A Letter to Brett Morgen, the director of Chicago 10

Dear Mr. Morgen,
Your film wasn’t half bad, but there comes a point when you gotta realize that maybe it wasn’t the best idea to make a movie about the sixties if you think that they don’t normally translate well on film. The people that are going to go see your film are the people that already know who Abbie Hoffman is and know about the ’68 National convention. Just because you have Eminem and Rage Against the Machine--covering the MC5 (when the MC5 is on the screen, c’mon! –Which makes some of us wonder, who are you going to get to cover Nirvana songs for your Kurt Cobain movie?) doesn’t make it more contemporary or accessible to younger audiences.
For that matter, when visiting an art school, you should know the people in your audience are kids that are learning and used to the idea of critique. So when you ask us what we truly thought of your movie, chill out, don’t start sprouting off some cover-up line that you are working in Brechtian tradition. You’re going around thinking that everyone has no clue what you are talking about and that by using rotoscope, oh sorry, motion capture, that will make it fresh. It’s history, and ultimately you can’t go rewriting it to make it “the most commercial and marketable” (as you advised us to do). Do you really think Hoffman or Rubin would agree with these comments?
But I mean, hey, good job on getting that Silver Hugo for Documentary, but maybe it’d be better if you stuck to your own advice and made fictional films.
Yours Truly.
The Society

A Walk Into the Sea

A Walk Into the Sea, Esther Robinson

10.07.2007
Esther Robinson seemed to have a problem most filmmakers have, “How to structure the film?” In her film A Walk Into the Sea I found the story interesting, but she wavered many times with what she wanted the film to say. It jumped from a few common themes: the disappearance of her uncle, her uncle’s involvement in Andy Warhol’s Factory, Andy Warhol’s cronies at the Factory and all the relationships with Andy and Warhol putting his name on other people’s work. It would switch from storyline to storyline too frequently.
The story of her uncle, Dan Williams, is really fascinating. He was an artist in the sixties who had an affair with Warhol and made films at the Factory. Robinson uses interviews with all the key players in that scene to figure out who her uncle was and what happened to him. I found the interviews intriguing, but what I liked most about the movie was Williams’ own films that were shown. The interviews were shot in video with a gross film grain filter and sometimes you would hear her interviewing the people. Though she started the film explaining the story with voiceover, she never appears on camera, and the occasional voice from behind the camera was annoying. It felt too much like a school project with a good soundtrack. But at the same time it makes it this intimate story of her trying to fill this void in her past, and it seems kind of juvenile the way she is trying to answer these questions by rely on personal accounts of others.
I wish more information about Dan Williams existed. It was more of an overview of his life and his demise instead of who he was, which bummed me out a little. But I think it was a good idea to see what all these different sources had to say, but the execution could’ve been cleaned up. Though Robinson was able to invoke the need for me to want see the films of her uncle. She was able to give exposure to the forgotten films of her uncle, which is inevitably a tribute to him as an artist.

(Filmmaker Magazine did an interview with Esther Robinson: here.
While reading the interview I saw that she said, "There's this moment in Stranger Than Paradise where it goes to black in between scenes, and I remember sitting in this black theater thinking, “Holy fuck! You can do that?! You can just go to black?!” It literally changed my life. I went to NYU because of sitting in the black in Stranger Than Paradise."
As a filmmaker myself I have had that exact same revelation, and it was endearing to read.)

Lightning Over Water

I've heard many directors say in order to make a successful documentary you must fictionalize it. Even though Cinema Verite may be a boring concept, there is something about the innocence of trying to create a film about reality, even if it is altered by the camera.
Wenders in 1980's, Lightning Over Water
As for Wim Wenders and Nicholas Ray's film, Lightning Over Water, which chronicles Ray last few weeks before his death of lung cancer, the film is extremely stylized and staged. Even though there is a rawness to it (Wenders said he could see Ray dying in the viewfinder), each shot was set up to provide correct lighting and shot/reverse shot editing techniques. The film was immensely well photographed, but what made the film feel authentic was the inclusion of Tom Farrell's videos that show behind the scenes of Wenders and his crew preparing the shots.
Some criticize Wenders for taking advantage of Ray and his illness, but I saw it as Wenders trying to let Ray complete one last film before his death, which was imminent.

Though I thought the best part of the film was the inclusion of Wenders, Ray, his wife, and Farrell watching (the now hard to find) We Can't Go Home Again, Ray's 1976 film about the 1968 democratic national convention that was rephotographed footage and extremely stylized. I wish I could find this film in its entirety because it seems like one of the most interesting artifacts from the '68 riots (instead of the duller grainy black and white documentation).