50 Documentaries To See Before You Die

Update: Current TV has excerpts from their broadcasts of 2011.

Documentarian Morgan Spurlock hosts 50 Documentaries To See Before You Die, a Current TV series on the documentaries released in the past 25 years. The doc ignores favorites like Connections, Ali Mazrui's The Africans: A Triple Heritage, Koyaanisqatsi, Baraka, Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse, A Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Movies, or The Merchants Of Cool, but the series looks like fun:

After Effects for documentaries + cutting rhythms

Richard Harrington notes some Useful Videos About Documentary Editing, including An Overview of After Effects for Documentary Editors, a presentation by Steve Audette and Mark Dugas given at a PBS conference. Embedded below, it's pretty basic but very effectively shows how a little bit of AE can add a lot of style. Harrington also notes other videos by Audette like "Thoughts on Documentary Editing."

For similar resources to liven up static content, see Animate a Photo Mosaic in After Effects, The Ken Burns Effect — and beyond, and other AEP resources for multiplane animation.

Also interesting is Todd Kopriva's notes on free chapters from Karen Pearlman’s Cutting Rhythms and podcasts available through the Art of the Guillotine, a very useful aggregator website on editing.

A hungry mob is an angry mob

In SADAT'S DAT, Adam Curtis revives a 1982 documentary on Egypt, which noted that food shortages and prices played a big role in Anwar Sadat's downfall. And of course the vision thing on our end. You'll have to visit his BBC website to see the doc Why Was Cairo Calm?

Here in Babylon, we may forget that 'a hungry mob is an angry mob'...

Food, Inc. movie: free stream at PBS

Food, Inc. the movie is available for online streaming at PBS for free via (@KevinGoldsmith). Details on this doc were posted last year in 'The Future Of Food' on Hulu + 'Food, Inc.' previews.

Here's a segment on Food, Inc. by the PBS show Now. By the way, The Future of Food is still available on Hulu.

Coming to Theaters: Food

Coming to Theaters: Food is Peter Smith's roundup of recent documentaries on food in Good Magazine. Some of this was already belabored in AEP's recent 'The Future Of Food' on Hulu + 'Food, Inc.' previews.

'The Future Of Food' on Hulu + 'Food, Inc.' previews

Food, Inc. is a film that looks inside America's corporate controlled food industry. It opens this June and features Michael Pollan, who spoke with Bill Moyers on security & food matters a few months ago, and other experts. The PBS show Now featured the director of Food, Inc. last Friday. It could be long if you're in a hurry, so the preview of Food, Inc. is also a fine lead-in to the main item of this post. (Note: free markets are not subsidized)





The feature documentary The Future Of Food is on Hulu for now. It "offers an in-depth investigation into the disturbing truth behind [genetically] engineered foods that have quietly filled U.S. grocery store shelves for the past decade."



Update: See the note below Food, Inc. from Participant Media, founded by eBay's Jeff Skoll, and a short review from KQED blog Bay Area Bites Hungry for Change: FOOD, INC.

Also, Martin Sheen and others advocate for issues posed by this film for TakePart.com.

How to Tell a Multimedia Story

Ricochet by Chrys Wu, mentioned last week in 10 Golden Rules for Video Journalists, has more in the same vein this week. Check out his summaries How to Tell a Multimedia Story, Part 1 (The Interview) and How to Tell a Multimedia Story, Part 2 (The Pitch).

Helvetica on PBS, and Objectified

From The World's Best Gadget Designers Speak in Objectified on Gizmodo:
"As he did for Helvetica's namesake typeface, Gary Hustwit gathered the world's top designers for his forthcoming documentary Objectified, telling the story of the magic behind the objects we use every day." continue at Gizmodo...

But wait, there's more: Helvetica (noted earlier in Type casting) has its US TV premiere on PBS' Independent Lens on Tuesday night (check your local viewings here) in an hour-long version. PBS has launched a fairly extensive mini-site with loads of info, clips, and other treats if you like that sort of thing.

And here's the trailer for Objectified:

The making of 'Fuel'

MacVideo.TV posted a video of the presentation from IBC 2008 on the making of Fuel. Darius Fisher, co-Producer of Fuel and Sundance Winner 2008 (and also worked on The Aviator), spoke about what tools and so forth went into making this feature-length documentary which challenges aspects of our oil-based economy and the cost this dependence has brought about. Here's the trailer for Fuel:

New Doc Chronicles Threat to South Central L.A. Garden

Via Pruned and Good, Scott Hamilton Kennedy's The Garden is a new documentary that chronicles the threat to the South Central L.A. Garden from real estate speculation.

'Taxi to the Dark Side' is back

Roundups of the Oscar 2008 Best Documentary nominees are at Salon's From "Sicko" to Iraq-o and All These Wonderful Things' Wagering on This Weekend's Doc Awards.

One of the nominees, Taxi to the Dark Side, has been picked up by HBO after being dropped by a spooked Discovery Channel. The movie is about "an innocent Afghan taxi driver tortured to death by U.S. officials at Bagram Air Base, and has received wide critical acclaim since its debut in April at the Tribeca Film Festival. The New York Times’s A.O. Scott said, 'If recent American history is ever going to be discussed with the necessary clarity and ethical rigor, this film will be essential.'" The original big spread in the NYT was quite disturbing.

There's more at Think Progress; here's the trailer:

al-Qaeda in Iraq fighters = 850

Meeting Resistance is a new documentary making waves about the nature of the resistence to the US invasion of Iraq. It debuts as our American president warns of WWIII if Iran tries to build a nuclear power electricity plant -- though at the same time India is to be given actual nuclear material even after refusing to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty along with Israel, Pakistan, and North Korea. But what can you expect when the UN Security Council, the world's top arms dealers, is really a protection racket? Penny-ante games by regional drug lords and other gangstas pale in comparison.

Bush's only excuse for the war on Iraq is al-Qaeda, whose leaders roam about in other countries while we attack relatively innocent people at a high cost to soul and treasury. Or at least the American children's treasury, which Asian and European lenders will be waiting to demand when most manufacturing and programming jobs are finally offshored. Maybe the idea is that nothing matters but short run profit now that oil production has peaked.

In this light, globalization makes no sense, especially for the food security, since by the time the New World Order is in place, electric power and shipping resources to run it will be scarce. Too bad we didn't put that cool trillion into alternative energy resources!

Anyway, it's interesting to note that the "estimated number of full-time al-Qaeda-in-Iraq fighters is 850 or 2-5% of the Sunni insurgency, according to Malcolm Nance, author of The Terrorists of Iraq, who has worked with military and intelligence units tracking al-Qaeda inside Iraq." (from Launching Brand Petraeus). There more on this at Washington Monthly's The Myth of AQI: the military's estimation of the threat is alarmingly wrong by a former Iraq correspondent for the Stars and Stripes newspaper (interviewed on Counterspin). There are additional details in Dan Froomkin's Washington Post article Bush's Baghdad Mouthpiece.

There's more video of Meeting Resistance at Crooks and Liars and Democracy Now.

To put the threat in perspective, if all the suicide bombers blew themselves up at once they still would not pose a threat to the survival of the USA. The real danger is that our fate is almost entirely in our own hands in the form of arms and poison-making capability. Reminds me of a scary old song by the well-designed Savage Republic: "The Crisis of our Country is not caused by External Forces... The Danger Lies Within..."

Have some corn with your corn

As Michael Pollan said in The Omnivore’s Dilemma (UC Berkeley webcast), have some corn with your corn -- like when you have a chicken or beef taco with soda pop. I love corn but now corn is a nearly omnipresent Frankenfood -- mostly genetically modified, as noted by The Center for Food Safety (KALW podcast on Frankenfood).

The indie documentary King Corn is making some waves after a decent showing in NYC (in NewTeeVee's Biofuel Primer and at All These Wonderful Things). Scheduled next is is DC, Boston, LA, and the Bay Area. As mentioned last month, there's also a low-key SAFE event on October 30 with the filmmakers and Michael Pollan in Berkeley. Here's the trailer for King Corn:

Ruling Documentaries

Truefilm (by Jim Feeley, pictured below) discusses some aspects of Fair Use for documentaries, while All these wonderfuls things (pictured above) discusses a controversy over Oscar rules for docs in a series of posts in April and May (via FreshDV).

And Repent, for The Shopocalypse is near!

Feeley's docs

Jim Feeley's sorta new blog Truefilm "currently provides a digest of news about nonfiction film and television. Soon it will provide much much more."

Freedom's just another word

Adam Curtis has a new 3-part documentary playing on BBC now: 'The Trap -- What Happened To Our Dream Of Freedom?'

Update: Youtube has a bit; theDossier posted RM versions.
BlairWatch has good discussions of the content.

Curtis' previous docs on fear and desire, 'The Power of Nightmares' (3-part or DVD) and 'Century of the Self' (mp4 parts), are available through Documentary-film.net, Archive.org and Google Video. See also the Errol Morris interview with Adam Curtis and George Lakoff's thoughts on "freedom."

(via a comment on Thom Yorke's March 4th post).