Doc Corner: S&M Lesbians, Oscar Winners and Queer Theater — classic restorations of 2020

By Glenn Dunks

We tend to focus on new release documentaries around here, covering the gamut of titles premiering in cinemas, on streaming and VOD, and occasionally—as you’ll see over the next few week—festivals. What I rarely have the pleasure of doing is review classic docs, which is probably rather silly since the boom in popularity for the form has meant distributors and exhibitors are getting more confident in not just re-releasing classics documentaries, but restoring them, too.

As I found when researching my top 100 docs of the decade list, even titles from as few as four or five years ago become increasingly hard to find. And if they never received a US release? Even harder. Hopefully that starts to change and all the more reason to celebrate when older works do appear. So, to celebrate the Film Society at Lincoln Centre’s season of films by gay icons Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman (until November 5, so get on it!) I wanted to highlight some of the absolute rippers that have come along lately.

There’s everything from S&M lesbians, American cross-country road trips, nuclear bombs, and one Chantal Akerman masterpiece...

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AFI Fest: Notturno

By Abe Friedtanzer

Italian documentarian Gianfranco Rosi’s last film, Fire at Sea, was released right around the time of the 2016 election. The Oscar-nominated film was a poignant and timely look at the implications of severely restricted immigration worldwide. Unlike popular recent documentaries like American Factory and Free Solo, Rosi’s work didn’t feature much dialogue or even a formed argument of any kind. Instead, plainly documenting what was happening was powerful enough to speak on its own. Rosi’s follow-up, Notturno, has a different focus but is much the same… 

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Showbiz History: CinemaScope, Recycled Comedy, and Jennifer Tilly

9 random things that happened on this day in showbiz history...

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1936: Henry Fonda (then 31 years old and a fresh new face at the movies) marries his second wife, socialite Francis Ford Seymour (then 28). Their marriage will be unhappy and end tragically in 1950 (with her suicide), but their union will produce one of the great inventions of the 20th century: Jane Fonda. 

1953: Biblical epic The Robe starring Richard Burton and Jean Simmons, world premieres in New York. It's the first movie shot in CinemaScope, "the new dimensional photographic marvel you can see without glasses"...

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On the rise, fall, and general chaos of "Hamilton" as an Oscar contender.

by Nathaniel R

Hamilton won 11 Tony Awards in 2016. Now some fans want that same production to win Oscars, too.Have you been following the story on Hamilton as an Oscar contender? It has not been easy to follow! As you all know, the Academy Awards are in chaos this year due to COVID-19. In addition to pushing the ceremony back and changing the calendar of eligibility, they'd previously announced a bending of their "must play in theaters for a week" rules to allow for streaming films that only MEANT to play in theaters. That loophole was meant to close again after the COVID crisis was over but once you've made a loophole that big, it usually grows in size. Now suddenly everything wants to be an Oscar contender. Or at least fans of everything want their favourite thing to be one. It's yet another reminder of the cultural dominance of the Oscars (despite cries of "irrelevant!" each season) that it's considered the "top" award.

The Oscar rule change about streaming eligibility was meant to make up for movie theaters being closed for months on end but it was always going to be problematic. Exactly how will the Academy enforce a "meant to" clause?

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1999 with Nick: Best Documentary Feature and "realness"

This week, in advance of the Oscars, Nick Davis is looking back at the Academy races of 20 years ago, spotlighting movies he’d never seen and what they teach us about those categories, then and now.

The Blair Witch Project

When I taught my Winter 2017 seminar about the movies of 1999, to a classroom of first-year college students who were all born in the last two years of the millennium, one of the trickiest ideas to historicize was how decisively the visibility and cultural stature of documentary cinema has shifted over the last 20 years. Compared to the decades when I grew up, nonfiction cinema has reached much further outside a relatively niche audience who tracked that filmmaking tradition. The explanations are too numerous to get into here, though they include all of the following: cheaper and more numerous technologies for recording and assembling footage; proliferating platforms for distributing and watching nonfiction films, especially in the era of the internet and of exploding cable-TV offerings; and some epochal, admittedly eclectic success stories in the commercial market, from The Thin Blue Line to Hoop Dreams to Fahrenheit 9/11 to March of the Penguins, that inspired more students and artist to pursue documentary tracks and more institutions to finance, release, and program the work.

More abstractly, I would add to that list a specifically millennial, post-postmodernist erosion of all faith in objective “reality,” differently crystallized in such landmark films of 1999 as The Matrix, eXistenZ, Eyes Wide Shut, and Fight Club. That erosion produces both a resistant hunger for whatever “real” images and stories might yet survive and its dialectical opposite: a contagious discovery, dismaying but darkly energizing, that even vérité images are subjective, manipulated, and at some level “fake”...

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