In this film showcasing six of the most dangerous jobs on the planet, Mega Cities director Michael Glawogger travels the globe to turn his lens on the men who labor in these deadly but necessary jobs day after grueling day. Structured in six chapters that take the viewer everywhere from the Ukraine, where workers snake down a 16-inch tall mineshaft to collect coal, to Pakistan, where migrants disassemble oil tankers piece-by-piece with their bare hands, Glawogger’s film focuses on the ravages of manual labor on the human body and the determination of the men who endure these tasks to build a better future for their children and families. Other thankless jobs showcased in Glawogger’s feature include Indonesian sulfur miners who brave volcano basins and Nigerian workers who slaughter goats and cattle so that they may use the parts to sterilize blazing pits of burning tires. —allmovie guide VIDEO: TRAILER
An extraordinary feature-length documentary about the messianic German director Werner Herzog struggling against desperate odds in the Amazon basin to make his epic feature, Fitzcarraldo. Burden of Dreams was honored with a British Academy Award for Best Documentary of 1982, and many critics consider it Blank's most awesome film. - lesblank.com VIDEO: SCENE FROM BURDEN OF DREAMS
"Les Blank's "Burden of Dreams" is one of the most remarkable documentaries ever made about the making of a movie." Roger Ebert review
"If Les Blank's jaw-dropping documentary Burden Of Dreams hadn't been first out of the box, its title might have applied to several subsequent making-of films, most notably 1991's Hearts Of Darkness (about Francis Ford Coppola's famously troubled production of Apocalypse Now) and 2002's Lost In La Mancha (about Terry Gilliam's aborted Don Quixote project)." AV Club review
Fitzcarraldo was shot on location deep within the rain forests of South America, one thousand miles from civilization. When the first version of the film was half-finished, its star, Jason Robards, was rushed back to New York with amoebic dysentery and forbidden by his doctors to return to the location. Herzog replaced Robards with Klaus Kinski (star of his "Aguirre, the Wrath of God"), but meanwhile, co-star Mick Jagger left the production because of a commitment to a concert tour. Then the Kinski version of "Fitzcarraldo" was caught in the middle of a border war between tribes of Indians. The whole production was moved twelve hundred miles, to a new location where the mishaps included plane crashes, disease, and attacks by unfriendly Indians. And all of those hardships were on top of the incredible task Herzog set himself to film: He wanted to show his obsessed hero using teams of Indians to pull an entire steamship up a hillside using only block and tackle.
Stanley Kauffmann, in the New Republic, argued that, for Herzog, the purpose of film is to risk death, and each of his films is in some way a challenge hurled at the odds. Herzog has made films on the slopes of active volcanoes, has filmed in the jungle and in the middle of the Sahara, and has made films about characters who live at the edges of human achievement. - rogerebert.com
Jimi Hendrix and Otis Redding arrived at California's Monterey International Pop Festival virtually unknown. Returning stateside from London, where he had moved to launch his musical career, Hendrix exploded onstage, flooring an unsuspecting audience with his maniacal six-string pyrotechnics. Redding, a venerable star of Memphis's Stax record label, seduced the "love crowd" in one of his best--and last-- shows. Jimi Plays Monterey and Shake! Otis at Monterey, acclaimed documentarian D. A. Pennebaker's Monterey Pop companion pieces, feature the entire sets by these legendary musicians, performances that have entered rock-and-roll mythology. - The Criterion Collection VIDEO: FULL FEATURES
Jimi Plays Monterey
Shake! Otis at Monterey
REVIEWS, INTERVIEWS, CREDITS:
Excerpt from Time magazine interview with director D.A. Pennebaker:
TIME: I understand that you had similar distribution problems with Monterey Pop, your film about the music festival, featuring breakout performances by Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix.
Yes. I put that in a porn house on [Manhattan's] Lower East Side. It was the only theater I could get. It ran for a year. People would come. In fact, the same people would come every Friday — and they'd all be smoking grass in the johns. The guy who ran the theater was so happy. He was making money left and right. He didn't want it to ever stop.
TIME: In that film, you recorded the now legendary footage of Hendrix's first major American concert. What was the mood in the audience like when he played?
John Phillips [of the Mamas and the Papas] had told me ahead of time, "There's this great blues player and he sets his guitar on fire." I didn't know what to expect. For some people there, his performance was noise and it upset them. In the first three or four minutes, it was noise to me, too. I didn't know what to think of it. I did know that we needed to shoot everything he did. We knew that this was different and that it was something amazing and historic.
TIME: Why do you avoid the use of narration and on-camera interviews in your films?
Really, I'm trying to be Ibsen. That's my secret hope: that I could somehow turn into [the playwright Henrik] Ibsen. There are things happening all the time to real people. You don't have to enact them or write them. I'm trying to make a play, not an educational device.
TIME: There's a dictum in anthropology that the observer changes the behavior of the observed. Have you been in situations where you felt that your presence was really affecting things?
Not a lot. Your attitude towards the camera determines that. If you're setting up lights and tripods and you've got three assistants running around, people will want to get you out as fast as they can. But if you go the opposite way, if you make the camera the least important thing in the room, then it's different. I've left it on the floor. Sometimes, I'll shoot with it on my lap. Other times, I'll put it on a table and turn it on. You don't make it a big issue.
The movies compile unreleased film of Jimi Hendrix and Otis Redding that had been shot for the rock documentary ''Monterey Pop.''
When Jimi Hendrix performed at the Monterey Pop Festival, the revolutionary rock guitarist was only 24 years old. A sensation in England where he had formed his trio, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, he was still virtually unknown in the United States. The festival, at which he set fire to his guitar and smashed it to pieces, helped put him on the map in America.
Otis Redding, who was only 25 years old when he appeared at the Monterey festival, died in a plane crash six months later. Less than three years later, Jimi Hendrix died a drug-related death. He was 27.
In 1974, boxers Muhammad Ali and George Foreman came to the still-emerging and politically unstable African nation of Zaire for what Ali called the "Rumble in the Jungle," a highly publicized world heavyweight championship fight. Documentarian Leon Gast flew to Zaire to film both the fight and a music festival (featuring B.B. King, The Pointer Sisters, and Miriam Makeba) organized by promoter Don King. Gast's footage was shelved for 22 years due to legal and financial problems, but when it was finally released in 1996, When We Were Kings provided a vivid portrait of the controversial Ali. At 33, he was considered past his prime for the Zaire fight, and his refusal to serve in the U.S. military on moral grounds was still an issue in the minds of many. But here, Ali displays strength, skill, intelligence, and tremendous charm, making it clear how he became one of the most renowned figures in the world of sports. And, while George Foreman is best known today as a genial commercial pitchman, he's seen here as a strong, forbidding opponent, not especially articulate and seemingly unstoppable. The film also features interviews with several notable fight fans, including Norman Mailer, George Plimpton, and Spike Lee. A fascinating document of a great moment in sporting and cultural history, When We Were Kings was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Documentary Feature and won a Special Jury Recognition Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. - Mark Deming, All Movie Guide VIDEO: FULL FEATURE
The film won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. At the presentation, both Ali and Foreman came up to join the filmmakers to make it clear they had long made peace since that match.
Though almost all of the footage in this documentary was shot by producer/director Leon Gast in 1974, one reason it took 22 years to complete was because the negative and rights to the film were entangled in civil suits involving the Liberians who financed the movie's making.
This is the only film containing footage of the "black Woodstock" soul music festival accompanying the fight.
Before gaining fame for his films L'Avventura (1960), La Notte (1961), L'Eclisse (1962), Blow-Up (1966), and The Passenger (1975) Michelangelo Antonioni began his career making documentaries.
From The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni by Peter Brunette:
...it is during this period that Antonioni's special fascination with vision and the nature of the look seems to have ripened. (Significantly, his Cinema article, "Toward a Film on the River Po," contained nine photographs, four of them half-page in size, even before the film was shot; in the finished documentary itself, information is often conveyed in purely visual terms, rather than through the more conventional means of the voice-over.) Antonioni later told an interviewer that once he began looking at objects with the intention of making a film, everything changed: "The things themselves were claiming a different attention, acquiring a different significance. Looking at them in a new way, I was taking control of them. Beginning to understand the world through the image, i was understanding the image, its force, its mystery. As soon as it was possible for me to do so I returned to those places with a camera. This is how People of the Po Valley was born. Everything that I did after that, good or bad as it was, started from there." Immediately after the war, Antonioni worked for a while as a translator, film critic, and scriptwriter (he wrote two unproduced scripts for Visconti) and made a magnificently photographed nine-minute documentary called N.U. - Nettezza Urbana. A study of the men who clean the streets and gather the garbage in Rome, the film poetically documents the magnificence of the early morning in the city. It won an important critics' prize in 1948. Next followed several other shorts such as L'amorosa menzogna (Lies of love, 1948-9), a film that humorously and ironically describes the gap between the glamorous lives of photoromance stars - all the rage at the time - and their real lives, and Superstizione (Superstition, 1949), which documents the superstitious customs still to be found among rural folk. About the same time, he wrote a treatment for Lo sceicco bianco (The White Sheik), based on the same idea L'amorosa menzogna, which was made into a film by Fellini in 1952. Three more made-to-order shorts came in 1949 and 1950, including a documentary on the production of rayon, another on the cable car that runs to Cortina d'Ampezzo in the Dolomites skiing area, and the third on the Villa dei Mostri, a Renaissance garden featuring grotesque figures carved in the rocks. The urge to document everyday life that appears in all of these films is not surprising given the fact that Antonioni came into his cinematic maturity during the heyday of neorealism, the most famous movement in Italian cinema history. VIDEO: Gente del Po (1947)
Before he moved to Rome (sometime around 1940), Antonioni attempted to make a documentary at a local insane asylum. When the set was lit, the patients suddenly responded with convulsions and the film was aborted.
Antonioni's first documentary concerned the inhabitants of the Po valley region near Ferrara. Shot in 1943, Gente del Po was not released until after the war in 1947. In the interim, the bulk of the footage was lost through degradation, accident, and, possibly, deliberate tampering. Still, he displayed an early resilience and determination to complete the film, a trait that would resurface on numerous occasions in the future.
On the strength of his documentaries, Antonioni secured financing from Vallani Film to make his first fictional feature in Milan.
Nestled deep within the heart of the mountains of Boone County, West Virginia reigns a King. The King - Jesco White, The Dancing Outlaw. Jesco is a living legend. The last of the Mountain Dancers, his style is unique to the mountain culture. Resembling tap dancing, it's a tradition passed down from father to son - as were his dancing shoes. His dance floor? An 8 by 4 piece of plywood or the roof of his canine companion Duke's doghouse. His venue? The front yard, the den of Jesco's and Norma Jean's trailer, or any place the spirit moves. But dancing isn't the only phenomenon that emanates from the cabin. On quiet nights, legend has it, you can hear the echoes of vintage Elvis tunes careening off the walls of Jesco's Elvis room and through the mountains of Boone county. Jesco belts out Elvis tunes as only a true King can. It's a beautiful thing, man. Jesco's unique mountain wisdom and talents (and tattoos) have not gone unnoticed. His jewels of wisdom are downright profound. His talents have made him the subject of two documentary films and scored him an appearance with Dweezil Zappa ("Weezil" as Jesco puts it) as a country cousin on the "The Roseanne Show." (The tattoos were a big hit, just ask Tom Arnold.)
In the end, Elvis, the King, is the first royalty of rock'n'roll. Jesco, the King, is the Dancing Outlaw, the last of the mountain dancers.
As the popularity of Dancing Outlaw grew, Jesco White was asked by comedian Tom Arnold to perform on the television show Roseanne. He traveled to Los Angeles for the performance, which was chronicled in the 1994 short film Dancing Outlaw 2: Jesco Goes To Hollywood - also directed by Jacob Young.
Jesco has been linked to many popular artists through song. Big and Rich mention his name in their single "Comin' to Your City," although Jesco is not a fan and feels as if they are capitalizing on his name. Hank Williams III wrote the song "Legend of D. Ray White," which honors the cultural significance of Jesco's father. It also mentions Jesco, as well as another legendary Boone County artist, Hasil Adkins, and Jesco's sister Mamie White. Jesco also dances on the Hank Williams III song "Louisiana Stripes."
A short clip of Jesco dancing can be seen in Beck's "Loser" music video.
"I enjoyed myself from within myself on behalf of myself" - Jesco
"My past is coming up into my future and messing with my good life" - Jesco
My Voyage to Italy (Italian: Il mio viaggio in Italia) is a personal documentary by acclaimed Italian-American director Martin Scorsese. The film is a voyage through Italian cinema history, marking influential films for Scorsese and particularly covering the Italian neorealism period. The films of Roberto Rossellini make up for half the films discussed in the entire documentary, dealing with his seminal influence on Italian cinema and cinema history. Other directors mentioned include Vittorio de Sica, Luchino Visconti, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni.VIDEO: FULL FEATURE
COURSE REQUIREMENTS:
Obtain by any means, watch, and research little known, overlooked, and classic documentary films. In addition you will be required to post your findings here should you find the film of merit.
IMPORTANT: Projects are due AT THE START of the class.
