Documentary Educational Resources - Subject / Visual Arts & Media / Photography / All Films

Exposing Homelessness

Thu, 30 Aug 2018 07:05:00 GMT

Exposing Homelessness
Buy Now: $295.00

Exposing Homelessness is a film that documents the experience of three formerly homeless women who participated in a three-month photography workshop. They were given 35mm cameras and instructed in the art of black and white photography. Drawing from their personal experiences they were asked to use photography to express their insight into the issue of homelessness so that viewers could be exposed to a more intimate and profound analysis of the problem. Diverse in age, race, class and citizenship status, the women succeed in challenging the homeless stereotype and empowering themselves in the process.

The women's technical and artistic skills develop as well as their confidence and kinship. They critique photographs while using them as a way to analyze the problem of homelessness and share their individual stories. The relationship and intimacy that grows between the women over the course of the workshop proves to be a healing and powerful experience for the women and holds a vital message for the viewer.

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Hello Photo

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 13:27:00 GMT

Hello Photo
Buy Now: $320.00

In her startling, exquisitely shot Hello Photo, documentarist Nina Davenport turns the conventions of the travelogue inside out. She takes us to India and abandons us there, leaving us to believe what we see through her eyes. Her movie replicates the experience of being a traveller and thus a voyeur, of taking in sights without necessarily understanding their meaning.

Davenport seems less interested in cracking the enigma of India than in savoring it …Her hunger makes her unashamed, like the eager children who find the eye of her camera the next best thing to sweets.

"Hello Photo takes its title from their greetings, and its method from her persistent visibility. It's a film about seeing and being seen. It's about making a spectacle of yourself — as a Western woman armed with a movie camera — and being part of a spectacle; in the theater of the street, under a circus tent, on a movie set.

Davenport uses images of Bombay filmmakers at work and the comments of two film stars who philosophize about the nature of fame, to frame her own enterprise, and to comment on it both directly and ironically. In a country intoxicated with cinema, Davenport is just one more moviemaker. Yet she's undeniably an outsider, subject to the scrutiny that brings her. And what she's after is something quite different from her Indian counterparts; popular Indian cinema is spangled, artificial, and gleefully dramatic, a true manifestation of myth.

In contrast, Davenport's vision is poetic and free form, attuned to the beauty and strangeness of real life. Instead of being staged, her drama is found in the details of a broken stone wall and a sky full of bats that are really kites. More than just found, it is aggressively pursued - seized in the faces of people carried on a wave of madness or religious ecstasy, in the look of a blind boy whose expression is as remote and mysterious as the moon."

(notes by Linda Dubler, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston)

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Naata

Tue, 28 Aug 2018 14:11:00 GMT

Naata
Buy Now: $320.00

Friends and activists Bhau Korde and Waqar Khan work with neighborhood peace committees in Dharavi, Mumbai to promote conflict resolution through the collective production and use of visual media. Korde and Khan are both long-time residents of Dharavi and both first-generation migrants to the city.

As Asia's largest slum, with a population of 800,000, Dharavi has often been represented as a breeding ground for filth, vice and poverty, full of immigrants whose right to live in the city is often questioned by vigilante citizens' groups and right-wing politicians. However, Dharavi's long history of immigration has created a creative, productive space which plays an important role in the economy of the city; it is one of the major hubs of the informal sector that produces commodities ranging from food products to leather goods catering to a large export market.

When the deadly riots of 1992-93 tore the city and their community apart, Korde and Khan were moved to act, working to change both the negative perception of Dharavi and erase religious and ethnic divisions. Naata follows these remarkable men as they work on their film, Ekta Sandesh - their work paralleling that of Naata's own filmmakers, another filmmaking pair who are immigrants to their city of Bombay.

Traveling with a projector and a screen, Korde and Khan show the film at their own expense in communities savaged by distrust and prejudice. The two pairs of filmmakers join forces in this documentary to spread their important message even further.

SELECTED SCREENINGS & AWARDS

Film South Asia 2003, Kathmandu

River to River Film Festival, Florence, 2003

The First and Last Experimental Film Festival, Sydney, 2003

World Social Forum Film Festival, Mumbai, 2004

Vikalp-Films for Freedom, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai and New Delhi, 2004

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Richard Leacock & Valerie Lalonde: The Paris Years 1989-2009

Tue, 28 Aug 2018 08:59:00 GMT

Richard Leacock & Valerie Lalonde: The Paris Years 1989-2009
Buy Now: $675.00

Richard Leacock was one of the few genuine pioneers in the field of documentary filmmaking and one of its greatest innovators — along with Al Maysles, D.A. Pennebaker and Robert Drew, he helped to create the shining interval that came to be known as cinema-verité. He made his first movie at the age of 14, and he never stopped filming until his death in 2011 at the age of 89. In Leacock's hands, the camera became an astonishingly sensitive instrument. A lot has been made of his work as a cameraman on Robert Flaherty's Louisiana Story, but his greatest influence was the ceaselessly changing world itself and the equipment he used to record and interpret certain of its events.

The films in this DVD collection were made after Leacock retired from teaching at MIT and moved to Paris, where he met his great love and creative collaborator Valerie Lalonde. The then-new Video-8 cameras delivered them from the enormous costs of shooting on film, and with unlimited time, the energizing power of love and the new lightweight equipment allowed them a freedom to film what had always interested them most — life itself, in all its beauty, charm and poignancy. This freedom is felt in every frame of every title in this collection, which spans the final period in Leacock's creative life. — Kent Jones

This 5-DVD set includes 11 films:

Les Oeufs à la Coque de Richard Leacock (91 min, 1991)

Inspired by both new love and Gulliver's Travels, Les Oeufs à la Coque (aka Richard Leacock's Soft-Boiled Eggs), is a ravishingly beautiful, important film about nothing in particular, a love song dedicated to France, French women in general and one Frenchwoman in particular, and a montage portrait of quotidian life in a country at peace.

A Musical Adventure in Siberia with Sarah Caldwell (56 min 2003)

In 1996, the First Lady of opera, Sarah Caldwell, invited her old friend and collaborator Richard Leacock to join her in Yektarinaberg, a previously closed Siberian industrial city, where she was preparing for the first-ever performance of a symphonic drama by Sergei Prokofiev of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin.

Mambo Madness (32 min, 1995)

The legendary 1960s supermodel Veruschka, aka Vera von Lehndorff, sets in motion a search for a long-lost all-female Communist Mambo band led by a blonde-haired, blue-eyed East German in this literally fabulous fantasy documentary conceived by Hans-Peter Litscher, the Swiss playwright, historian and polymath, and filmed by Leacock and Lalonde in Austria, Russia, France and Cuba.

Gott Sei Dank: A Visit with Helga Feddersen (30 min, 1993)

Years after the great-granddaughter of Richard Wagner introduced Leacock to Feddersen, the German comic actress and theatrical impresario, he and Lalonde visited her home in Hamburg while she was recuperating from a cancer surgery and filmed her talking about her life and times, her illness, and the beauty of forgiveness.

Kren - Parking (3 min, 1992)

A very short portrait of a work of art called Parking by the award-winning Slovak artist Matej Kren. Parking is made of mobile mirrors that reflect and invite reflection with confounding yet hypnotic visuals.

Les Vacances de Monsieur Leacock (20 min, 1992)

A lighthearted, charming visual diary of a cross-country road trip Leacock and Lalonde took across America, Les Vacances was made as a series of vignettes in places as diverse as Monument Valley, the ghostly mountaintop mining town Climax, Colorado, and Los Angeles.

A Celebration of St. Silas (25 min, 1993)

An offshoot of a separate collaboration about vicars for the BBC, this film follows the Anglican vicar who most delighted Leacock and Lalonde, as he prepares for and celebrates the heavenly birthday Mass of St. Silas, who brought the news that circumcision was not a prerequisite for entry to Heaven.

The Killings of Cariola (35 min, 1992)

Fascinated with process of rehearsal, Leacock and Lalonde watched and filmed as London's Cherub Company prepared a production of The Duchess of Malfi by Shakespeare's contemporary, John Webster.

Hooray! We're 50! (30 min, 1993)

A moving snapshot of Leacock's 50th reunion with the Harvard class of 1943, shot primarily by Lalonde and edited by Leacock (who majored in physics there), Hooray! We're 50! is a joyful look at the return from both war and life of an accomplished cast of graduates.

A Hole in the Sea (Le Trou dans la Mer) (30 min, 1994)

Shortly before the opening of the "Chunnel" linking England and France, Leacock and Lalonde were commissioned to film at both ends of the underwater project. They produced a light-hearted portrait of the effects of the massive project on life and the local landscapes, both physical and psychological.

Au Revoir, Marie Laure: Portrait of a Gallery at Work (42 min, 2006)

When she died in 1970, Marie Laure de Noailles left behind a legacy as a patron of the arts, muse of the surrealists and one of the great salonistes of Paris. Marie Laure's antiquaire Pierre Passebon invited her old friend Lalonde to film in the Galerie du Passage in Paris during the last week of an exhibition of Marie Laure's artworks and other possessions. The result was this sensitive meditation on art, friendship, permanence and transience.

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Wedding Through Camera Eyes

Fri, 24 Aug 2018 12:26:00 GMT

Wedding Through Camera Eyes
Buy Now: $320.00

"Honeymoon tour means nothing without photography."

After viewing Wedding Through Camera Eyes, one has the sense that Korean weddings are held in order for the couples involved to create and preserve a fantasy of their relationship in video and carefully constructed photo albums.

Korean visual anthropologist Kijung Lee talks with three different couples and their professional wedding photographers, using the visual documentation of the event as a vehicle to facilitate the discussion. With the help of a photographer, couples may stage a story-book relationship with all the romance of a television soap opera. The photographer is eager to share his knowledge and how he manipulates the photos and his subjects in order to get the desired effects, acting as a stage director at the wedding ceremony.

In the case of the wedding we see in the film, there are 2 ceremonies; first is a traditional Korean style event, and then the westernized version with the bride in a flowing white gown. After the spectacle of the wedding itself, on their honeymoons couples pile into tour buses and for 2 days they are photographed at predetermined sites known for their popularity as backdrops for honeymoon photos. Through these interviews, it is made clear how important the creation of visual records is to the couples involved and their families. With the collaboration of a photographer, ordinary people in Korea can become the heroes and heroines they imagine themselves to be.

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