In this dispatch: Every Contact Leaves…
Museums always claim to be the home for lost religious art/anthropological objects — Alain Resnais’ and Chris Marker’s Statues Also Die tackled this patronizing and…
The latest experimental documentary by Lynne Sachs — her 49th film overall — is entirely organized around a formal conceit that simply doesn’t work. That’s…
What better medium for communing with the spirits than film? Sights and sounds of eras since passed, or visions of things unknowable in reality —…
In 2020, Kevin B. Lee and Lého Galibert-Laîné released Bottled Songs 1-4, an epistolary essay film constructed via Lee’s desktop documentary method. Divvied up into…
The Kinshasa-based media group known as Collectif Faire-Part takes its name from their 2018 debut featurette, Faire-Part, about Congolese street performers. Earlier this year the…
In this dispatch: A Date With Shirley…
Back in the ’90s, Ken Jacobs came to the San Francisco Bay Area for a week of programs and seminars. When attending one of the…
Charlie Birns, by his own account, set out to direct a documentary that would re-capture his transcendent experience in an acting class taught by self-styled…
Hansel Porras Garcia’s sophomore feature Tropical Park accomplishes a remarkable feat in cinema. In any other film, the depiction of a fraught encounter between a…
For an artist whose conceptions of cinema constantly evolved with the developing technologies and audiovisual forms, it’s a bit of a shame that Ken Jacobs’…
Austrian-born, U.S.-based filmmaker G. Anthony Svatek has an interest in human systems, and how they are put in place to manage forms of chaos that…
There was a time not so very long ago where, hard as it is to believe these days, East Asian cinema was commonplace among the…
“It’s amazing to be able to create something that others don’t understand at all.” So says an elderly woman to the aspiring punk singer-songwriter of…
In this dispatch: Heat, The Illusion…
Jacqueline Zünd’s documentary Heat takes place across the Persian Gulf, one of the hottest spots on planet Earth today. Though not because of the ongoing…
The redundant fatigue from the influx of Russo-Ukrainian war documentaries remedies itself if one begins to recognize their level of artistic excellence. One such effective…
In 2020, HBO began airing one of the funniest and most significant docuseries in the history of the form, How To With John Wilson, in…
The opening shot of Dutch director Jona Honer’s documentary Club Heaven plunges us into the heart of the “Playhouse” club in Chengdu. A perfectly symmetrical…
In this dispatch: After Dreaming, Selegna…
It’s hard to do justice to the images in Christine Haroutounian’s After Dreaming through words alone. Their quality is of a blinkered, bleary kind, as…