“He [D.W. Griffith] missed a certain beauty he thought had disappeared from film, from the way people saw life — ‘the beauty of the moving wind in the trees, the little movement in a beautiful blowing on the blossoms in the trees. That they have forgotten entirely. . . We have lost beauty.’ On that note, Griffith fell silent.” -Richard Schickel, D.W. GRIFFITH: AN AMERICAN LIFE

Griffith’s deathbed lament has turned into something of a mission statement for a disparate group of filmmakers on the experimental side of documentary practice,  who combine anthropological impulses (recording “the wind in the trees”) with a rigorously constructed visual formalism (regaining its “beauty”), blurring the boundary between fiction and non. The great French avant-gardist Jean-Marie Straub is a main influence, and seems to have popularized the quote, as recounted by director John Gianvito and critic Jonathan Rosenbaum. Griffith’s words have exerted almost as much influence as Straub and late partner Daniele Huillet’s austere long-take style. I’ve never found the original 1947 interview from which Griffith’s words were taken, so any help on this front would be much obliged.

I was led to three of these hybrid films: Sweetgrass (which I discussed here), The Anchorage, and Agrarian Utopia, by Robert Koehler in his Cinema Scope essay, “Agrarian Utopias/Dystopias“.  Here he introduces his concept of a “cinema of in-between-ness”, which is not a movement as much as a tendency, where “a zone of a cinema free of, or perhaps more precisely in between, hardened fact and invented fiction permits all manner of wild possibilities.” Most of these possibilites, he finds, are focused on “subjects about humans working on the surface of the earth.”

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This past week a bright and charming grade-schooler interviewed me about Chicago’s place in film history. He was knee deep in producing a documentary for his school’s history fair, and I was one of the people he interviewed on camera. I am always thrilled when young people exhibit an interest in the cinema of the past, let alone an era that predates Hollywood as the hub of the industry. The experience was doubly enjoyable because not only was it fun to help out, but in prepping for the interview, I uncovered and re-discovered some fun facts about my adopted city and its place in the history of film.  As a matter of fact, I found so much that I am going to divide the information into two posts, continuing the saga next week. Much of this detail is omitted from standard film texts, which tend to travel the path of history as it threads through the industry centers of Hollywood and New York.

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One of my favorite things to do on a lazy Sunday morning is to grab a book from a growing pile of neglected reading material. This morning, the book that caught my eye was a 2006 publication from David Lynch called Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity. As is widely known by fans of the maestro of weirdness, the same director who is famous for disturbing our collective unconsciousness – with a mewling mutant baby in Eraserhead (1977), sliced ears and sexual psychopaths in Blue Velvet (1986), head-blasting violence in Wild at Heart (1990), more demonic versions of evil incarnate than you can shake a stick at be it Bob in Twin Peaks (1990), Robert Blake in Lost Highway (1997), the screeching imps in a box of Mulholland Drive (2001), or the crazy clown of Inland Empire -  this same man wants his name to be associated with Transcendental Meditation and inner bliss. It calls to mind a famous quote by Gustave Flaubert: “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”  READ MORE

Last week I made note of some of the more conspicuous Best Actor Oscar omissions – Lew Ayres for ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT (1930), Charlie Chaplin for CITY LIGHTS (1931), Joseph Cotten for SHADOW OF A DOUBT (1943) – while some of you brought up other favorite shutouts such as James Cagney for WHITE HEAT (1949) and Humphrey Bogart for IN A LONELY PLACE (1950). Starting with 1955 and continuing up to 2000, here are the rest of my Best Actor choices which deserved nominations.     READ MORE

Back when TV Guide was as important a publication to me as The Cub Scout Handbook or Famous Monsters of Filmland, I often ran across the phrase “Good fang work” in the one-sentence reviews that accompanied listings for vampire movies.  I don’t know whose wording that was (the neologism was ported into Leonard Maltin’s movie guides in the 1980s) and its provenance is immaterial to this discussion.   “Good fang work” always struck me as a touch condescending even back before I really understood the meaning of the word.  I didn’t need some faceless adult patronizing me.  I knew good fang work when I saw it… and I still do.

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Motherhood and the movies have often made for boffo box office returns. My glowing memories of those warm-hearted, endearingly fluttery, or nobly self-sacrificing mothers played by Spring Byington, Mary Astor, Fay Bainter and Barbara Stanwyck and others in classic movies may have fogged my vision of celluloid motherhood a bit.

The Silver Cord (1933), a 77 year old film made at RKO, broke that clichéd Mom mold with a disquieting crack, blending a domestic drama with strong elements of high camp. There were Bad Moms around in dramas before and after this exercise in theatrical Freudianism. Noel Coward enjoyed his first big success in the mid 1920s dramatizing the unhealthy relationship between a glamorous nymphomaniac socialite and her drug addicted son in The Vortex (1927), which was made into a silent movie in 1927. The same year as The Silver Cord (1933), director John Ford offered a surprisingly negative portrait of a mother played by Henrietta Crossman in Pilgrimage. Crossman’s dour character was so fixated on avoiding a marriage by her only son to “an unsuitable girl,” she sent him off to the trenches of World War I. And Gladys Cooper brought the Bad Mom to an artistic high point with her portrayals of lethally clinging matriarchs in Now, Voyager (1942) and Separate Tables (1958) in the ’40s and ’50s. The grandma of many of the later indictments of maternal love, however, might be this early talkie, which is statically staged but electrifying, thanks to the author, the actors and their under-appreciated director, John Cromwell.

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Last week I looked at six of the Best Picture nominees from 1943, the last year the Academy nominated ten films for Best Picture, until they expanded the category once more in 2010. Today I’ll look at the remaining four titles, with James Agee and Manny Farber again providing perspective with their reviews from the period. The idea is to approach these films with fresh eyes, outside of the reputations (or lack of) that have accrued over time.

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I love to watch documentaries in a theater on the big screen, where the camerawork can be seen in all its glory and any subtleties of technique are more noticeable. According to some documentary websites, the popularity of this mode of filmmaking has increased, and the advent of DVD has made it more financially viable.

Despite the increase in documentaries, the exhibition and distribution of nonfiction films is spotty. The most lucrative exhibition opportunities exist in the broadcasting market, particularly on public television and cable channels, though filmmakers who make deals in this market find themselves shackled by the tastes and limits of the broadcasting industry. In terms of a theatrical release, docs are generally distributed by small companies, or by the filmmakers themselves who work hard to get their labors of love shown. Few have the money for marketing campaigns, and movie reviewers seldom write about them, let alone advocate for them, preferring to write yet another piece on the latest Hollywood blockbuster. Though mainstream theater chains rarely exhibit feature-length documentaries, doc fans who keep their eyes open know that alternative venues, such as cinematheques, university film programs, museums, small film festivals, and arts centers frequently show nonfiction films of all types.

I am fortunate that my job at Facets Multi-Media allows me to see documentaries I might not otherwise hear about. Nonfiction films are frequently part of the program in our cinematheque, and we often release them on DVD either on our own label or through our distribution partners. Recently, I caught two documentaries that actually made me feel joyful after watching them—something I can’t say for most Hollywood films that I see.

BILL WITHERS NEAR THE BEGINNING OF HIS CAREER

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Most of my cinematic heroes have been ignored by the Academy over the years, and after hearing James Cameron’s “King of the World” speech in 1997 for Titanic I stopped tuning in. Now comes Avatar and I’d rather walk around the block to stick my snout by the fire hydrant to sniff out the more interesting details of what goes on behind the scenes of this momentous occasion. In honor of the fact that this year the field has been extended to ten films, I’m here to offer my top-5 Oscars – that’s right; I’m going to be sloppy about this because my Oscars are named after Jack Klugman’s Oscar Madison from The Odd Couple. Which is to say that these are dedicated to the colorful people I’ve personally come across who went on to walk, or happily stumble (as the case may have been), down the red carpet for the Oscars ceremony in their own unique way. READ MORE