Director Peter Watkins' web site describes the filming, distribution and critical reaction to each of his controversial films, including Punishment Park, the rock star satire Privilege, The War Game, La Commune and more. He also offers a 10-part critique of "the media crisis" that marginalizes non-mainstream ideas via the Hollywood monoform and the Universal Clock, a style he claims structures almost all of the messages delivered to the public, but which sharply limits the range of relationships possible between media producers and audiences. [more inside]
posted by mediareport on Nov 3, 2008 - 7 comments

What happens when a US President declares war on a concept? In 1964, Canadian photojournalist Hugh O'Connor traveled to eastern Kentucky to document the battlefields of Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty and was shot for trespassing. The incident is the subject of a wonderful documentary, Stranger with a Camera by filmmaker Elizabeth Barrett, produced by Appalshop, a non-profit organization in Whitesburg, Kentucky, that works with local artists to promote self-representation in media and the expediency of culture to counteract a stagnating local economy. Makes you think twice about nostalgic representations of poor Appalachian coal miners plucking their banjo strings in the hollers, doesn't it?
posted by billtron on Apr 15, 2008 - 14 comments

Saddam's Confessions - Given Saddam Hussein's central place in the American Consciousness over the last couple decades and particularly in recent years, I found 60 minutes' interview with FBI interrogator George Piro pretty fascinating.
posted by kliuless on Jan 27, 2008 - 24 comments

80 years of Found Footage Filmmaking...
1927-1967:
The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty, 1927.
Rose Hobart, 1936.
Night and Fog 2 3 4 5 6 7, 1956.
1968-2007 inside...
posted by Ambrosia Voyeur on Aug 28, 2007 - 12 comments

From reporter to relief worker in Afghanistan. An astonishing documentary, Life After War, follows NPR correspondant turned relief worker Sarah Chayes as she struggles to help rebuild a rural Afghani village destroyed in the war. Here is an article she wrote expressing her frustrations with the American media post-9/11 and describing how and why she made this drastic life change. Her organization is Afghans for Civil Society.
posted by callmejay on May 5, 2004 - 4 comments

The Appalshop, nestled in the hills of coal-stained eastern Kentucky, was founded in 1969 as a War on Poverty project designed to train young people in Appalachia for jobs in film and television. Today, it flourishes as one of the premier cultural outposts of a proud and struggling swath of America. Its projects include documentary films, a record label, and one of the best public radio stations in the country.
posted by PrinceValium on May 8, 2003 - 5 comments