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Gunckel, Colin. "“Gangs Gone Wild”: Low-Budget Gang Documentaries." The Velvet Light Trap 60(2007): 37-46.
This article discusses gangs and how they are portrayed in the public media through exploitation documentary. It questions whether the way they are being shown is the best way to do so because it glamorizes the gang lifestyle to the public, possibly corrupting the youth’s view of gangs. This article analyses the trend of gang based documentaries and the effect it has on the film industry. Specifically The World Most Dangerous Gang, a documentary on La Mara Salvatrucha portrays the gang in a poor light for the public eye. It uses a sensationalistic and exploitative method turning it into more entertainment than a serious documentary should be. Then it discusses different types of films made for release direct to DVD. These raw documentaries are cheap and easy exploitations to create. Film series such as Bumfights and Girls Gone Wild are cited as examples of the genre of exploitation documentary.
This article relates to The Warriors in that it exploits the gang genre, in a manner that glamorizes the gang lifestyle. It creates allure to the violent life led by gang members. With all the glamour, it could possible cause viewers of the film to get overly excited by the film and act irrationally. This violence might extend into real-life and cause serious injury or death, as occured in the days following The Warriors's public release. The gang exploitation film genre has been designed in such a way using rap soundtracks and flashy images of gang members that it would appeal to viewers similarly to how it has been argued that The Warriors appeals violence to its viewers.
A juxtaposition of philosophical narration and visual montage, presented in the form of a woman's voice, reading and commenting upon the letters she receives from "Sandor Krasna," a freelance cameraman who travels the world, particularly focussing on those "two extreme poles of survival," Western Africa and Japan. His reflections concern filming, time, memory, history, ritual, and civilization.
This documentary harshly examines the life of a comic book illustrator from Philadelphia. The film shows the way in which Crumb’s persona was developed through his childhood and family. By L. Pardue
The Dixie Hummingbirds are depicted in We Love You Like a Rock as the preeminent gospel group. The documentary includes interviews with Stevie Wonder, Paul Simmons, Bobby Womack, and other figures in the music industry praising the Dixie Hummingbirds for their influence on gospel music and African-American music. The documentary is screened at the Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema. By L. Pardue
Cipriano interviews Van Blunk and Rosanio about their 15-minute documentary on six synagogues in south Philadelphia, only one of which was active at the time the film was shot. The film examines the growth and decline of the Jewish population in south Philadelphia and the corresponding closures of synagogues and Jewish businesses. By L. Pardue
This film was filmed in Doylestown, a suburb of Philadelphia. It is a look at an alternate treatment for psychotic outbursts in which the patients live under the supervision of families. The film highlights the Delaware Valley Mental Health Foundation, an important Philadelphia institution. In his review, Roger Greenspun talks about the controversial methods of treatment being practiced as well as their effects. He calls the Cinéma-Vérité style film tactful, although, he says as a movie the subject matter is not as interesting as it is in its own right. By S. Stein
IMDB entry for Other Voices. By S. Stein
from the website -
The 55 minute documentary film while replete with humorous anecdotes is one of the most serious and disturbing assessments of the rampant use of this inexpensive and highly addicting drug.
CRACKHEADS GONE WILD is a new and contemporary version of “Scared Straight” an earlier documentary on juvenile crime and the negative road to prison that youth can expect with continued criminal involvement.
The documentary shows the destructive nature of Crack Cocaine through the eyes of actual users who have experienced the devastation of addiction, and how the users cover the racial, ethnic and socio-economic spectrum of our society.
Call#: University Museum Library Desk VHS TX945.5.S54 F56 1989
Documentary showing discussions amongst teenagers with a facilitator on developing communication strategies in
the area of sexuality and reproductive health
Trailer (2:14)
Documentary
Rating: Not yet rated
In Theatres: June 28th, 2006
Keating,P . "The Fictional Worlds of Neorealism." Criticism [0011-1589] 45.1 (2003). 11-.
Unlike Yau's Recon-figuration:Revisiting Modernity and Reality in Deleuze's Taxonomy of Cinema (Wide angle [0160-6840] 20.4 (1998). 51-.) Patrick Keating disputes previous claims that Neorealism exist solely in a plane of constructed reality because of conventional cinematic attributes . Keating does not refute that neorealism is constructed and stylized reality, but it is his assertion that neorealism is closely related to documentary in its scope and tradition as well. To support his claims, Keating points to Benjamin Harshav's theory of Internal and External Fields of Reference, a literary theory that explains how a work of fiction does not truly exist outside of reality, but rather the realms of fiction and reality are interrelated through a frame of reference (fr). Each frame does not exist in a separate world, but rather inhabits and contributes to a larger frame, called a field.
In the Bicycle Thieves, Keating sees a "double-decker" reference of reality where there is the fictionalized Rome that de Sica constructs (internal), and the Rome outside of the mise en scene (external). In other words, a viewer is getting a glimpse into the world of Antonio and Bruno AND late 40's post-war Italy. These two references do not exist in separate spheres, yet they are distinct and should not be interpreted as being one in the same, but the viewer still is shaped by the depiction of father and son shown in the film. The reality in the Bicycle Thieves is not based solely on content, but rather the importation of reality to the film and the subsequent exportation of this reality as art.
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- A journey through the Critical Mass Bicycle Ride and America’s right to assemble. Filmmaker Christopher J. Ryan ( Warriors: the Bike Race, Still We Ride, Team Spider Television ) has spent the last 18 months tracking his personal experiences as a Critical Mass bike rider, as well as his subsequent journey through the New York State Criminal Court system. The colorful, poignant, and often funny story is told through video footage that includes video diaries, bicycle chase scenes, paddy wagon interviews shot by Chris’ handcuffed hands , voyeuristic NYPD helicopter footage, as well as daring video exposing the presence of NYPD’s previously denied undercover agents ( recently used as the basis of a recent New York Times cover story ). Throughout his extensive journey, Chris tries to juggle his time- consuming legal battles and courtroom appearances, with his day-job working, ironically, on television’s “Law and Order” where he lights the large courtroom sets that are used to pretend to prosecute the city’s real crimes. His misadventures are intertwined with a colorful cast of characters, including:
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-His fellow arrestees, who form a legal aid group known as FREEWHEELS, as they become unwilling participants in the cat & mouse style police chases and exhaustive legal battles. -Chris’ VIDEO CAMERA, a character unto itself as the beaten and bruised little camcorder is repeatedly smashed to pieces and miraculously brought back to life by a sympathetic television news technician named “FLIP”. -Chris’ Father, KEVIN, a military officer and Vietnam veteran, who, horrified at the recent treatment of Cindy Sheahan, becomes heavily involved in his son’s legal battles. -Dozens of unlikely “criminals” such as 8-year old JENNA, who can’t understand “why the police arrest bicyclists” and SHARON, who, at seven months pregnant, when sent to jail for standing on the sidewalk with her bike the night of a Critical Mass ride. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -----------------------------
- Criminal Mass examines the erosion of the American people’s personal freedoms, privacies, and the right to assemble, while celebrating the unexpected positive effects, communities and friendships forged in the face of injustice.
May 28, 2006
No Free Samples for Documentaries: Seeking Film Clips With the Fair-Use Doctrine
By ELAINE DUTKA
THE film producer Alicia Sams viewed "Wanderlust," a documentary about American road movies, as a way of introducing a new generation to Bonnie and Clyde, Thelma and Louise, and other giants of the genre. Films like "Five Easy Pieces," "Easy Rider" and "The Grapes of Wrath," she was convinced, offered a window into the American character.
The 90-minute documentary, to be broadcast Monday night on the Independent Film Channel, was also a window into the frustrations of making a clip-intensive film dependent on copyright clearance, which has become hugely expensive in the past decade. Initial quotations for the necessary sequences came to more than $450,000, which would have raised by half the cost of the IFC film, directed by the Oscar-nominated team of Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini ("American Splendor").
"Paramount wanted $20,000 for 119 seconds of 'Paper Moon,' " Ms. Sams said. "The studios are so afraid of exploitation that they set boundaries no one will cross. Even after the prices were cut, we were $150,000 in the hole."
Unwilling to pay those fees, IFC's general manager, Evan Shapiro, helped Ms. Sams pursue another, more aggressive, tack, which may point the way for documentarians who want to tap movie iconography without paying studio prices. Its strategy involved some negotiating hardball, backed up by a willingness to fall back on the tricky legal doctrine known as fair use.
Mr. Shapiro called in a Los Angeles entertainment lawyer, Michael C. Donaldson, who drilled him on copyright law. Under the 165-year-old fair-use doctrine, Mr. Shapiro was told, filmmakers, news gatherers, critics and educators can access material at no cost if they add something to it (like a voice-over), don't undermine its value or use more than needed to make a point. Free speech trumps private property when a project is in the public interest, a term broadly defined.
"Fair use is the lubricant that allows creativity and copyright law to coexist," said Mr. Donaldson, a former president of the International Documentary Association.
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Trailer (2:14)
Documentary
Rating: Not yet rated
In Theatres: June 28th, 2006
Black Label bicycle club
(i think it is a documentary - but it is unclear)
see also myspace page for the film - http://www.myspace.com/bikemovie
see also the myspace page for this film
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=54430439
This article focuses on sharks and how Americans’ views on sharks have evolved since around the 1970s. Author Stephen Papson writes about how the use of documentary films on Discovery Channel’s “Shark Week 90” has shaped the terror-filled relationship between humans and sharks. Papson also acknowledges Jaws as the first movie to “elevate the shark to celebrity status.”
As Papson states, it is easy to be mislead by the manner in which sharks were represented in early films due to the fact that many moviegoers’ first shark encounters occurred while watching one of those films. In Jaws, Steven Spielberg uses an oversized replica of a great white shark in conjunction with various “Hitchcockian devices” with which to involve the audience in the film while simultaneously maintaining a certain sense of reality so as to not lose the viewers.
However, 1971 marked the first significant contribution in film pertaining to sharks, particularly the great white shark -- Peter Gimbel and James Lipscomb’s documentary “Blue Water, White Death.” Many early films that involved sharks, including Gimbel and Lipscomb’s film, regarded sharks as evil man-eating machines. It was Spielberg’s Jaws that first cast sharks in a different light. The shark in Jaws was given “personality and internationality” which in turn led to the international media coverage of new shark encounters (including Time Magazine’s June 23, 1975 cover page). The opening scene, in which the audience experiences the action from the shark’s perspective, draws on humans’ primal fear of being attacked and eaten by a shark.
As one can see, Americans have been educated on the nature of sharks primarily through documentary film, but movies like Jaws helped in attaining global coverage of shark activity that eventually led to the production of “Shark Week 90,” giving Americans a trustworthy source of information on sharks.