommon in the 1. These films celebrated the vibrancy of the modern cityscape with pastiches of urban images, for the most part neither set up nor reconstructed. Vertov, though, plays fast and loose with the conventions of such films, to profound effect. He superimposes, splits the screen, deploys fast- and slow- motion and extreme close- ups, and animates using stop- motion. Most surprisingly, he shows us the processes whereby a documentary is made. The eponymous man with the movie camera is his brother Mikhail, and his wife, Yelizaveta Svilova, is his editor. An Eclectic Digest of Science, Art and Literature. COREY FELDMAN: STILL TOURING WITH HIS ANGELS We can’t decide if Corey Feldman, 46, aspires to be the next Michael Jackson or the next Hugh Hefner. Tickets for Concerts, Sports, Theatre and More Online at TicketsInventory.com. Both appear at work on screen. His experimental exuberance was not appreciated. ![]() The 50 greatest documentaries as nominated by 237 critics, curators and academics.When the film was seen in the West, it was dismissed. The British documentarist Paul Rotha remembered: “Vertov we regarded really as rather a joke, you know. All this cutting, and one camera photographing another camera photographing another camera – it was all trickery, and we didn’t take it seriously.”At the time, his colleague John Grierson, the Scottish producer and theorist regarded as the father of British realist documentary, dismissed Vertov’s work peremptorily: “Vertov has pushed the argument to a point at which it becomes ridiculous.”More profoundly and more dangerously for Vertov, he was also attacked in the Soviet Union. Eisenstein called Man with a Movie Camera “cine- hooliganism”. The comrade- theoreticians associated with the intellectual LEF journal were equally unimpressed: “Dziga Vertov cuts up newsreel. In this sense his work is not artistically progressive” – a failing that could get you years in the Gulag. Vertov, who always marched to a different drummer, compounded the threat. He never produced recognisable scripts, shot from the hip (most of the time), went over budget and was generally uncontrollable. He was a combative polemicist vehemently insisting that the potential of the cinema as a revolutionary tool was being ignored by his fellows. Their fictions were bourgeois distractions, unlike his efforts with the “unplayed film”, as he called documentary. Almost from the start of his career in newsreels immediately after the Bolshevik revolution of 1. Film is not merely… facts recorded on film… but the product, a ‘higher mathematics’ of facts.” Crucially, he disdained everyday observationalism: “Our eyes,” he wrote, “see very poorly and very little… the movie camera was invented to penetrate more deeply into the visible world”…Today, all such possibilities matter more and more. A ‘kino- eye’ seeing beneath surface realities offers a crucial lifeline as modern technology undercuts and wounds mainstream realist documentary’s essential observationalist assumptions, perhaps fatally. Vertov’s agenda in Man with a Movie Camera signposts nothing less than how documentary can survive the digital destruction of photographic image integrity and yet still, as Vertov wanted, “show us life”. Vertov is, in fact, the key to documentary’s future. It is no wonder that two years ago Man with a Movie Camera entered the top ten in Sight & Sound’s ‘Greatest films of all time’ list and that now it tops the poll for the greatest documentary ever made. It is not merely that a great film now receives its just deserts. Vertov has no reason any longer to be “sad”.—Brian Winston, excerpted from a new essay in our September 2. Claude Lanzmann, France 1. There are documentary filmmakers who plant their stakes within existing traditions and those for whom cinema has to be reinvented. Claude Lanzmann clearly belongs in the latter category. Of course cinema already had to exist in order to allow Lanzmann to make Shoah – the title is the Hebrew word for catastrophe – but he also had to rethink what cinema could be. His 5. 50- minute examination of the Jewish Holocaust falls within the documentary tradition of investigative journalism, but what he does with that form is so confrontational and relentless that it demands to be described in philosophical/spiritual terms rather than simply cinematically. Determined to make us imagine the unimaginable, Lanzmann literalises a quote from the philosopher Emil Fackenheim: “The European Jews massacred are not just of the past, they are the presence of an absence.”One could even describe Shoah as a kind of cruel but determined shotgun marriage between Judaism and existentialism – a match between Lanzmann’s sense of his tribal roots (he was born in 1. French Jewish family of Eastern European immigrants, and joined the Resistance at the age of 1. Jean- Paul Sartre’s journal Les Temps modernes and the lover of Simone de Beauvoir). How does one negotiate between a religion founded on the dictates of the past and a philosophy founded on the needs and challenges of the present? First of all, in the case of Shoah, by refusing any historical or archival footage or narration. The film depends exclusively on interviews and footage shot in the present, either at certain key places where the Holocaust occurred (on the trains carrying Jews to the death camps, or at what remains of the camps themselves at Chelmno, Sobibor, Treblinka, Auschwitz) or in other relevant locations in Wlodawa, Kolo, Berlin, Belzec, Warsaw – even, most memorably, in an Israeli barbershop. Secondly, by recording Lanzmann and others in their own languages (including German, Hebrew, Polish and Yiddish) and including the translations into French, which are then subtitled in English in Anglo- American prints of the film. And thirdly, as de Beauvoir noted in her preface to the film’s published text, by editing the sequences not according to any chronological order, but poetically. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” Theodor Adorno once wrote, and Lanzmann’s singular achievement is to both challenge and corroborate that statement.—Jonathan Rosenbaum. Chris Marker, France 1. By the way, did you know that there are emus in the Ile de France?” This is surely not the most pertinent question in Chris Marker’s monumental Sans soleil – a time- and- space- hopping travelogue that may be one of the most ardently searching movies ever made – but it perfectly encapsulates the film’s M. O.: the sly, conspiratorial tone that collapses the literal and figurative distance between the images on the screen and the epigrams on the soundtrack, and the viewer doing his or her level best to keep up with the racing pace of both. Allusions to Jean- Jacques Rousseau, the Khmer Rouge and the revolutionary history of Guinea- Bissau are heady stuff, but who can resist a glancing close- up of a puffed- up bird bobbing its way through a botanical garden? Rigour and discursiveness – or perhaps a uniquely discursive rigour – are the most potent weapons in Sans soleil’s arsenal. Shot by Marker under the pseudonym Sandor Krasna and narrated (in both its English and French- language versions) by an actress pretending to be this cipher’s closest correspondent – and thus a vessel for conveying both his footage and his thoughts to the audience – the film is unique in the documentary canon for its simultaneous embodiment of both documentary’s most classical and radical qualities. At its core, the work is an exercise in ethnographic filmmaking, with Marker- as- Krasna decamping to locations in Japan and Africa to observe the environments and rituals therein. But the highly mediated presentation – the adoption of a fictional framework and the relentless manipulation and juxtaposition of the images into a kind of audiovisual labyrinth – gets so far away from Flaherty that it actually laps him: depending on one’s perspective, Sans soleil is either an hommage to the observational ethos of Nanook of the North or an ardent repudiation. Hollywood Reporter | Entertainment News. The order won't be official until Monday since both 'Kingsman: The Golden Circle' and 'American Made' reported an estimated $1.
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