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Poster from the film Almost There, rendering by the artist Arthur Jones of Peter Anton
Film History
October, 27, 2016

Cats of Documentaries

Craig Phillips in Film History

"I love cats because I enjoy my home; and little by little, they become its visible soul.”—Filmmaker Jean Cocteau (Orpheus; Beauty and the Beast) International Cat Day is August 8 and National Cat Day is October 29, days designed to…
Filmmaker Shirley Clarke with slate and monitor
Film History
July, 11, 2016

From Alice Guy-Blaché to Barbara Kopple: The Pioneering Women of Documentary Film

Maryann Johanson in Film History

When we talk about the early years of cinema, there is no separating “the history of women in film” from “the history of film.” Women have been there from the beginning, and have shaped the medium in transformative ways. Early Women…
From the film "The Walk"; image courtesy Tri-Star Pictures
Film History
May, 27, 2016

Based on a True Story: 8 Documentaries that Inspired Feature Films

Sean Axmaker in Film History

True stories have been a prime inspiration for movies for as long as there have been movies. Early films recreated historical events and breaking news for eager audiences and films as disparate as I Am a Fugitive from a Chain…
Still of priest standing in front of outdoor cross in Robert Bresson's 1951 film Diary of a Country Priest
Lists
May, 6, 2016

Losing Your Religion: Nine Movies about Crises of Faith

Noel Murray in Lists

Abigail Disney’s documentary The Armor of Light takes an unusual but illuminating approach to the gun control debate. In the film, Reverend Rob Schenck — an evangelical Christian who gained some cachet on the right decades ago via his leadership of…
Horst van Wächter and Niklas Frank (l-r), with Philippe Sands in background
Beyond the Films
April, 27, 2016

Blood Guilt: 12 Movies about Healing after Heinous Crimes

Sean Axmaker in Beyond the Films

Niklas Frank and Horst von Wächter are the adult children of high-ranking Nazi officers. As we learn in My Nazi Legacy, their fathers sent tens of thousands of people to their deaths, and Niklas and Horst spent decades dealing with…
Artwork from Jodorowsky's Dune
Film History
March, 10, 2016

The Unmaking of: Stories of the Greatest Films Never Made

Sean Axmaker in Film History

The "making of" documentary has become a lively subgenre of nonfiction filmmaking, thanks in large part to the explosion of home video and the proliferation of cable channels in the past few decades. Once a purely promotional creation to run…
production of the first Wikipedia video tutorials (Hamburg, Germany)
Behind the Films
March, 4, 2016

Documentaries for Movie Geeks: Films About Films

Scott Weinberg in Behind the Films

Once you've watched a beloved movie two or three times, you start to crave a little more information about the film's conception, production, and cultural impact, among other things. So you hit the internet to read a few articles or…
Stephen, at home, explaining how you know when you're in love
Beyond the Films
January, 8, 2016

More Than Rain Man: Autism Portrayals on Screen

Noel Murray in Beyond the Films

For a long time, the Oscar-winning 1988 drama Rain Man wasn’t just the best-known representation of autism on film, it was a lot of people’s only frame of reference for autism spectrum disorders (ASD) in general. But over the past…
Cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond
Beyond the Films
January, 6, 2016

From the Archive: Cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond Talks Motion Picture Making

Independent Lens in Beyond the Films

In memory of Vilmos Zsigmond, the legendary cinematographer who died New Years Day, we reached into the Independent Lens archive for an interview Mr. Zsigmond gave us in June 2010 on the premiere of the documentary about Vilmos and his Hungarian…
Irina Nistor (played by an actress here) dubs American films into Romanian), in Chuck Norris vs. Communism
Interviews
January, 1, 2016

Ilinca Calugareanu Returns to Her 1980s Romania Roots

Craig Phillips in Interviews

Chuck Norris vs Communism may not literally be the retro action film the title implies, it's a shorthand way of reflecting how this new documentary captures the giddy way Romanians in the 1980s must have felt when they were given access…
Irina Nistor watches a film being projected, for censorship review, in dramatic recreation scene from Chuck Norris vs. Communism
Film History
December, 31, 2015

Nine Movies about the Power of Cinema

Noel Murray in Film History

In Ilinca Calugareanu’s documentary Chuck Norris vs. Communism, a handful of Romanians who endured the Cold War reminisce about congregating surreptitiously in cramped apartments to watch American action films on illegal VCRs. Some parts of the experience they recall fondly:…
From the Maysles Brothers' Gimme Shelter, when things turned ugly at Altamont during Rolling Stones' performance
Film History
December, 14, 2015

Cinema Verite: The Movement of Truth

Sean Axmaker in Film History

This piece is part of an ongoing Independent Lens series exploring documentary film history. Check out the previous entry, Silent Real-Life Adventure Films, and stay tuned for more installments. The birth of documentary filmmaking is the birth of cinema. The very…