/film/ - FILM

THE LIFE OF BIRDS (1998) - Great BBC nature documentary series that you might have overlooked, imdb rating of 9/10

All 10 parts are on this Iranian vidsite https://www.aparat.com/search/life_of_birds

ARAYA reminds me of a couple great Japanese films - Woman in the Dunes and The Naked Island. All of these films deal with the topic of repetitive, soulcrushing labor.

The Japs react to these situations with stoicism, while Araya (especially via narration) highlights exasperation and hopelessness. However you have to keep in mind that Araya depicts real human lives and the Japanese films are fictional.

Please Vote for Me (2007)

An experiment in Chinese democracy - schoolkids campaign to be Class Monitor

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DuMuFsCJFWI

Speaking of wars I just found out about Balkan Wars of Đoka Bogdanović. It's some of the earliest film documentation of real soldiers in a warzone, shot during the Second Balkan War in 1913. I really like watching this stuff even if there's not much action in the footage. Reading about history cannot substitute for seeing it yourself. When you watch you notice subtleties like how people dressed, how they interacted, how their towns looked, etc.

Bogdanović's film has been well-restored for a 3-disc release and many clips are online at http://www.europeanfilmgateway.eu/content/pioneer-cinematic-war-reporting-dyordye-dyoka-bogdanovi%C4%87

<Dyoka Bogdanović was no newcomer to cinema. Born to a lawyer’s family in 1860, he set up Belgrade’s first movie theatres in 1905. The experience of the First Balkan War (1912–1913) led him to the idea of re-enacting Serbian victories for the camera. In order to realise this plan, Bogdanović contracted two camera operators who were working for the Vienna outpost of Pathé, Europe’s leading producer of newsreels.

<In the midst of the filming preparations in June 1913, Bulgaria attacked Serbia and Greece, thus unleashing the Second Balkan War. Bogdanović immediately understood that this was his chance to film real combat operations instead of re-enacted ones. He decided to abandon his original plans and send his camera operators to the front. During the month of July, the men – whose names are unknown even today – shot footage of battles, of devastated villages, of war victims, of prisoners of war, and of soldiers in their everyday life. Out of this footage, Bogdanović quickly compiled a number of short documentaries and newsreels. These films are noteworthy not only because few other moving images of the Second Balkan War exist, but also because they rank among the earliest cinematic recordings showing soldiers in action in real war situations.

>>13633

In what ways do you think Warrendale uniquely captures the essence of Canada?

>>13641

Canada is just northwestern America but made into an entire country, robust types of people and/or with rural edge. It isn't a "nice and friendly" version of America and just about identical, if anything Canadians are bigger assholes. The Canadian flag is also terrible and misrepresents even more with it's culturelessness, "lol we just put a leaf on our flag it means nothing look how easy-going we are" further enforcing the stereotype, in fact it's like the whole thing was made up by the Canadian government to make Canada look better.

Posting this here so I remember to watch it

>>14470

I didn't know about that one. I remember watching A Married Couple which was fairly interesting and surprisingly intimate.

>>14794

I got the two books confused. Curtis discussed Bernays' Propaganda in The Century of the Self.

>>14498

>freak show documentaries

Yeah, try Little Lady Fauntleroy about a child prodigy antiques expert that looks like Harpo Marx and wanted to be Prime Minster but ended up getting a sex change. The rest of hisher family is weird too.

http://www.snagfilms.com/films/title/little_lady_fauntleroy

(The only video I could find, the stream may not work with every browser.)

This is full of historical surprises that will leave you looking at the civilization your living it in a different light.

Peter Whitehead - The Fall (1969)

<Shot around New York between October 1967 and May 1968, Peter Whitehead's The Fall reflects the turbulence and chaos of its conjuncture. Visiting from Britain, Whitehead initially offers an outsider's perspective on the antiwar protests, bizarre performance art pieces, and surreal everyday life that he films.

Trailer: https://vimeo.com/42949757

Full: https://vimeo.com/184247853

I only just started watching The Fall to note the passing of Peter Whitehead. He considered this his most important film. It's apparently in the vein of Medium Cool and Hearts and Minds, examining the protest movement and counterculture of 1968. Which makes me wonder: where are the documentaries like this today? We seems to be experiencing a similar era of social disintegration and confusion, yet few (if any) filmmakers care to give broader context to the situation.

England has been involved with Ireland for many centuries, leading to frequent uprisings from the native Irish. Unlike many other countries that successfully expelled the English at some point, Ireland fought a losing battle again and again. A nationalist high point was limiting UK rule to just a handful of counties in Northern Ireland.

With that in mind, here's a thought-provoking chronicle of "The Troubles" in Northern Ireland during the 1970s. The commie bomby Irish Republican Army fights a guerrilla war for a unified Ireland, while Her Majesty's Armed Forces employ heavy-handed tactics to squash the violent insurrection.

It's a fascinating situation where I can't fully discount each side's motivations.

The director Arthur MacCaig was an American living in Europe whose documentaries focused exclusively on the conflict in Ireland. Last year his son made a good companion piece: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Za4Nm3l9ujk

I have a soft spot for weird subjects, like the paranormal, unsolved mysteries, that sort of thing. The genre is utterly flooded with bullshit from every angle possible making it impossible to find the good quality documentaries.

What's some good documentaries on abnormal happenings, urban legends or unsolved mysteries?

>>15422

Quick move there, i got scared my post was for nothing and probably you won't find it useful but i will try look something.

I think i read something about ""Skinwalker Ranch"" getting a documentary. I spend moderate amounts of time reading about paranormal (except the spiritual/alchemist aspect) and to be fair the entire field of the paranormal is filled to the brim with bullshit but the very few instances that are legitimately intriguing are the reason to keep going, still i don't quite recall good filmed work discussing it.

I do remember a couple of decent TV programs from an old Argentinian channel dedicated to this genre (that drastically changed its focus after it got absorbed by Time Warner around 2007) it was about "casual activity", meaning stuff that was widely known and experienced by regular people but still was paranormal in nature (folk belief) namely highway shadows that almost every interstate driver has seen. The argieanon will probably remember the channel but most of the content from it went bust, at least in the rest of the continent, i never saw any of its original programs again. Just checked and there's a listing of the programs' names, i will try to check if i can find something interesting because they also had a lot of bogus before the handover.

We can stop reading here, somewhat related historical rambling that i just realized ahead:

My pop also had a bunch of VHS tapes with old documentaries, somehow Latin America was very receptive to these things. There was one about a triangle sector in Puerto Rico were a famed entity trolled people at night and sucked the blood of the farmstock in the mid-70's: El Vampiro de Moca (Moca's Vampire) it was just a local thing until it reappeared in the late 90's again (1996 i believe) in that instance it was re-dubbed Chupacabras (Goat Sucker) but the inconsistent thing here is that, while it became more rampant in its antics, the locals were divided with 2 very different descriptions; Many saw something like the original one, a giant bat thing that flew above people's head kicking them before/after killing chickens and goats (also left a sulfurous stench) and then you had the other that people saw up in the mountain, the famous grey thing with kangaroo legs and chicken-feet hands, red spots under its fine rug hair and spikes on his back, also a retractable pointy tongue in which this thing jumped on cows and drained them, yet this last one never tried to interact with people and was said by some to be actually repelled by them. None are similar to the Northern Mexican/Southwestern Chupacabras indians and cowboys like to brag about, which is a super d duper big dog that outright butchers cattle instead of elegantly draining them and extracting the organs, hence why sometimes the Puerto Rican version is called the Caribbean Chupacabras although similar cases also appeared in Colombia.

The video had a bunch of technical drawings about the latter, and some sketches about the former, but still it was mostly about some reporters interviewing the ranchers who were either too damn scared (this was recorded at night in the middle of the forest a few months later, one didn't want to talk if he didn't have his shotgun) or too damn confident to be taken serious. The thing i realized just now was how set-up this whole thing was, i thought it was an isolated event but making memories i realize Puerto Rico around that era (mid 90's) had a lot of Hollywood around due to Arecibo's Dish; The X-Files had a crucial episode about contact (1994, second season premiere) and was filmed around the Dish. Then you have 007's Goldeneye which had its final segment filmed on the dish (Spring 1995) and then out of nowhere in 1996 a strange entity appears in Moca and the area surrounding it that supposedly looks similar to the famous things that are the center point of the X-Files series. Now this smells like a touristic stunt or something really silly, the only thing that is missing here are mysterious black helicopters (one being a plot point in Goldeneye) because even material like the drawings were good stuff, made by a talented profiler or some artist and i don't mean to insult law enforcement in rural Puerto Rico or anything, there might've been someone who liked that. Also the municipality of Arecibo is in the same region as Moca but that's relative as the island is quite small.

I feel deceived, but if it was a stunt it didn't work out at all.