Ex Libris turns out to be riveting, a monument to the collections and people clustered inside the NYPL’s 88 branches. Chalk that up to the generosity and curiosity of Wiseman’s lens, and the filmmaker’s desire to cede the spotlight to patrons, guests, and staffers, who appear to be coexisting with the camera instead of performing for it. Over the course of weeks spent embedded in the library’s buildings, Wiseman’s crew “became the fabric of the room”.
Tag: documentaries
FBI skills
Ryan should have trusted his instincts. Johnson and his colleagues were not documentarians. They were undercover FBI agents posing as filmmakers. By the time they sat down with Ryan, Johnson and his team had spent 8 months traveling to at least 5 states to film interviews with 24 people about the Bundy standoff, all part of an FBI effort to build criminal cases against the Bundys and their supporters.
the fbi is more incompetent than a bunch of inbred farmers
Society of Professional Investigators
Every month in the back room of Forlini’s, an old Italian restaurant just off Canal Street, the members of the Society of Professional Investigators, or spi (pronounced “spy”), gather to dine on veal parmigiana and cannoli and to swap war stories, advice, and the latest breakthroughs from their never-dull profession.
Eero Saarinen
highly recommended. i wish there were more architects in his mold.
Mafia Art World
Step inside a world of high art, low cunning and prices beyond your wildest imaginings. The Banker’s Guide To The Art Market is a revealing, wry and rare look behind doors that are closed to most of us. Propelled by the newly rich of the financial world, London’s art market has soared to historic highs.
The film deconstructs this extraordinary phenomenon and looks back over a century of the market’s twists and turns to try to explain it, talking to outspoken collector Jeffrey Archer – ‘I couldn’t afford to buy my own pictures’ – maverick dealer Kenny Schacter – ‘when money is introduced it brings out the worst in people’ – and gallerist Nicholas Logsdail – ‘You’ll never go wrong, if you buy from a good gallery’. We don’t think you will look at a painting in quite the same way again.
Fashion Peacocks
this nature documentary is very well done.
Louis Theroux interviewing technique
Louis Theroux’s ability to establish a rapport with subjects is legendary, even with people who are aware that he may be, from their perspective, implicitly hostile. His affectation of ignorance and naivety is part of it, obviously, but it’s more than that: he lets subjects take a position of superiority, remains emotionally detached, yet exposes himself to scrutiny.
Miracle of Feeding Cities
this is a documentary i’m particularly looking forward to:
The Miracle of Feeding Cities will bring to life the often-invisible, always intricate food system–a system that operates non-stop with remarkable reliability despite myriad disruptions, capricious consumer behavior and rogue weather events. And, underlying this fast-paced, globally integrated supply chain, you’ll see plain old barter economics and a service-based industry run by the most unexpected and captivating characters you could hope to encounter.
Daft Punk Documentary
this is going to be good.
What makes us Human?
Over the past 3 years, filmmaker and artist Yann Arthus-Bertrand travelled to 60 countries, interviewing more than 2K people in 10s of languages, in an attempt to answer the question: What is it that makes us human? The result is HUMAN, a documentary film that weaves together a rich collection of stories from freedom fighters in Ukraine, farmers in Mali, death row inmates in the United States, and more—on topics that unite us all: love, justice, family, and the future of our planet.
Now we’re partnering with Arthus-Bertrand, the Goodplanet Foundation and Bettencourt Schueller Foundation, to bring HUMAN to you on Google Play, YouTube and the Google Cultural Institute so we can share this project with the widest audience throughout the world.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 