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In 2016, Brett Story made a documentary about the state of penitentiaries in the U.S. without ever shooting inside one. The Prison in Twelve Landscapes offered a snapshot of the American incarceration system through a dozen of thematically and formally distinct vignettes. They were not portraits of prisons, but of the people and spaces orbiting around them. There were female inmates who’d fought wildfires in California, a man who made a business out of people struggling to send life’s necessities to their loved ones behind bars, and a group of women waiting for a bus to ship them to visit relatives held captive. The whole project was, as Story would later put it, a reaction to conventional prison documentaries and their pernicious tendency to put inmates on display, “as if there were no other way of making the prison or its captive subjects visible, and as if visibility...

Above: French poster for Chronicle of a Summer (Jean Rouch & Edgar Morin, France, 1961). Design by Raymond Gid.There is an essential and vital film series opening today at Film Forum in New York: a survey of 1960s Cinema Verité productions which brings vividly to life a decade of instability and protest as well as a new era of introspection. While this survey of posters doesn’t give a complete look at the series—“more than 50 modern classics which not only changed the recording of social history, but revolutionized filmmaking itself”—since many of the films are not feature-length (some of the shows pair an hour long film with a 30 minute short) and thus were not theatrically released. But those that I’ve gathered do convey the urgency of the movement as well as its seat-of-the-pants guerrilla style of film marketing as much as film making.I’ve not included the...

Jean Rouch may not be a household name, but some of the world’s most revered filmmakers — from Jean-Luc Godard to Werner Herzog — are indebted to him. The French filmmaker pioneered the concept of “ethno-fiction,” fictional films built around the lives of everyday people, and developed the bulk of his filmography out of time spent in Africa. His 1958 feature “Moi, un Noir” follows the daily routine of a trio of Nigerian immigrants off the Ivory Coast who imagine themselves as movie stars, and its blend of jump cuts and amateur performances reportedly inspired Godard’s 1960 debut “Breathless.” Rouch’s documentary “Chronicle of a Summer,” co-directed with Edgar Morin, is considered a foundational achievement of the cinéma vérité movement.

Nevertheless, Rouch has remained a cinephile secret for decades, and in the wake of his death in 2004, much of his work has been unavailable in the U.S. — until now.

On November...

Take a look at the roots of American campaign image consciousness, and the then-new techniques of cinéma vérité to bring a new 'reality' for film documentaries. Four groundbreaking films cover the Kennedy-Humphrey presidential primary, and put us in the Oval Office for a showdown against Alabama governor George Wallace. The Kennedy Films of Robert Drew & Associates Blu-ray Primary, Adventures on the New Frontier, Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment, Faces of November The Criterion Collection 808 1960 -1964 / B&W / 1:33 flat full frame / 53, 52, 53, 12 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date April 26, 2016 / 39.95 Starring John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy, Robert Drew, Hubert H. Humphrey, McGeorge Bundy, John Kenneth Galbraith, Richard Goodwin, Albert Gore Sr., Eunice Kennedy Shriver, Pierre Salinger, Haile Selassie, John Steinbeck, George Wallace, Vivian Malone, Burke Marshall, Nicholas Katzenbach, John Dore, Jack Greenberg; Lyndon Johnson, John Kennedy Jr., Caroline Kennedy, Peter Lawford. Cinematography Richard Leacock, Albert Maysles, D.A. Pennebaker,...

As reported over at The Dissolve, highly respected British film magazine Sight & Sound is famous for its list of the greatest films off all time released once every decade. Since 1952, Citizen Kane held the number one spot until Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo dethroned it in the 2012 poll. Now for the first time Sight & Sound has released a list of the 50 greatest documentary films of all time. The list was compiled after polling from over 200 critics and curators and 100 filmmakers, including “John Akomfrah, Michael Apted, Clio Barnard, James Benning, Sophie Fiennes, Amos Gitai, Paul Greengrass, Jose Guerin, Isaac Julien, Asif Kapadia, Sergei Loznitsa, Kevin Macdonald, James Marsh, Joshua Oppenheimer, Anand Patwardhan, Pawel Pawlikowski, Nicolas Philibert, Walter Salles, and James Toback”.

The top 10 are:

Man With A Movie Camera, (Dziga Vertov, 1929) Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1985) Sans Soleil, (Chris Marker, 1982) Night And Fog (Alain Resnais, 1955) The Thin Blue Line (Errol Morris, 1989) Chronicle Of A Summer (Jean Rouch & Edgar Morin,...

More than 200 critics and 100 filmmakers take part in poll.

Dziga Vertov’s silent film Man with a Movie Camera (1929) has topped Sight & Sound magazine’s first major poll of the world’s best documentaries.

More than 1,000 films were nominated by 200 critics and 100 filmmakers with more than 100 voting for Man with a Movie Camera.

Vertov’s surrealist classic in which a man travels around a city with a camera documenting urban life was shot in Odessa, Kiev and Khadliv.

Vertov also topped the critics’ list of top doc filmmakers while Frederick Wiseman is number one according to his fellow directors.

Participating filmmakers included Kevin Macdonald, Walter Salles, Joshua Oppenheimer, James Toback, Asif Kapadia, Carol Morley and Mark Cousins.

Critics’ Top 10 documentariesMan with a Movie Camera, dir. Dziga Vertov (Ussr 1929) [pictured]Shoah, dir. Claude Lanzmann (France 1985)Sans soleil, dir. Chris Marker (France 1982)Night and Fog, dir. Alain Resnais (France 1955)The Thin Blue Line, dir. [link...

More than 200 critics and 100 filmmakers take part in poll.

Dziga Vertov’s silent film Man with a Movie Camera (1929) has topped Sight & Sound magazine’s first major poll of the world’s best documentaries.

More than 1,000 films were nominated by 200 critics and 100 filmmakers with more than 100 voting for Man with a Movie Camera.

Vertov’s surrealist classic in which a man travels around a city with a camera documenting urban life was shot in Odessa, Kiev and Khadliv.

Vertov also topped the critics’ list of top doc filmmakers while Frederick Wiseman is number one according to his fellow directors.

Participating filmmakers included Kevin Macdonald, Walter Salles, Joshua Oppenheimer, James Toback, Asif Kapadia, Carol Morley and Mark Cousins.

Critics’ Top 10 documentariesMan with a Movie Camera, dir. Dziga Vertov (Ussr 1929) [pictured]Shoah, dir. Claude Lanzmann (France 1985)Sans soleil, dir. Chris Marker (France 1982)Night and Fog, dir. Alain Resnais (France 1955)The Thin Blue Line, dir. [link...

Other masterclasses to be held by Dumont, Gray, Kiarostami and philosopher Debray.

The 13th Marrakech International Film Festival (Nov 29-Dec 7) has announced the directors who will conduct this year’s masterclasses.

The first masterclass, on Dec 1, will be held by French director and screenwriter Bruno Dumont whose Camille Claudel 1915 played in competition at this year’s Berlinale.

Dumont is currently finishing P’tit Quinquin, a police miniseries for the Franco-German channel Arte.

Us director, screenwriter and producer James Gray will host the next masterclass on Dec 2. This year, Gray directed Cannes competition title The Immigrant and produced Guillaume Canet’s Blood Ties. He will preside over the international jury at the Rome Film Festival this month.

The following day (Dec 3), Iran director and screenwriter Abbas Kiarostami will share his memories and thoughts about film.

His credits include Taste of Cherry, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1997, and The Wind Will Carry Us, which...

French-Canadian director and cinematographer who pioneered handheld camera techniques

Michel Brault, who has died of a heart attack aged 85, was one of the great unsung heroes of cinema. The French-Canadian director and cinematographer could have claimed, in all modesty, to have pioneered handheld camera techniques, leading to cinéma vérité in France (and thus to the Nouvelle Vague) and Direct Cinema in the Us.

It all began in 1958 with Les Raquetteurs (The Snowshoers), which Brault co-directed with Gilles Groulx and shot in 35mm with a relatively lightweight camera carried on his shoulder. The 15-minute film, which explores life in rural Quebec, was seen by Jean Rouch, the French anthropologist film-maker, who invited Brault to France to be chief camera operator on Chronicle of a Summer (1960), in which a cross-section of Parisians are asked to respond to the question: "Are you happy?"

Rouch and his co-director, the sociologist Edgar Morin, were not...

In May 1962, a cease-fire was declared with colonial Algeria, marking the first time in 23 years that France was not at war. Filmmaker Chris Marker and cinematographer Pierre Lhomme took to the streets of Paris that month with a handheld camera (a new model also used by Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin to film the contemporaneous ground-level doc Chronicle of a Summer) to interview a cross-section of the city's population about the state of their lives at that moment. The freshly restored time capsule Le Joli Mai (which will screen at Film Forum in Dcp) documents on-the-street talks with a wide variety of Paris residents. A mason cheerfully accepts the eternal need to work to earn money for himself and his family; a poor wife and mother thrills at finally receiving a new, gover...

Ben Rivers and Ben Russell, two artists whose accomplished individual bodies of work already complement one another with overlapping ambitions, ideas and approaches, co-direct A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness (which has just premiered here in Locarno in the Fuori concorso section), a three part manifesto on the potential for utopian living, and a loose, fluid (distinctly apolitical and secular) definition of what that may be. Beginning in a commune in the Lofoten Islands, Rivers and Russell fleetingly document moments of life, music and conversation among a peaceful collective of people, before jarringly switching to a portrayal of a tranquil solitude in the wilderness of Northern Finland as a figure canoes and settles on the shore, and, finally, a black metal performance in Norway. These three parts are seemingly disparate, but tonally unite in Rivers and Russell's unbiased presentation. One of the central elements that connect these three parts are the film's main figure,...

In France in 1961, Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin directed a film (“Chronicle of a Summer”) in which they interviewed a group of diverse Parisians about whether or not they were happy, in a series of man on the street interviews, boozy dinner parties, and casual conversations, with the directors themselves onscreen as moderators of sorts. They then screened the footage for their group of subjects, and watched the fur fly as these people were forced to confront themselves and their peers onscreen. This film would go on to change documentary form and launch the cinéma vérité filmmaking movement. The title of “cinéma vérité” is often incorrectly used to describe observational, fly-on-the-wall style filmmaking, which should actually be called Direct Cinema (e.g. the Maysles Brothers, Frederick Wiseman). Cinéma vérité refers to the practice of the filmmaker engaging or provoking their subjects in conversation/scenarios that allow the filmmaking process to...

(Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin, 1961; BFI, 12)

Excited by the atmosphere surrounding the French New Wave in 1960, the sociologist Edgar Morin suggested to the ethnographic documentarist Jean Rouch that he look at present-day France the way he observed Africa. The result was this cinematic landmark, produced by Anatole Dauman (an important supporter of Resnais, Godard, Marker and others) and co-directed by Rouch and Morin, who brought together a cross-section of young Parisians to meet, talk and collaborate on the picture during the summer of 1960. The participants interview people in the street, posing the question: "Are you happy?" They discuss their own lives as students, factory workers, young marrieds, immigrants, and they argue about race, class and the current wars in Algeria and the Congo. They go on vacation to the Côte d'Azur (where they interview would-be starlets). In perhaps the film's most memorable sequence, one of the contributors speaks of her...

As you watch Edgar Morin and Jean Rouch's 1961 documentary Chronicle of a Summer, an eerily familiar sentiment begins to seep out of the testimonials of the men and women, both young and old and financially struggling and well established, as they discuss what it's like living day by day in a city. It turns out that the basic existence of mankind doesn't change all that much from one century to the next: you work to live as you must or, if you're one of the exceptional lucky few, you live to work doing what you love to pay the rent and fill the table with food. The subjects range from unemployed artists to struggling mechanics and the film digs in deep, sometimes acting like a therapy session, to explore whether or not people are actually getting by when they say they are. Is anyone truly happy in this world?...

Chicago – The summer of 1960 was another time, on another planet. And Paris was another planet itself, with everyone blissfully smoking cigarettes. All of the oddness, alienation and personality of this peculiar time and place comes alive in the Blu-ray release of Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s French new wave documentary, “Chronicle of a Summer.”

Blu-Ray Rating: 4.0/5.0

At first, the film is striking as something that can occur on a regular basis today. Conversation with friends, “recorded” for posterity. But what distinguishes this is of course the radical nature in recording naturalistic conversation during a time where film was primarily used for fiction. Shot originally with newly lightweight 16mm cameras (one step up from home movies), the effort to do so was much more labor intensive, and the filmmakers were fortunate to find the right subjects to handle what had to be the in-your-face nature of the shoot. The result becomes fascinating and completely voyeuristic.

1961’s Chronicle of a Summer is generally credited with inspiring what became known as Cinéma-vérité; a style of narrative filmmaking that both copied and utilized techniques of documentary production to create films of heightened realism. Of course, documentaries have been around as long as motion picture cameras but in the first half of the 20th century the genre’s chief subjects were exotic travelogues and political propaganda. Chronicle of a Summer was one of the first documentaries with the stated aim of capturing the lives and interactions of “real people,” and gaining a clearer understanding of the public mood through random sampling.

Not surprisingly, Chronicle of a Summer was conceived by two men who valued science over aesthetics: sociologist Edgar Morin and anthropologist Jean Rouch. While Rouch had spent a decade documenting tribal life in Africa through a series of influential short films, Morin was a novice at filmmaking. Their innocent,...

This month the Criterion Collection has an eclectic mix heading to Blu-ray and DVD, reminding us once again just how fun their mission to preserve the best and most important works of classic and contemporary cinema can be. In one corner you have the Japanese classics The Ballad of Narayama, by Director Shôhei Imamura, and Kenji Mizoguchi's Sansho the Bailiff. In another you have the lauded, and 8 Academy Award-winning On the Waterfront by Elia Kazan and starring Marlon Brando and Karl Malden. And finally, in the third corner we turn to France for two films separated by 50 years: Edgar Morin and Jean Rouch's Chronicle of a Summer, and 2011's The Kid with a Bike, a powerful drama by Luc Dardenne and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, with one of the best performances by a child actor in recent memory.

For details on all of these releases, keep reading.

Read more...

Blu-ray & DVD Release Date: Feb. 26, 2013

Price: DVD $29.95, Blu-ray $39.95

Studio: Criterion

The 1961 French documentary Chronicle of a Summer is the fascinating result of a collaboration between filmmaker-anthropologist Jean Rouch (Moi, un noir) and sociologist Edgar Morin.

An influential vanguard work of what Morin would term cinéma verité is an undeniably well-conceived and realized sociopolitical diagnosis of the early sixties in France. By simply interviewing a group of Paris residents in the summer of 1960—beginning with the provocative and eternal question “Are you happy?” and expanding to political issues, including the ongoing Algerian War—Rouch and Morin reveal the hopes and dreams of a wide array of people, from artists to factory workers, from an Italian émigré to an African student.

Ultimately, Chronicle of a Summer’s penetrative approach ultimately delivers a document of a time and place with extraordinary depth and substance. Not surprisingly, the film is now a staple in...

Today's must-read is Glenn Greenwald's report in Salon on the Us Department of Homeland Security's persistent and ongoing harassment of travelers returning to their own country. "A 2011 Foia request from the Aclu revealed that just in the 18-month period beginning October 1, 2008, more than 6600 people — roughly half of whom were American citizens — were subjected to electronic device searches at the border by Dhs, all without a search warrant." And "the case of Laura Poitras, an Oscar- and Emmy-nominated filmmaker and intrepid journalist, is perhaps the most extreme." As Dennis Lim wrote in a 2010 profile for the New York Times, with My Country, My Country and The Oath, Poitras has made "two of the most searching documentaries of the post-9/11 era, on-the-ground chronicles that are sensitive to both the political and the human consequences of American foreign policy."

Over the past six years, Poitras has been detained at the airport as...

Daniele Evenou and Jean-Pierre Castaldi attend 11th Annual Marrakech International Film Festival.Photo copyright Pixplanete / PR Photos. Edgar Morin attends 11th Annual Marrakech International Film Festival.Photo copyright Pixplanete / PR Photos. Edgar Morin attends 11th Annual Marrakech International Film Festival.Photo copyright Pixplanete / PR Photos. Daniele Evenou and Jean-Pierre Castaldi attend 11th Annual Marrakech International Film Festival.Photo copyright Pixplanete / PR Photos. Jean-Pierre Castaldi attends 11th Annual Marrakech International Film Festival.Photo copyright Pixplanete / PR Photos. 12/05/2011 - Daniele Evenou and Jean-Pierre Castaldi - 11th Annual Marrakech International Film Festival - December 5, 2011 - Arrivals - Marrakech - Marrakech, Morocco © Pixplanete / PR Photos 12/05/2011 - Edgar Morin - 11th Annual Marrakech International Film Festival - December 5,...

At her Iva Asks blog, Iva Radivojevic looks at how the spreading Occupy Wall Street movement is inspiring a new protest culture at Cuny. “This is a document about the struggle of students and adjunct faculty at Cuny,” she writes. “This local struggle is part of an international student movement against neoliberal dictatorship. This is only the beginning. The time for action is now.”

As she often does, Radivojevic writes on her blog the inspirations for her work. For this new video piece, one influence is a film by Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin.

From the blog:

And the latest inspiration is Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin‘s experiment Chronique d’un été (“Chronicle of A Summer”). One of first introductions to Cinéma Vérité, it illustrates the problems of film reality, how it’s depicted, portrayed and relayed to the audience. The film poses questions “Are you happy?” and “How do you live?...

This final wrap comes with a reminder that all our reviews, interviews and coverage of the coverage is indexed right here.

"Throughout her nearly half-century career, actress Charlotte Rampling has rarely shied away from exposing herself onscreen," writes Jordan Mintzer in the Hollywood Reporter. "In the new bio documentary The Look, she bares it all yet again, but this time in a series of compelling discussions with different artists, writers, photographers and filmmakers." Karina Longworth for the Voice: "Director Angelina Maccarone intersperses well-chosen clips from Rampling's greatest acting hits, which hammer home the larger themes, and also offer a much-needed reminder that Max, Mon Amour exists. It's breezy and entertaining, but only occasionally more than superficially insightful. Ideal catch-it-on-cable-on-a-hungover-Saturday viewing."

More from Mark Adams (Screen) and Boyd van Hoeij (Variety). Catherine Shoard interviews Rampling for the Guardian. Clips: 1 and 2. Until The Look hits cable, we have the Charlotte Rampling gallery at everyday_i_show.

With each day that passes, Cannes is becoming closer and closer, and now, for those looking forward to seeing a few, let’s say, more classic features, your sidebar has just been announced.

Cannes has announced their Classics Sidebar lineup, and what a lineup it is. A few Criterion directors have found their way onto the list, including Roberto Rossellini (The Machine To Kill Bad People), Bernardo Bertolucci (The Conformist), and Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Despair). And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

The most interesting additions are both Georges Melies’ classic 1902 silent film, A Trip To The Moon, as well as Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. The festival’s jury head, Robert De Niro, will also be focused on in this sidebar, as his film A Bronx Tale will also be showing during the festival.

Personally, the film that I’m most excited to see would have...

The Cinema de la Plage where screenings of classic films are held at 9:30 each night; click for a larger look

Photo: Brad Brevet I already mentioned how Warner Home Video would be releasing a *new* Stanley Kubrick Blu-ray collection, this time including high definition versions of Lolita and Barry Lyndon with previously released HD versions of Spartacus, Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, Eyes Wide Shut and a new 40th Anniversary Edition of A Clockwork Orange. That set hits Blu-ray on May 31, but Kubrick's now-40-year-old A Clockwork Orange will be hitting the Cannes Croisette a little bit earlier than that.

Another, late night look at the Cinema de la Plage; click for a larger look

Photo: Brad Brevet It had been previously announced, but yesterday the Cannes Film Festival made it official that A Clockwork Orange would be part of the...

The Cannes Film Festival's unveiled its Classics program today: "Fourteen films, five documentaries, surprises, a Masterclass (Malcolm McDowell), new or restored prints: The program is based on proposals from national archives, cinematheques, studios, producers and distributors. Rare classics to discover or re-discover, they will be presented in 35mm or high definition digital prints."

The Films

The first round of descriptions comes straight from the Festival.

A Trip to the Moon (Le Voyage dans la lune) by Georges Méliès (France, 1902, 16'). "The color version of Georges Méliès most famous film, A Trip to the Moon (1902) is visible again 109 years after its release: having been long considered lost, this version was found in 1993 in Barcelona. In 2010, a full restoration is initiated by Lobster Films, Gan Foundation for Cinema and Technicolor Foundation for Heritage Cinema. The digital tools of today allows them to re-assemble the fragments of 13 375 images from the film and restore them one by one.

The 64th festival de Cannes announced the selection for Cannes Classics on Tuesday. The selection will present fourteen films which includes the colour version of Georges Méliès famous A Trip to the Moon. The programme also comprises five documentaries and a Masterclass by actor Malcolm McDowell.

Established in 2004, the selection showcases heritage cinema, re-discovered films, restored prints and theatrical, television or DVD releases of the great works of the past.

Mrinal Sen s Khandahar and Ritwik Ghatak’s Titash Ekti Nadir Naam (A River Called Titas) were presented in this section in the 2010 edition of the festival.

Cannes Classics: The Films

1. A Trip to the Moon (Le Voyage dans la lune) by Georges Méliès (France, 1902, 16′)

2. Clockwork Orange by Stanley Kubrick (USA, 1971, 137′)

3. The Machine to Kill Bad People (La Macchina Ammazzacattivi) by Roberto Rossellini (Italy, 1952, 80′)

4. A Bronx Tale by Robert De Niro (USA, 1993, 121′).

5. The Conformist (Il Conformista) by Bernardo Bertolucci (Italy,...

Cannes Classics is a recent addition to the festival, and will enjoy its 8th instalment this year. Part of the line-up of this section of the fest is screened at Ceinema de la Plage, that’s right, on the beach. You’ve got to admit that it’s pretty cool – an open-aired screening of a classic film on the French Riviera, away from the exclusivity of the Palais, and able to be enjoyed by Panini-eating passers-by on the Croisette. There should be more of this at the festival, it’s good for the soul.

This year’s line-up of films includes work by Stanley Kubrick, Bernardo Bertolucci, Euzhan Palcy (currently being honored by MoMA in New York) and Jerry Schatzberg, whose photograph of Faye Dunaway is embedded into this year’s festival poster above.

Robert DeNiro and Jane Rosenthal will present a screening of “A Bronx Tale” to celebrate ten...

Cannes Classics is a recent addition to the festival, and will enjoy its 8th instalment this year. Part of the line-up of this section of the fest is screened at Ceinema de la Plage, that’s right, on the beach. You’ve got to admit that it’s pretty cool – an open-aired screening of a classic film on the French Riviera, away from the exclusivity of the Palais, and able to be enjoyed by Panini-eating passers-by on the Croisette. There should be more of this at the festival, it’s good for the soul.

This year’s line-up of films includes work by Stanley Kubrick, Bernardo Bertolucci, Euzhan Palcy (currently being honored by MoMA in New York) and Jerry Schatzberg, whose photograph of Faye Dunaway is embedded into this year’s festival poster above.

Robert DeNiro and Jane Rosenthal will present a screening of “A Bronx Tale” to celebrate ten...

Ok cinephiles. Who among you has seen all 100 on the Toronto International Film Festival's Essential 100? The full list is pasted below. True confession: I have seen all but the following 11, which I shame-facedly reveal below: 1. Pather Panchali Satyajit Ray (pictured) 2. La Jetee Chris Marker 3. Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom Pier Paolo Pasolini 4. Through the Olive Trees Abbas Kiarostami 5. Dust in the Wind Hou Hasaio-Hsien 6. Chronique d'un Ete Edgar Morin and Jean Rauch 7. La Noire de... Ousmane Sembene 8. Andre Rublev Andrei Tarkovsky 9. A Nos Amours Maurice Pialat 10. Earth Aleksandr Dovzhenko 11. Oldboy Park Chan-Wook The Essential 100 This list represents the merging of one 100 film list as determined by an ...