Doc Corner: The art of restoration at TCM Classic Film Festival

By Glenn Dunks

Do you ever think about what career path you may have chosen in retrospect? You know, the one you would have selected had you been able to make such a life-changing decision after having actually experienced life? Maybe you already have your dream job, but even then—there’s often a niggling part of us that imagines something else. If I could turn back time, I think I would love to have gotten into film restoration and archiving. They are each fascinating professions that play to my niche interests including preservation and exhibition of celluloid, not to mention pretty, curated shelves. (I was the guy who would visit the video store and ensure the cases were in alphabetical order.) What's this go to do with anything though?

I bring this up because playing at this month’s TCM Classic Film Festival (May 6–9) is a new documentary called The Méliès’ Mystery about the efforts to conserve and restore the 520 films by the French pioneer, Georges Méliès. Yes, he of A Trip to the Moon had burned the original print negatives of all his movies as his career faltered at the start of the 1910s. His fairy tale excursions of light and magic were out of vogue and his production house of Star Films, with French and American studios, shut up shop.

Méliès’ story is not new to audiences, of course...

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Back to the Movie Theaters: Lynn Sees "Gunda"

By Lynn Lee

a sad strip mall interior for happy experiences

Until yesterday, the last movie I saw in a theater was Emma – on March 7, 2020, just before the reality of COVID-19 descended on me and most people I knew.  If you’d told me that the next time I’d be in a movie theater would be nearly 14 months later, in a tiny, crappy arthouse joint in a suburban Virginia strip mall, and that the movie would be an idiosyncratic black-and-white documentary about a brood sow, I probably wouldn’t have believed you.  And yet that is exactly where I found myself Sunday afternoon.  

It wasn’t the return to moviegoing I’d envisioned since my husband and I got our second Pfizer dose in early April...

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Doc Corner: Raoul Peck's brilliant 'Exterminate All the Brutes'

By Glenn Dunks

I suppose I could beat around the bush. I could skirt around the issue and try to temper my praise, worrying that people could accuse me of mere hyperbole. But what’s the point? Instead, I will just say it: Raoul Peck’s new four-part HBO documentary miniseries, Exterminate All the Brutes, is one of the finest works of art I have ever had the privilege to watch. A soaring epic that takes viewers on a journey over thousands of years—at one point to even the dawn of man—through humanity’s worst impulses for racial supremacy and colonial barbarism.

Peck pilfers from cinema (classic and otherwise), paintings, photography, music, archival footage, and adds dioramas, animation, graphic aids, anachronistic diversions, and dramatic interpretations. He rips a fierce and violent tear through history, yet with the precision and delicacy of a surgeon with a scalpel...

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Doc Corner: 'Wojnarowicz: F*** You F*ggot F**ker'

by Glenn Dunks

I briefly mentioned Chris McKim’s artist bio-doc Wojnarowicz: F*** You F*ggot F**ker (their grammar, not mine) earlier this year as one of the best unreleased documentaries that I saw in 2020. Voila, here we are, and this incredibly vibrant film is now out in the world. Big, boldly stylized and defiantly queer; it’s a documentary about an artist that, for once, feels truly in sync with its subject’s style. “I’m not gay as in ‘I love you’, I’m queer as in fuck off!” If it was one of last year’s best unreleased films, so now it is one of this year’s best films. I love it.

And perhaps part of what makes McKim’s film so interesting from the very start is that David Wojnarowicz is not an artist whose work and life has been excessively covered in film. (Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, as brilliant as they were, could probably stand to sit the next few years out if you know what I mean)

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Doc Corner: 'Allen v. Farrow' & 'Framing Britney Spears'

By Glenn Dunks

How do you go about making a film or a series about celebrity scandal let alone writing a review of those very projects? It’s difficult. It is virtually impossible to not bring one’s own history and baggage to a work like Allen v. Farrow or Framing Britney Spears. And then there are the works themselves, both of which confront subject matters that demand the audience assess—or re-assess—their own thoughts and responses to damaging events in the lives of the rich and famous that played as entertainment for the masses in less enlightened times of media representation.

Arguably the two biggest works of documentary to have arrived in the first quarter of 2021, I actually don’t think either of them really work. They sure are thorny works, though, that push the viewer into murky areas that need to be explored.

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