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After having seen a great number of its rip-offs, I finally watched the original Mondo Cane and it's surprising how much more vulgar and ridiculous it is than any of the antecedents I've seen-- a real accomplishment! I watched it with the English narration, which was so consistently and ludicrously white supremacist that it quickly became comical. Like all the fake Mondos that came after, a lot of the things we see are clearly bullshit set up by the filmmakers, but that's part of the "fun"-- though, to be honest, I didn't think this was nearly as fun as I'd hoped. I guess I'm not super into watching hogs slowly get beaten to death by sticks or snakes skinned alive, et al. The broken glass religious martyrs were the ones that really got me to squirm in my seat, though. Good lord, I don't need to see someone raze their legs with glass and leave bloody puddles in their wake.

All of these kind of movies do remind me with better pleasure of that great 80s TV treat Ripley's-- Believe It or Not, hosted by Jack Palance and equally a mix of bullshit and weird repurposed footage. But Palance is so entertaining as the host and the narration so much fun that they're a real treat. Unfortunately there's only a few episodes up on YouTube but I've been thinking about picking up a bootleg DVD-R set of the series from the online black market. You'd think one of these labels like Severin would license and release the series, it's completely in line with their kind of tastes.

I remember spending an entire Saturday watching that Blue Underground set back in October 2003 and felt much the same way about the Mondo Cane film and its sequel. There is that really ridiculous revelling in the superficial surfaces of extremes of behaviour (getting at nothing much deeper than a "Look at these weird foreign customs. Aren't you glad that you don't live there, have to eat that or have to mutilate yourself in that way? But also look at these beautiful women too" approach) that kind of gets expressed in the film by that constant almost bi-polar shifting back and forth revelling in moving without warning between the sweet and the sour, going from a subject so tame and twee on the one hand and then lashings of gore, corpses, self mutilation and animal violence on the other. I guess that the films are partly fulfilling that desire to see less sanitised material that would never pass the broadcast standards of the mainstream news media of the day (plus a much more partisan voice over narration than I think could ever pass muster in a 'news reportage' piece!) and partly a strange outgrowth of those Cinerama travelogue films, replacing widescreen vistas with other forms of more gruelling spectacle from around the world.

As far as I can recall Women of the World struck me as being really underwhelming, especially sandwiched in between the screenings of Mondo Cane and Mondo Cane 2 since that film, as implied by its title, is minimising the 'extreme' content to the utmost and instead padding out its run time entirely with the boring tame and twee female navel gazing stories instead. I am in no hurry to return back to that one any time soon but I seem to recall long sequences of white South African ladies in bikinis bouncing up and down on trampolines and the 'empowering' sight of Israeli female soldiers whilst the narration twitters incredulously about how deadly and dangerous they must be for simply being in an army (but yet they are still beautiful women too, just look at how they fill out their uniforms!).

All of that felt relatively tame even back in 2003 before YouTube existed but especially now with the internet and so much more extreme, and far more 'real', video material available at the click of the button there is really no particular need for these kind of films anymore (or even really television programmes either which is where this material really migrated to in the 1980s and 1990s with all of the programmes about police chases and people being arrested, along with the 'funny' home video clip craze, whilst the much more mondo stuff became the subject of underground video tapes).

But then later on during that fateful Saturday evening in October 2003 I reached Africa Addio and Goodbye Uncle Tom which are simply jawdropping. It is hard to describe Africa Addio's mixture of verite footage, bluntly biased narration (which is quite drastically different in content between the English and Italian soundtracks!), staged sequences (including staging real executions?), real footage of aftermath of civil wars, and the inevitable animal violence when the human death toll just doesn't appear to be high enough. Which leads to the astonishingly saccharine digression into saving a baby giraffe whose mother has been killed by poachers and then helicoptering it off into the sunset whilst the most romantic ballad there has ever been warbles on! That deliriously over-emotional sequence alone, especially coming after all of the real carnage on display, has seared the film into my memory!

And then what to say about Goodbye Uncle Tom, the film which tackles the subject of slavery through a dramatic conceit of sending documentary filmmakers back through time (and immediately allying them with the slavers) to do an unflinching mondo-style view on the practices of the trade (through staged re-enactments involving hundreds of extras under the auspices of Papa Doc's regime) that ends up being more harrowing and upsetting than any number of worthy, less exploitative historical dramas about the same subject. Just that moment when Riz Ortolani's gorgeously syrupy musical ballad number "Oh My Love" (which later got appropriated for a scene in Nicholas Winding Refn's Drive) rises up as the documentarians fly in in their helicopter (mirroring certain shots in Africa Addio) over a cotton plantation, buffeting all of the extras around and sending slaves sprawling for cover in the wake of the rotors as they simultaneously pretend to be happily welcoming their time travelling visitors to the Deep South, is absolutely astonishing!

I don't know how to describe them as nothing seems to come close to the whiplashing tonal shifts on display in those last two films. Just the word "audacious" does not seem to cover it. Neither does "daring" or "opportunistic", though they are undoubtedly somewhat applicable, as are "exploitative" and "dangerous". They are blundering, bizarre and certainly not for the faint hearted or easily offended, but I think they are absolutely fascinating as a kind of unfiltered look at the world and mid-1960s, early 1970s meditation on the end of colonialism and the upheavals in Africa which both preceded and followed that period through the psyche of a pair of white Italian filmmakers, which is certainly a perspective I don't think I had been exposed to before! Much like Cannibal Holocaust I think they are (inadvertently? self implicating? or simply emotionally moved at specific shocking moments rather than intellectually curious, as in the earlier Mondo films which are much more focused on emotional impact on the audience) delineating some kind of outlying boundary between fictional and staged footage and the dangerously fine line between accepting images (and narration!) at face value, and they are perhaps at their most valuable for puncturing that lofty sense of 'safe documentary distance' from events in the most extreme ways possible.

I cannot in good conscience recommend them, but I will certainly never forget them either!

Those later phony docs sound perversely fascinating, as I can’t think of any filmmakers I trust less to talk about race relations than these ones! Great point about these being an evolution of the Cinerama travelogues. They also show just how good and smart the Reichenbach film on America and Rouch’s work are as active and playful ethnographies without a lot of the baggage of these kind of movies (or so say I, knowing full well many modern scholars disagree on Rouch). I have Mondo Cane 2 and the women one on the docket, but I’m even less optimistic than I already was!

I would love to see TCM attempt to do a 'contextual introduction' to Goodbye Uncle Tom some time!

For something a bit 'tamer' ( ) I would also highly recommend Prosperi's 1983 solo effort Wild Beasts, which appears to be trying to be a kind of environmental allegory, but is on similarly shaky ground talking about treating animals well as he was on colonialism and African civil war! That is what makes those films so jaw dropping though, as they feel like parodies but done with an entirely straight face and dealing with literally deadly serious material!

I wrote the experience of watching it up a couple of years back in the Severin thread.

In a real twist, I actually quite enjoyed Mondo Cane 2, which has a cheekier sense of humor and weird anti-British sentiment throughout, apparently in response to the first film being banned there for the dog eating scene. This is addressed head on by the film as the narrator tells us there won't be any more footage of dogs being mistreated... after this first scene, which they included upfront to make the British censor's job easier! (And fear not dog lovers, it's just footage of an alleged dog vocal chord removal surgery) I'm guessing the first film caught shit for all the racist crap too because this one even sneaks in a pretty good progressive dig after showing a Southern town joyously celebrating a cowboy festival together, as the narrator slyly notes that "this year they left out the lynchings of negroes." And what the hell was up with that out of nowhere great single take traveling shot of all the bloody tableaus being photographed for pulp magazines, which coupled with the fun last ten minutes seems to come from a much better film? Also, per my rec of Ripley's-- Believe It or Not!, I was tickled to see that the show actually lifted the face slapping recital from this movie as an uncredited repurposed segment! Overall, this was much milder but far more entertaining than the original. Not a great movie, but definitely on the higher end of these kind of films.

Maybe a strange place to post this but I had to vent about a frustrating experience. Remembering an excellent documentary about punk rock that I saw on PBS in the late ‘90s, I thought I’d traced it to the Time-Life/Warners DVD box The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll, which I picked up used and have been enjoying, though it seemed a little more superficial than the episode I remembered. Lo and behold, the punk episode is entirely different from what I saw. So investigating online it turns out that there are two very similar documentary miniseries, released in consecutive years (1995 and 1996), and the one I was looking for was produced by WGBH and the BBC and is simply called Rock & Roll (or, in the UK, Dancing in the Street). Unfortunately it doesn’t appear the latter has ever been on DVD... a VHS edition exists but is quite rare; some very low quality rips are on YouTube and bootleg DVD sets occasionally appear. I rewatched the punk episode on YouTube and was again very taken with it — in depth, intelligent, with clips and interviews well chosen — but good heavens, what a drag the quality is. Anyway, if you can find a better version anywhere it seems like a terrific series (and please let me know if you turn one up...).

Why Beauty Matters (Louise Lockwood, 2009): I hesitated to put this in the documentary section (it really belongs more in the Faith list), as it’s essentially an essay film arguing that beauty in all its forms (love, art, architecture, human bodies, nature etc.) is the closest we as human beings can get to the spiritual; the ordinary of the natural that elicits symbolic revelations. I love the historical fusion of science, philosophy, and spirituality, and the framed tragedy in how modern science and ensuing skepticism dissolved the space set aside for enigmatic values and ideas, deviating all attention into measurable, palpable functionality. Roger Scruton can't cover enough material in under an hour for a strong documentary, but as a passionate charge for us to re-incorporate an important and neglected vision of spiritual significance in our current, exponentially-disconnecting era, it's magnificent. I can already see the masses of people critiquing this film on the grounds of inherent objective meaning as ill-fitting with our postmodern understandings of personal truths and even at-odds with the individualized experiences of engaging with the transcendental stimuli, but they're missing the point because this thesis is to make room for objective beauty that affects us all in our individual ways. The counter point to this is the idea of art being art "because I say it is" - which erases the unification in beauty, that may give us personalized meaning but binds us together as a people too. The late statement that pushes for us to consider beauty's importance as the vital place where "the real and ideal can still exist in harmony" extends that harmony for us to connect with one another, and I took this film to be less of a call to abandon our current frameworks for meaning-making and more to loop in this historically yet timelessly significant lens as well. It exists whether we pay attention to it or not, but paying attention to it makes life so much richer, and gets us closest to the meaning of life; that I believe, and that is all Scruton is really passionate about in his persuasion. Max Richter's Vladimir's Blues, later expanded upon for The Leftovers, is also used majestically here- and for those who have seen that show, it's no surprise it was repurposed there since the piece is drenched in the awe of abstract spirituality seen in the corporeal!

Two recommendations: based on what you describe liking in that, search out Gabriel Josipovici's On Trust, and, if you haven't already, read some more about Scruton before getting too excited about him. It's been faaaaar too long for me to make anything like a detailed argument, and I have no desire to refresh my memory because just seeing his name still makes my skin crawl—my first impulse was to reply to your post with a vehemently simple, "Nope, fuck Roger Scruton right to hell"—but I read a fair chunk of him back in the day, and his fundamentalism is intrinsic to his aesthetics. There are critics who have endeavored to salvage beauty as a valuable feature of aesthetic experience and to balance modern skepticism without grounding their efforts in a worldview that enthusiastically embraces a retrograde religious fundamentalism as Scruton does—perhaps not in that doc, but certainly elsewhere. Josipovici is one of them, and was my perpetual ally during knock-down, drag-out arguments about Scruton's aesthetics with a grad school professor of analytic aesthetic philosophy who assigned and argued for him (and who has since become one of the foremost TERFs in British academia, fwiw).

I totally get that, and his fundamentalism certainly shines though in the way you describe- which is again why I think this is not good if viewed as a documentary, as he's spinning his wheels towards some pretty extremist rhetoric. The guy's points are so easy to challenge when taken as mutually exclusive from the building blocks of our current critical thinking skills, and from that angle he's begging for people to ravage his argument. However, it was easy for me to overlook the dogmatic dismissals of our current culture and see that there's room for both- the man has some great points when we see these outlooks as not mutually exclusive but important complements. So yes, it's a bit like religion that way- we don't need to bow down to its extremism or even become a student of its church in order to grasp valuable principles from it. I think simply writing his ideas off because they at times involve the invalidation of our current processing patterns is unfortunate, though understandable since it's triggering by nature- though it means we miss out on the good points next to the problems. For me this essay film was not one to rally behind in its literalism, and more of a reminder of a missing piece perspective that has great truth to glean from.

I'm not writing his ideas off because they "at times involve the invalidation" of currently dominant thought patterns; I'm writing them off because I engaged with them pretty extensively over a period of several months in an academic setting explicitly and entirely focused on his primary field, analytic aesthetic philosophy, and found them to be fundamentally dependent on a bigotry which, stem to stern, I want absolutely no part of. (And that was before I read about his arguments that moral condemnation of homosexuals is justifiable because sexual attraction is founded on an appreciation of difference and therefore to be sexually attracted to sameness is a perversion of nature. So... )

But to reiterate, it sounds like a lot of what Scruton reveals as "missing" that you find valuable overlaps a lot with what I found very literally life-changing about Josipovici's ideas when I found them. Scruton is arguing from a conservative, analytical position against viewpoints that Josipovici argues are themselves a misinterpretation of and reaction to capital-M Modernism. In other words, they're both trying to salvage elements of culture—both artifacts and mindset—that many witting or unwitting inheritors of Modernism have written off as forever lost to us. Referencing the dead-horse caricature of Duchamp that art is art "because I say it is" as Scruton's straw man is a perfect example of the kind of sunderance both are arguing never actually occurred, for entirely different reasons. "Fountain" was a specific argument made in an extremely specific context, one which Josipovici explores, only briefly (in Whatever Happened to Modernism?, not On Trust, though he also wrote a novel loosely based on Duchamp), but it's an excellent, succinct example of how Modernism was egregiously misread by those who came after, whether they claimed to be in support or opposition—whether Koons or Scruton. The more interesting element of his argument, though, is that Modernism was the flowering of half a millenium of artistic development, not a sudden break at the turn of a century, and his exploration of that continuity is where it sounds like you'd find something of interest and more broadly valuable. You mention Scruton's argument about "the real and ideal" coexisting within beauty, so I'll point specifically to Josipovici's reading, in On Trust, of Proust's comparison of Giotto's depiction of Caritas with a young servant girl.

Sorry senseabove, I should clarify that I meant writing the ideas off as such within the context of this film, not within the context in which you consumed his more in-depth ethos (I've read quite a few reviews of Why Beauty Matters and that shallow triggering is the thread running through them, mostly all negative). The film only threatens viewers on that vague surface level, but I can absolutely believe that his philosophy extends to some very problematic places, and it sounds like- as a more thorough examination of this film's 101 offering- On Trust is worth seeking out. I appreciate the rec, it's now on my (exceedingly long) book list.

Richard Brody in the New Yorker: Sixty-two Films That Shaped the Art of Documentary Filmmaking
A very interesting list with short write-ups. Plenty of docs I was totally unaware of.

“Strange Victory” (1948, Leo Hurwitz) about black soldiers returning to the apartheid America after fighting in WWII for freedom.
“The Children Were Watching” (1961, Robert Drew) about integration in New Orleans (and violent white opposition)
“Belarmino” (1964, Fernando Lopes) about a Portuguese boxer
“A Time for Burning” (1966, William Jersey) -- religious racism

“Marjoe” (1972, Sarah Kernochan and Howard Smith)
In this film, which won an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature before disappearing from circulation (it was restored and reissued in 2005), Marjoe Gortner, who had been a child-star preacher, returns to the pulpit as an adult for a farewell tour, which he uses to repudiate the world of organized religion. His riveting stage persona fills the screen with the ecstasy and the skepticism of the age of rock; he collaborates with the filmmakers to reveal the tricks of his trade and, in on-camera discussions, discloses the painful story of his exploitation.

“The Police Tapes” (1977, Alan and Susan Raymond) - embedded with South Bronx police mid-70's

and more ...

Rare 1978 BBC program on Shuji Terayama’s troupe Tenjo Sajiki recently shared out online by a crew member (NSFW)

My friend's son is about to direct a one-act play and asked for suggestions for a movie or doc about the creative process of directing. Anyone have any suggestions? I'm sure I know a few but my mind's drawing a blank

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One?

kuzine wrote: Wed Mar 29, 2023 12:13 am Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One?

That should scare him off!

Drive My Car, Gang of Four, Vanya on 42nd Street, various Wiseman and Pennebaker documentaries?

Pacino's Looking for Richard would seem to address your question directly. Or, if you prefer to be abstract, El sol del membrillo!

Thanks! Not sure if this kid will wanna do this anymore if he watches most of these (good-to-great films!) but Drive My Car is actually a really interesting rec

Mysterious Castles of Clay (Joan and Alan Root 1978) The Wikipedia entry for this film, which was nominated for the Best Documentary Feature Oscar, claims it is lost, but I don’t think so since I watched it. Granted, I did so via what appears to be an off air recording from PBS with effusive George Plimpton (!) wraparounds. Orson Welles narrates what is one of the most concise and interesting films I’ve ever seen about something I don’t care about in the slightest: the African termite. As Plimpton expounds in his segments, the Roots synthesized three years of filming in their adopted country of Kenya into less than an hour of footage and what we get is so streamlined and efficient that you can’t imagine there’s anything more to see or say on the matter, even though there must be hundreds of hours not accounted for on screen. Nature documentaries are rarely something that registers for me as art, but this is a rare exception and Welles’ narration walks a tricky line between educational and poetic (Incredibly, the film was later reedited and Welles' narration replaced by Derek Jacobi, in what must be a competitive bid for the worst idea of all time). This is a wonderfully entertaining film, and proof that anything can be interesting in the right hands of a passionate party. Highly recommended.

WTO/99 is the most gripping capital-i-Important film I've seen in as long as I can remember, and the most violent depiction of nonviolent attempts at social justice, primarily from its sense of urgency to not forfeit agency during our difficult times. The film covers the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle, and allows the first-person footage shot from camcorders on the streets to define its vantage point. This is a novel kind of docu-narrative told through what feels like an infinite archive, a furious yet inspiring gift from the people for the people. And all it took was years of life from a few talented artists, who were passionate enough to sew it all together for us. Seriously, it's impossible not to be baffled by the effort that went into combing through this insane amount of material to shape such a compelling narrative.

See this in a theatre as soon as you can. You'll want to hit the streets with your seat-neighbors, as the film intuitively creates a community out of the lone souls in the audience. The ache and anger are validated, but the playfulness in the youthful spirit of the advocate is given plenty of time to provoke laughs too. This is not a feel-bad film. It's an adrenaline rush reminder of what it means to be sober and alive and 'part-of', and we can all use that now more than ever. I found it inspiring, infuriating, funny, and ultimately as a branch for emotional and philosophical connection.

This seemed like the closest thing to a general documentary thread. I caught up with the documentary on the poet, performer, and artist ruth weiss, One More Step West Is the Sea. There were worthwhile moments for sure, but it was hard to get past the irony of a film whose subject is a case study of how women were sidelined and disrespected in the beat cultural phenomenon, and it opens with seven full minutes of her male partner Hal Davis's rambling voice over footage of him, which is less about weiss than him telling you about the dreams he had—standard American boomer claims of having a consciousness that's tapped into Native American spirituality.
The film gets on track several minutes after that, then about two-thirds in we're treated to Davis opining out of the blue (in 2019) that periodic die-offs happen, and they're horrible, but we haven't had a pandemic in some time. They "take out" a big chunk of the human population, "which might help!" he says. What does this pontificating have to do with the film's subject? Nothing.

Since this thread just got a bump & I hadn't noticed it before: Anyone interested in documentaries should keep tabs on the PBS program Independent Lens. It often airs documentaries that had received theatrical runs shortly thereafter. Most recently it had on The Librarians and this week or next it will be showing Natchez. If you don't have a local PBS station, you can often stream it on either their dedicated Roku ap or the PBS app or the PBS or Independent Lens' Youtube channel but with commercials.