Doc Corner: Bowie and 'Moonage Daydream' at Melbourne International Film Festival

By Glenn Dunks

Moonage Daydream is unlike any other Brett Morgen film. If you expected the same stately warmth that imbued Jane or even a tragic rock and roll epitaph like Cobain: Montage of Heck, then you would be wrong. This is evident immediately into its 140-minute runtime, beginning as it does with not just any David Bowie song, but the (incredible, it must be noted) Pet Shop Boys remix of “Hallo Spaceboy” from 1996. I love a bit of trolling the rock crowd, so I was instantly on board. The mere inclusion of this song—to say nothing of the kaleidoscopic, tie-dyed montage that accompanies it—keyed me in that Morgen wasn’t just going to do what a Bowie fan may expect from a biography documentary.

These high-octane opening minutes don’t exactly let up, either. Moonage Daydream is a work of documentary that is almost as exhausting as it is exhilarating.

Click to read more ...

1999 with Nick: Best Documentary Feature and "realness"

This week, in advance of the Oscars, Nick Davis is looking back at the Academy races of 20 years ago, spotlighting movies he’d never seen and what they teach us about those categories, then and now.

The Blair Witch Project

When I taught my Winter 2017 seminar about the movies of 1999, to a classroom of first-year college students who were all born in the last two years of the millennium, one of the trickiest ideas to historicize was how decisively the visibility and cultural stature of documentary cinema has shifted over the last 20 years. Compared to the decades when I grew up, nonfiction cinema has reached much further outside a relatively niche audience who tracked that filmmaking tradition. The explanations are too numerous to get into here, though they include all of the following: cheaper and more numerous technologies for recording and assembling footage; proliferating platforms for distributing and watching nonfiction films, especially in the era of the internet and of exploding cable-TV offerings; and some epochal, admittedly eclectic success stories in the commercial market, from The Thin Blue Line to Hoop Dreams to Fahrenheit 9/11 to March of the Penguins, that inspired more students and artist to pursue documentary tracks and more institutions to finance, release, and program the work.

More abstractly, I would add to that list a specifically millennial, post-postmodernist erosion of all faith in objective “reality,” differently crystallized in such landmark films of 1999 as The Matrix, eXistenZ, Eyes Wide Shut, and Fight Club. That erosion produces both a resistant hunger for whatever “real” images and stories might yet survive and its dialectical opposite: a contagious discovery, dismaying but darkly energizing, that even vérité images are subjective, manipulated, and at some level “fake”...

Click to read more ...

Doc Corner: 'Jane' is Our Oscar Frontrunner

by Glenn Dunks

We are informed at the beginning of Jane that the footage we are about to see had been previously lost. While it is absolutely astonishing that such incredible footage could have somehow just vanished and nobody thought to look for it before now, let's be thankful. It means we get Jane, a compelling and often awe-inspiring documentary from Oscar-nominated filmmaker Brett Morgen.

Jane is gorgeously composed documentary. An exciting play of form that that swings among the vines thanks to the prowess of contemporary rhythms of structure and construction, yet hums to the classic, even nostalgia-inducing visions at its heart...

Click to read more ...