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I don't really understand the claim that all Cornell's films are "effectively 'found.'" Even the ones on which he worked closely with Burckhardt, Brakhage, and Jordan on the filming, and even the rare ones he shot himself?

HerrSchreck wrote:If you can't call it mise en scene Dent then you cant call Cornell a director-- it's that simple. Take Burroughs cut-ups-- was he merely an editor or was he writing something via his juxtapositions?

Thanks, Schreck, this brings it home for me. I'm with you now.

I'm sure my subsequent viewings of Carousel Animal Opera will now be very different. Thank you.

davidhare wrote:I wouldnt claim to be any sort of authority on Cornell but this seems to be the whole basis of his film work (and his Boxes.)

Well, this is not true. Offhand, I believe The Aviary, Nymphlight, A Legend for Fountains, and Angel do not use "found" footage, but are traditionally filmed by Cornell (or Jordan?). There's also Gnir Rednow and Centuries of June, shot by Stan Brakhage but assembled and edited by Cornell.

I picked up the new Lux/CCA Warsaw DVD of the complete surviving films (all three of them) of Stefan and Franciszka Themerson last night - more details here

Zillertal wrote:Peter Rose now sells two dvd's one with film works and another with video works, for 40 dollars each, 'The man who could not see far enough' is a true classic, not to be missed.

Agreed, and not just because I was a student of the man.

Can anyone recommend any Avant-Garde documentaries? I'm specifically looking for docs which interrogate the representational possibilities and limits of documentary practice.

Thanks.

That's a wide topic, and I don't know that my shortlist will fall into the "non-narrative" category, but here are some that spring to mind, and which I've quite loved:

Reassemblage (Trinh T. Minh-ha, 1982)
From the Other Side, Sud, and D'est (Chantal Akerman)
News From Home (Chantal Akerman)
The Old Place (Godard/Mieville, 1998)
France/Tour/Detour/Deux/Enfants (Akerman/Mieville) (stream this here)
Ici et ailleurs (Godard, 1976)
Sink or Swim (Su Friedrich)
Too Early Too Late (Straub/Huillet)
Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (Straub/Huillet)
A Film About A Woman Who... (Yvonne Rainer)
House is Black (Farrokhzad, 1963)

And some of the more obvious names hold weight here too. Chris Marker, Jean Rouch, JLG, Abbas Kiarostami, Emile de Antonio, Agnes Varda, Dusan Makavejev (WR and Switchboard Operator are of particular importance), Werner Herzog (whose faith in the idea of honest representation is so dim that he deliberately fabricates and even scriptes huge portions of his documentaries), Alexander Kluge, Harun Farocki, et al.

And don't sleep on early documentary. Joris Ivens and the old Brits docs are amazingly rich in their handling of questions of representation and authenticity. Night Mail (Basil Wright, 1936), for one, could keep your mind spinning for days.

Also, while Apted's Up series really isn't an example of a thorough meditation on representational ethics, it certainly gives you a lot to chew on in that department, as does more wildly sensational work like Capturing the Friedmans.

If any of that falls into the category you're looking for, consider checking out Philip Lopate's writings on "essay film." He'll have a lot more for you to add to your rental list.

I'd add Leslie Thornton's Adynata which examines the nature of Orientalism as exoticism. Similarly, there's also her There Was an Unseen Cloud Moving which also examines the nature of exoticization, this time, with respect to Islamic culture.

backstreetsbackalright wrote:And don't sleep on early documentary. Joris Ivens and the old Brits docs are amazingly rich in their handling of questions of representation and authenticity. Night Mail (Basil Wright, 1936), for one, could keep your mind spinning for days.

...and so, to an even greater extent, will just about any film by Humphrey Jennings.

Thanks very much guys that helps a great deal. I hadn't forgotten the old Brits and Joris Ivens was definitely springing to mind, but I want to focus on something newer, well at least post 1960s/Verité etc. though I will be looking into Rouch. I will definitely check out Philip Lopate's writings, that sounds perfect for what I'm after.

Oh Michael thanks so much for your link - it just caused me to find Len Lye's wonderful short The Birth of the Robot, which I've been wanting to see again for some time!

FSimeoni wrote:Oh Michael thanks so much for your link - it just caused me to find Len Lye's wonderful short The Birth of the Robot, which I've been wanting to see again for some time!

Len Lye and Norman McLaren's work for the GPO Film Unit may well be relevant here too, though they stretch the definition of "documentary" arguably beyond breaking point.

The NFB's wonderful seven-disc McLaren overview contains all his GPO films.

Thanks Michael, I am going to see what I can track down in my uni library and possibly rent and then make a decision about what I want to write about (this is for an essay).

Backstreet- I can't seem to find Philip Lopate's book, am I being stupid? Or are his writings collected somewhere?

EDIT: Found Lopate's essay in a collection 'Beyond the Document: Essays on Non Fiction Film' Edited by Charles Warren.

There's a fabulous tour of the films of Len Lye touring North America, organized by the New Zealand Film Archives. It might be done, but if not, try to check it out.

Also there is a good DVD with Humphrey Jennings films, produced by David Shepard, I think on Image.

Adam wrote:Also there is a good DVD with Humphrey Jennings films, produced by David Shepard, I think on Image.

Alternatively, since FSimeoni is UK-based, he should keep an eye out for the touring programme of digital Jennings screenings.

Restored from what's believed to be the finest surviving materials (the BFI National Archive, the Central Office of Information and the Imperial War Museum all contributed footage), they look absolutely staggering - and even this old Jennings hand felt at times that he was watching the films for the first time.

FSimeoni,
I recommend you check out David Holzman's Diary and Portrait of Jason. The former blurs documentary and fiction while the latter is a blend of documentary and performance. They're closer to fiction and performance, respectively, than what is normally associated with the genre's technique and what it asks of the viewer, and they're interesting in thinking about what documentary essentially is.

Gregory wrote:FSimeoni,
I recommend you check out David Holzman's Diary and Portrait of Jason. The former blurs documentary and fiction while the latter is a blend of documentary and performance. They're closer to fiction and performance, respectively, than what is normally associated with the genre's technique and what it asks of the viewer, and they're interesting in thinking about what documentary essentially is.

Seconded. And, as a sort of tangent, I once had an excruciatingly aggravating experience at the Seattle International Film Festival that confronted me with a lot of problems of documentary observation and the camera's intervention in actual lived experience.

Michael Winterbottom's refugee docudrama, In This World, had its local premiere at the Fest. I hadn't read up on it previously, so when the Festival program presented it as a documentary, I didn't raise an eyebrow. Then, at the screening itself, some SIFF programmers spent quite a bit of time before the film celebrating what an astonishing documentary it was. Not praising "documentary qualities" in the film, but straight up classifying it as "a Documentary." In all likelihood, they probably hadn't seen it, or at least not all of it. That, or they aren't particularly thoughtful viewers. It's not a documentary, just shot in a pseudo-doc style. Unfortunately, it took a bit before I'd overturned my assumed confidence in the Fest's classification, and realized that this was more Rossellini than Wiseman. Until that point, I felt that Winterbottom should've been incarcerated. Take, for example, a scene where the camera sits on the back of a truck, pulling away while the juvenile subject chases after this important ride in vain. Luckily, I'd come to my own conclusions before the films end (if you've seen it, you'll understand why), otherwise I might've started throwing chairs...

backstreetsbackalright wrote:Michael Winterbottom's refugee docudrama, In This World, had its local premiere at the Fest. I hadn't read up on it previously, so when the Festival program presented it as a documentary, I didn't raise an eyebrow. Then, at the screening itself, some SIFF programmers spent quite a bit of time before the film celebrating what an astonishing documentary it was. Not praising "documentary qualities" in the film, but straight up classifying it as "a Documentary." In all likelihood, they probably hadn't seen it, or at least not all of it. That, or they aren't particularly thoughtful viewers. It's not a documentary, just shot in a pseudo-doc style. Unfortunately, it took a bit before I'd overturned my assumed confidence in the Fest's classification, and realized that this was more Rossellini than Wiseman.

I had a similar experience to you, but in reverse, when I saw Chris Smith's American Movie at the 1998 Edinburgh Film Festival. I'd just failed to get into something else and had a couple of hours to kill, so I glanced through the programme and booked tickets for what I thought was a fictional This Is Spinal Tap-style comedy about a hilariously inept filmmaker (which was pretty much how it was sold).

It's a real shame, as I might have enjoyed it a lot more if I'd known it was a documentary from the start. As it was, I spent far too much time wondering not only why I wasn't laughing but why the film didn't seem to be making any particular effort in that department, and why the protagonist seemed more sad-sack than comical.

FSimeoni wrote:Can anyone recommend any Avant-Garde documentaries? I'm specifically looking for docs which interrogate the representational possibilities and limits of documentary practice.

Weighing in a bit late on this, but have you got the Faber Book of Documentary Imagining Reality ed. by Kevin MacDonald and Mark Cousins? A trawl through that will give you plenty to chew on.

Zazou dans le Metro wrote:Weighing in a bit late on this, but have you got the Faber Book of Documentary Imagining Reality ed. by Kevin MacDonald and Mark Cousins? A trawl through that will give you plenty to chew on.

Thanks, I have the book and am trawling through it.

Also, Gregory, thanks for your recommendation of David Holzman's Diary and Portrait of Jason, they sound very interesting and am going to rent them very soon!

Browsing through the backpages of this thread, I decided to splurge on the Frans Zwartjes set. I haven't seen any of his films, but read about one film in Film as a Subversive Art. I'n hoping this DVD lives up to the hype!

Secondly, does anyone know if there is a legitimate release of any of the films of Segundo de Chomon?

Another documentary recommendation that occurred to me is Sonic Outlaws by Craig Baldwin, which is about Negativland's struggle with Island Records after the release of the band's record U2. Baldwin utilizes many of the same methods as Negativland, not as a pretense because of the subject but because as a kind of co-conspirator this was his style as a filmmaker. As a result the film says infinitely more than a straightforward documentary could have done.

By the way the way I referred to the two films in my last post was ambiguous. Lest there be any confusion, I'll identify them this way: David Holzman's Diary by Jim McBride and Portrait of Jason by Shirley Clarke. Of course many people on this forum will already be familiar with these titles because of Second Run's releases of them, if for no other reason.

Cabiria21 wrote:Secondly, does anyone know if there is a legitimate release of any of the films of Segundo de Chomon?

A few of them appeared on the Movies Begin set from Kino. There were some online at UbuWeb, too, but that's probably not the kind of thing you're looking for.

Avant-Garde docs:
Definitely hunt down:
Films by James Benning, which are documentaries to me.

"Une histoire de vent" (Or A tale of the Wind"( by Joris Ivens and Marceline Loridan Ivens (1989)
'Rain" and "Bridge" by Ivens

Afrique, je te plumerai (1993) aka Africa, I Will Fleece You by Jean-Marie Teno

El Abuelo Cheno y otras historias (1994) aka Grandfather Cheno... and Other Stories by Juan Carlos Rulfo

Craig Baldwin films are good.

Films by Su Friedrich: The Odds of Recovery; Hide and Seek; The Ties that Bind; The Head of a Pin; and others

"Who's Going to Pay for these donuts anyway?" by Janice Tanaka

"Trick or Drink" by Vanalyne Green (available from Women Make Movies)

"Tongues Untied" by Marlon Riggs

"Very Nice, Very Nice" by Arthur Lipsett

Films by Péter Forgács

Films by Vlatko Gilic

Films by Errol Morris are rather avant-garde as documentaries, even though he has become popular.

"Man with a Movie Camera" by Vertov

Also, browse the on-line catalogues at Lux (in Lodon) and Film-makers Coope (NY) and Canyon Cinema (SF) - there are "avant-garde docs" mixed in the catalogues.

And the docs of Kazuo Hara shou'd be in your vocabulary. Not avant-garde, but superb Best to start with "The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On."

David Holzman's Diary and Portrait of Jason are both great films. The former, of course, is not a doc.

That's a good start.

I was under the impression (having not seen it) that David Holzman's Diary was something of an exploration of documentary and how it crosses over with fiction in the representation of real people and situations, and the actual fictiveness of the film is unknown, that's what really interested me, if that's not the case, I don't think I am as excited about it.

FSimeoni wrote:I was under the impression (having not seen it) that David Holzman's Diary was something of an exploration of documentary and how it crosses over with fiction in the representation of real people and situations, and the actual fictiveness of the film is unknown, that's what really interested me, if that's not the case, I don't think I am as excited about it.

It is everything you say, except the fictiveness of the film is completely known. (And I can tell you if you like) Well worth seeing no matter what.

Just remember, it was directed by the same person who directed "Breathless" the American remake of the Godard film, starring Richard Gere.

When it was recommended I was thinking Jim McBride? Where do I know that name from? and it clicked Breathless! which I have heard is very good, though I have not seen it. I came across an interesting tid bit about Breathless when Fantastic 4 was being reviewed by Mark Kermode, he mentioned that there is more about the philosophy on the Silver Surfer in Breathless than there is in Fantastic 4 Kermode the proceeded to talk about Breathless and his discussion sold me on it.

So, David Holzman's Diary is in fact a fiction film? Or can it be argued that it's faction or some other strange derivative of the word truth-film. It sounds so damn interesting I may just buy it today anyway regardless of my essay.

And thanks again everyone for the recommendations.