#documentary-filmmaking

#documentary-filmmaking

There's a spectre haunting modern documentary filmmaking-the eternal return of Jason Holliday, the subject of Shirley Clarke's 1967 film " Portrait of Jason." It's not the first portrait film but it's the definitive one-not least because its raison d'être is built into it. Holliday, an unsuccessful actor, gives of himself with a reckless, unself-sparing profligacy, and Clarke turns the audiovisual recording of him into a work of art in itself, one in which Holliday's presence and performance aren't merely preserved but enshrined and exalted.

Vladimir Putin's government had begun cracking down on independent journalists covering the protests, branding them as "foreign agents" a designation that effectively stigmatized them and forced them to include disclaimers with their work. Loktev began filming several of these journalists who courageously kept reporting on the abuses of the regime, including her friend Anna Nemzer, a talk-show host for the independent channel TV Rain.

He served 27 years in prison before being granted parole. As soon as he was released, he was taken into ICE custody. Although not currently incarcerated, Prasad is haunted by the fear of deportation, given the administration's escalated actions against immigrants. Additionally, as a queer man, he faces potential persecution in Fiji. Prasad and his legal team are seeking a full pardon from Governor Newsom.

For the filmmaker Werner Herzog, 83, the truth that matters transcends mere fact. Starting in the 1990s, he began using a term he coined himself: ecstatic truth, which refers to poetic truth, emotional truth, a stylized truth that illuminates and moves. It's not about delivering fake news, but about delivering beautiful news, he vigorously clarified before the packed auditorium of New York's 92NY cultural center, where he was presenting his seventh book, The Future of Truth.

My relationship with the stretch of Sixth Avenue running between West 3rd and West 4th Streets, on one corner of which stands New York City's legendary IFC Center, mirrors my relationship with cinema, bad tattoos, crushing hangovers, and a whole mess of memories that sit in the back of my brain like luggage stuffed in a collapsing mid-flight Ryan Air jet.

In my recent Filmmaker conversation with Julia Loktev about the making of her monumental documentary, My Undesirable Friends, I cited the work of the late documentary filmmaker Joel DeMott, because I believe there is a straight line between DeMott's approach in the late 1970s to shooting vérité documentary using shoulder-mounted 16mm cameras and Loktev's latter-day methods using iPhones. DeMott, who died in June, has been eulogized in obits in Documentary and The New York Times,

Michael Rabiger was a pioneering educator and documentarian whose profound understanding of the human condition shaped generations of film-makers around the world.

"The honest truth - this is so weird - but I try to live a slightly embarrassing life. It's OK to be the overly enthusiastic person."