"At PSFK Conference NYC,
Vikram Gandhi spoke about his latest movie
Kumaré - The True Story of A False Prophet. While he was born in New Jersey, the film director spoke about how he had been noticing how the Indian-heritage culture he had experienced as he grew up, was being used by Americans and other Westerners to help solve their emotional and spiritual issues. To explore this idea further he dressed up as a guru, created a backstory with YouTube video and website, spoke like his grandmother and recruited followers in Arizona. What's unique is that throughout the film is that he tells everyone he was an illusion and asks his followers to look in a mirror to solve their own problems."
[more inside]
posted by vidur
on Jul 8, 2012 -
42 comments
In the late 1970s the UK's Anglia Television ran a respected weekly documentary series:
Science Report. But when the show was cancelled in 1977, the producers decided to channel Orson Welles in their final episode. The result was
Alternative 3. Over the course of the hour, the audience would learn that a
Science Report investigation into the UK "brain drain" had uncovered shocking revelations: man-made pollution had resulted in catastrophic climate change, the Earth would soon be rendered uninhabitable, and a secret American / Soviet joint plan was in place to establish colonies on the Moon and Mars. The show ended with footage of a US/Soviet Mars landing from May 22, 1962. After Alternative 3 aired,
thousands of panicked viewers phoned the production company and demanded to know how long they had left to change planets. [more inside]
posted by zarq
on Jun 20, 2012 -
22 comments
The wonderful, and fairly rare, 13-part documentary series from 1980 -
Hollywood: A Celebration of the American Silent Film - is narrated by James Mason for Thames Television. Episode One -
The Pioneers -
[52 mins] [the rest are linked inside] shows:-
"the evolution of film from penny arcade curiosity to art form, from what was considered the first plot driven film, The Great Train Robbery, through to The Birth of a Nation, films showing the power of the medium. Early Technicolor footage, along with other color technologies, are also featured. Interviews include Lillian Gish, Jackie Coogan and King Vidor.*"
[more inside]
posted by peacay
on Jun 18, 2012 -
19 comments
In the wake of their grunge-y breakout hit
"Creep" and the success of sophomore record
The Bends, Thom Yorke and the rest of
Radiohead were under pressure to deliver once more.
So they shut themselves away inside the echoing halls of
a secluded 16th century manor and got to work.
What emerged from that crumbling Elizabethan castle fifteen years ago today was a shockingly ambitious masterpiece of progressive rock, a visionary concept album that explored
the "fridge buzz" of modernity -- alienation, social disconnection, existential dread,
the impersonal hum of technology -- through a mosaic of
challenging,
innovative,
eerily beautiful music unlike anything else at the time.
Tentatively called
Ones and Zeroes, then
Your Home May Be at Risk If You Do Not Keep Up Payments, the band finally settled on
OK Computer, an appropriately enigmatic title for this
acclaimed harbinger of millennial angst. For more, you can watch the retrospective
OK Computer: A Classic Album Under Review for a track-by-track rundown, or the unsettling documentary
Meeting People is Easy for a look at how the album's whirlwind tour nearly gave Yorke
a nervous breakdown. Or look inside for more details and cool interpretations of all the tracks -- including
an upcoming MeFi Music Challenge! [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi
on Jun 16, 2012 -
66 comments
Drive 8.7 km (5.4 miles) west of
the municipality of Roses in Catalonia, Spain, and you'll get to
the gates of the renowned avant-garde restaurant,
El Bulli. Run by Ferran Adrià since 1987,
the restaurant closed in 2012 due to Adrià and his partner Juli Soler
losing a half million Euros a year on the restaurant and Adrià's cooking workshop in Barcelona. Slate's Noreen Malone wrote an article on
the history of the "I Ate at El Bulli" piece, giving an overview of tropes that you could expect in an IAaEB piece, and you can
browse images tagged "elbulli" on Flickr for snapshots of personal experiences. But for an extended look into what went into making the ever-changing
35-course taster's menu,
El Bulli: Cooking in Progress (Trailer on YT and
Vimeo) is
a 109 minute documentary on the preparation and implementation of the 2008/9 season, an "
extreme fly-on-the-wall vérité, with only the barest context provided." If you're looking for recipes,
Molecular Recipes has a few listed under
the El Bulli tag.
[more inside]
posted by filthy light thief
on Jun 4, 2012 -
26 comments
Magic Meerkat Moments: In this clip from BBC's Planet Earth Live, we get to see meerkats, which have become so acclimated to film crews that they now view them as part of the landscape and use them for shade and as vantage points.
[via]
posted by quin
on May 24, 2012 -
35 comments
"I'm just looking for a second chance. Other people get second chances. Alcoholics. Drug addicts. Spousal beaters. Not gamblers, though. But, if you want to put something on my tombstone that was very important to me, it’s 1,972. That’s how many winning games I’ve played in. So that makes me the biggest winner in the history of sports. No one else can say that." Here, Now is a short documentary that looks at baseball legend Pete Rose, as he lives his life today.
[more inside]
posted by zarq
on May 23, 2012 -
45 comments
Shock of the New is a 1980 documentary television series by Robert Hughes produced by the BBC in association with Time-Life Films and RM Productions. ... It addressed the development of modern art since the Impressionists and was accompanied by a book of the same name; its combination of insight, wit and accessibility are still widely praised. -
Wikipedia [more inside]
posted by Trurl
on May 22, 2012 -
18 comments
Consequences,
Choices,
Children in Crisis,
Challenges. HBO’s multi-part research documentary The Weight of the Nation examines obesity in America in four parts, marshaling leading doctors, epidemiologists, economists, researchers, and community leaders to understand and explain the individual costs and public solutions to a multi-faceted social and individual problem. The documentary both explores large picture statistics, while giving voice “to those that often too seek to be invisible: members of the nearly 70 percent of Americans currently diagnosed as overweight or obese. (
AV Club Review)”
[more inside]
posted by stratastar
on May 16, 2012 -
42 comments
"
From photography’s earliest days, enterprising practitioners realized they could take their services directly to the people. This lead to the horse-drawn wagons called “Daguerreotype Salons” and then to portable, darkroom tents that allowed wet-plate photographers to make pictures outside. As technology advanced, the tents morphed into a single apparatus that combined both camera and darkroom, which allowed photographers to work anywhere. Afghanistan is one of the last places where street vendor photographers still use such a hand-made, wooden camera called kamra-e-faoree or “instant camera.” Observing this practice lead photographer Lukas Birk & anthropologist Sean Foley to undertake the Afghan Box Camera Project." -
Photo Technique Magazine introduction to an interview with Lukas Birk
[more inside]
posted by filthy light thief
on May 9, 2012 -
4 comments
In 1973 and 1975, two one-hour television documentaries aired in the US:
In Search of Ancient Astronauts (Parts:
1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6) and
In Search of Ancient Mysteries (Parts:
1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6). The same producers also put out
The Outer Space Connection (Parts
1 and
2) in 1975. All were narrated by Twilight Zone's
Rod Serling. In 1976 a series was developed. Since Serling had passed away in 1975, popular actor Leonard Nimoy was chosen as host.
In Search of... ran for six seasons, from 1976 - 1982, and was devoted to discussing unusual mysteries and phenomena. All 144 episodes can be seen on YouTube. Playlists:
Seasons 1 and 2.
Seasons 3 and 4.
Seasons 5 and 6.
posted by zarq
on Apr 23, 2012 -
51 comments
Imaginary Landscapes (1989): a visually hypnotic and impressionistic portrait of musician Brian Eno, directed by Duncan Ward and Gabriella Cardazzo. (40 mins.)
posted by Neilopolis
on Apr 22, 2012 -
20 comments
Who Killed Nancy is a documentary examining the lives and deaths of
Sid Vicious and
Nancy Spungen. It features interviews with many of the people on the Punk scenes in both London and New York, including people who were in Sid and Nancy's Chelsea Hotel room on the night Nancy died.
posted by marienbad
on Apr 22, 2012 -
23 comments
Before Joy Adamson went to Africa, before Margaret Mead sailed to Samoa, before Dian Fossey was even born, a
Kansas teenager named Osa Leighty
married Martin Johnson. Whether
dancing to jazz in Congorilla or
meeting headhunters in Borneo,
her life with Martin ultimately led to hours of
pioneering documentary footage,
books,
movies and more. Her
autobiography inspired a
Kate Spade purse, a
perfume and her marriage an
entire line of clothing while her
joie de vivre put her
on the cover of a book on
trailblazing women of history. Osa Johnson went on to become a character in
a play, in
a poem while her married life gave birth to
a museum (or two).
When Osa met Martin,
she married adventure.
posted by infini
on Apr 19, 2012 -
4 comments
I Woke Up Gay (SLYT): In the small town of Ystrad Mynach, South Wales, seven years ago, a 19-stone rugby-playing ladies man and bank clerk Chris Birch snapped his neck while larking around doing somersaults and backflips with his friends. As the tabloids excitedly revealed a while ago, he suffered a massive stroke and woke up as a completely different person -- a person who happened to be gay. [more inside]
posted by gertzedek
on Apr 18, 2012 -
105 comments
Those Americans who are familiar with the name Claude Lanzmann most likely know him as the director of “Shoah,” his monumental 1985 documentary about the extermination of the European Jews in the Nazi gas chambers. As it turns out, though, the story of Lanzmann’s eventful life would have been well worth telling even if he had never come to direct “Shoah.” In addition to film director, Lanzmann’s roles have included those of journalist, editor, public intellectual, member of the French Resistance, long-term lover of Simone de Beauvoir and close friend of Jean-Paul Sartre, world traveler, political activist, ghostwriter for Jacques Cousteau — I could go on, but it’s a good deal more entertaining to hear Lanzmann himself go on, and thanks to the publication in English of his memoir, “The Patagonian Hare,” we now have the opportunity to do so. (previously)
posted by Trurl
on Apr 16, 2012 -
6 comments
In 1984,
The Voyage of the Mimi set sail on PBS, exploring the ocean off the coast of Massachusetts to study humpback whales. The educational series was made up of thirteen episodes intended to teach middle schoolers about science and math. The first fifteen minutes of each episode were a fictional adventure starring a young Ben Affleck. The second 15 minutes were an "expedition documentary" that would explore the scientific concepts behind the show's plot points. A sequel with the same format,
The Second Voyage of the Mimi aired in 1988, and featured the crew of the Mimi exploring Mayan ruins in Mexico.
[more inside]
posted by zarq
on Apr 9, 2012 -
36 comments
Dirty Pictures [1h30m] is a
documentary (
trailer [1m30s]) about
Alexander Shulgin, his life, his family, the drugs he has developed, the people he has affected, the boundaries of experience he has explored, the effects he has had on society, and the understanding of the mind and the psychedelic experience which have resulted from his experiments and chemical creations.
posted by hippybear
on Apr 4, 2012 -
23 comments
The Winter Of The Beard [1h47m] is a documentary which chronicles the lives of nine men across six months.
Each was provided a video camera and weekly interview questions to document his own experience. The resulting 600 hours of intimate footage revealed a group of men traversing the same rite of passage from disparate vantage points. Throughout the process, the men told stories from their pasts, shared likes and dislikes, and confessed personal fears and aspirations. They laughed and cried, hid and came alive behind their beards. The tireless taping captured bad days and good ones, and it is in this framework that the individual stories stand out and the beards fade into the background. From a son dealing with his father's descent into Alzheimer's, to financial and marital struggles, to the birth of a child, THE WINTER OF THE BEARD [trailer, 2m58s] reveals the trials and tribulations of what it means to drastically alter one's appearance and otherwise go on living life. [more inside]
posted by hippybear
on Mar 27, 2012 -
30 comments
HBO Documentary: Child of Rage: (1989) "Story of Beth, a six-year-old child who had faced the loss of a mother, physical abuse, and sexual abuse all before the age of 19 months. Both Beth and her younger brother Jonathan were put up for adoption. They were adopted by a minister and his wife. This unsuspecting couple quickly learned that something was extremely wrong with Beth.
This terrifying and disturbing documentary traces Beth as she goes through therapy in Colorado. The video explains that Beth suffers from
Reactive Attachment Disorder.
[Via]."
posted by Fizz
on Mar 25, 2012 -
44 comments
"
First Kill is a war documentary that explores the dark side of man and the psychology of soldiers at war. Vietnam veterans are interviewed about their experiences and what war does to the human mind and soul."
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posted by gman
on Feb 16, 2012 -
9 comments
Человек с киноаппаратом ("Man with a Movie Camera") is a classic experimental documentary film that was released in 1929. Directed by pioneer Soviet filmmaker
Dziga Vertov, this classic, silent documentary film has no story and no actors, and is actually three documentaries in one. Ostensibly it documents 24 hours of life in a single city in the Soviet Union. But it is also a documentary of the filming of that documentary and a depiction of an audience watching that documentary and their responses. "We see the cameraman and the editing of the film, but what we don't see is any of the film itself."
[more inside]
posted by zarq
on Feb 13, 2012 -
26 comments
