Listen to Me Marlon filmmakers found heart of darkness
Brando narrates his own story in new documentary
Surviving a broken home with alcoholic parents, Marlon Brando found a way to heal using a tape recorder, isolation and a professional obsession with truth that made every performance vibrate with all the beauty, and ugliness, of the human condition
By Katherine Monk
PARK CITY, UT – When Marlon Brando was still alive, his face was scanned using what was, at the time, cutting-edge digital technology. Pulses of laser light crisscrossed his famous profile, swallowing each feature into an algorithm, resulting in an animated, glowing green grid: a Marlon matrix.
The footage lingered for years. Then the producers behind Restrepo, Waiting for Sugar Man and James Marsh’s Project Nim got a call from Brando’s estate.
“They approached us to do something and we said we’d be delighted, but only if we can make it in a way that is entirely original,” says John Battsek, one of the founders of London-based Passion Pictures – ...
Canadian Must-Sees: Cinema Verité Defines a Real Moment
Late, and undeniably great, documentary director Peter Wintonick not only chronicled the rise of a new cinematic day in non-fiction film, he traced its roots all the way back to the New World and the camera work of Michel Brault
CINEMA VERITE: DEFINING THE MOMENT
4/5
Directed by: Peter Wintonick
Running time: 102 minutes
A documentary about the pivotal shift in documentary film, Cinema Verité follows the evolution of static, institutional non-fiction film into a flowing -- and often shaky -- vehicle of artistic expression.
Montreal-based filmmaker Peter Wintonick (Manufacturing Consent) opens this slick yet sedate take on film history with a shot of Terrence Macartney-Filgate -- regarded as the pioneer of the Candid Eye series -- sitting on a Toronto streetcar with a digital camera, filming Wintonick’s crew as they are filming him. It’s a wonderfully reflective image that captures the essence of the self-conscious movement and sets up the history ...
The Look of Silence screams for justice
Joshua Oppenheimer's sequel to The Act of Killing wanted to provide an emotional and moral coda to the original as it sought remorse in the eyes of the guilty, but in every beautiful saturated frame, The Look of Silence finds only the blank face of denial
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The Look of Silence: Joshua Oppenheimer reflects on deflection
In The Act of Killing, Joshua Oppenheimer offered the dramatic testimony of mass murderers as they re-enacted their crimes. In the forthcoming sequel, The Look of Silence, the Oscar-nominated filmmaker brings the perpetrators face to face with the brother of the man they killed.
By Katherine Monk
Joshua Oppenheimer is a precise filmmaker, which is difficult to accomplish at the best of times, but something practically unheard of in documentary. It’s the reason why the Texas-born filmmaker was nominated for an Oscar for his first feature, The Act of Killing, a blend of research and febrile nightmare that related the story of Indonesia’s communist purge in which one million people were murdered.
The movie caused a stir in Indonesia as it showed men who are still in power boasting about their acts of killing, and Oppenheimer suspected it would probably make any repeat visits to Indonesia impossible.
Yet, this month will see the release of a sequel to The Act of Killing ...
Amy Winehouse documentary delivers shivers
Asif Kapadia allows his camera to become an emotional confessional to his subjects in the profoundly moving Amy, a documentary portrait of another musical luminary prematurely darkened by a deep love deficit
Movie Review: Seymour – An Introduction
Ethan Hawke steps behind the camera to direct a lovely, purposefully small movie that gently dusts the edges of existential angst as it animates the life of pianist Seymour Bernstein
Movie review: Brett Morgen’s Montage of Heck
The beautiful, broken life of the late Nirvana frontman is transformed into a creative examination of the artistic impulse and the soul-crushing force of fame in the new documentary, Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck
Brett Morgen on Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck
Interview: The outspoken director spent eight years sifting through a 'cold empty storage unit hidden from the world' to find relics of Cobain that 'were still breathing'
By Katherine Monk
PARK CITY, UTAH -- A homemade cassette featuring a cover of a Beatles love song, the story of how he lost his virginity, and countless hours of home video created with Courtney Love: For 20 years, these relics salvaged from the wreckage of Kurt Cobain’s life remained unseen, and unheard, until now.
Compiled and delicately edited into a vibrantly creative portrait of the late artist by filmmaker Brett Morgen, these once-hidden fragments of a shattered soul make Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck more than just another documentary about another dead rock star.
Sifting through the contents with the careful hand and brush of a paleontologist uncovering an unknown bone, Morgen’s film shows us a different version of the now-mythical figure who's been condensed into a souvenir of grunge, plaid and ...
