I am happy to announce that the sixth edition of The Conversations series is live at The House Next Door. In this installment, Ed Howard and I discuss the eight documentary feature films of Errol Morris: Gates of Heaven (1978), Vernon, Florida (1981), The Thin Blue Line (1988), A Brief History of Time (1991), Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (1997), Mr. Death (1999), The Fog of War (2003) and Standard Operating Procedure (2008). If you read our previous discussion of Werner Herzog, which included considerable debate about documentary filmmaking, you might view this as an appropriate segue – or another tedious slog through the “nonfiction” genre. Hopefully the former.
As always, Ed and I hope that our conversation at The House Next Door is the starting point for a larger discussion. So please check it out and add to the conversation by leaving comments at The House Next Door.
Previous Editions of The Conversations:
David Fincher (January 2009)
Mulholland Dr. (February 2009)
Overlooked - Part I: Undertow (March 2009)
Overlooked - Part II: Solaris (March 2009)
Star Trek (May 2009)
Werner Herzog (May 2009)
3 comments:
Morris work is very, very interesting. It will be great read your observations in your work.
And more off topiqish, but very interesting, I think that The Happening is a great work of art. Off course, isn't a blockbuster, not in a Hollywood way. It isn't a B-Movie in the late style, it's set with the tone of Tourneur, but the deep of a Bergman and a critic pointed that in the Empire magazine.
The Happening has a shot that is exactly the same to a masterpiece: Last year Marienbad. It's the same shot and it's not merely a quote.
http://faculty.frostburg.edu/phil/forum/marienbad.jpg
It's the clay for reading this movie. It's the acces you get through a movie that explores a pair in failure and they suddenly gets close in an act of bravery in the middle of the Apocalypse. It has to do more with the poetry of Resnais, Tourneur and the european filmmakers than the B-Movie suspense. But, it knows how to film a long, kubrickian, cold-blooded shot of suicides. It's pure cinema, quoting Hitchcock.
Oh, and spanish guy talking again so my apologies for the language barrier. I have a mistake up there. I must say "in his work" not in your work. Ops.
Jason,
I have just put up a master list of all the books - including yours - mentioned in the "Reading the Movies" exercise. The link is here:
http://thedancingimage.blogspot.com/2009/07/movie-bookshelf.html
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