DocuChronicles is a blog dedicated to independent documentary cinema by filmmaker Marjorie Sturm. It includes a mix of reviews, interviews, and longer pieces. By Marjorie Sturm. Barbara Rubin was an experimental filmmaker most known for the pulsating, sexually graphic “Christmas on Earth” that she shot when she was only eighteen. She was a […]
Peace & Love, 50 Years On – Woodstock: Three Days That Defined a Generation
Elias Savada
June 14, 2019
By Elias Savada. Fifty years ago (gulp!) I never made it to Woodstock. I didn’t even try, although I had a hallucinogenic blast four years later at the 1973 Summer Jam in Watkins Glen (instant weekend population: 600,000). $10 to see the Allman Brothers Band, Grateful Dead and The Band […]
Gentrification on Film: Capital Expansion and the Limits of Video Activism
Anthony Killick
June 13, 2019
By Anthony Killick. Our current period of urban-environmental “change” (a word that is now almost synonymous with “chaos”), is characterised primarily by the ever-accelerating speed at which capital is pumped into the physical landscape (what was once called the fabric) of the city. One of the consequences is that working-class […]
Giving by Stealing: Denys Arcand’s The Fall of the American Empire
Thomas Puhr
June 13, 2019
By Thomas Puhr. Denys Arcand’s The Fall of the American Empire (2018) asks a question that most never have the luxury to ponder: What does one do when they have too much money? This moral conundrum confronts Pierre-Paul Daoust (Alexandre Landry) after two duffel bags full of money from a […]
Transcending the Chains of Illusion – The Assassin: Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s World of Tang China, Edited by Peng Hsiao-yen
Tony Williams
June 12, 2019
A Book Review Essay by Tony Williams. In Mostly About Lindsay Anderson, his long-time friend Gavin Lambert speaks about the in-flight movie seen by his colleague that drove him to despair. Enduring Suspect (1987), Anderson experienced feelings similar to anyone watching The Jagged Edge (1984), the kind of bland made-for-TV movie that […]
Film as Cultural Artifact: Palestinian Cinema in the Days of Revolution by Nadia Yaqub
Thomas Puhr
June 11, 2019
A Book Review by Thomas Puhr. What does it mean to “document” a displaced people? Do humanitarian films, while helpful in raising awareness, inherently depict a people as helpless victims? How should the displaced go about documenting themselves? Are their own representations, while providing a sense of agency for both […]
It’s a Hard Knock Life: American Woman
Elias Savada
June 11, 2019
By Elias Savada. Wanna watch a train wreck? Sienna Miller plays one in Jake Scott’s third feature. For the first half-hour of this blue-collar salute to misguided motherhood (and the remorse that follows in the wake of a parent’s “worst nightmare” scenario), Miller plays Deb Callahan, an angry, immature 31-year-old […]
Film Scratches: the Beguiling Play of Illusion – Gelateria (2019)
June 10, 2019
Film Scratches focuses on the world of experimental and avant-garde film, especially as practiced by individual artists. It features a mixture of reviews, interviews, and essays. A Review by David Finkelstein. Gelateria is a fascinating and strange new feature film by Arthur Patching and Christian Serritiello. A surreal picaresque tale, the seemingly […]
A Device to Remember: Halston
Dana Weidman
June 9, 2019
By Dana Weidman. Halston, the new documentary from director Frédéric Tcheng (Dior and I) starts with a credit stating that the “following film is documentary. However, the narrator is a fictional character.” In the opening, Tcheng uses news clips to build a brief history of the iconic dress designer’s rise […]
Researcher Beware! – Frankly: Unmasking Frank Capra by Joseph McBride
June 8, 2019
A Book Review Essay by Tony Williams. Joseph McBride’s latest mammoth book, well-written and copiously documented as usual, is an unusual production in the field of cinema studies. It is a companion volume to his earlier 1992 text, Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success, which took issue with the traditional estimation of […]