Documentary Impact
Since I am in London at the moment I thought I would highlight a documentary season that is happening in August at BFI Southbank. I went there yesterday and was blown away by how fancy the place is after the extension and refit. They now have a fabulous Mediatheque where you can watch hundreds of films and television programmes from the BFI National Archive for free - I didn’t have time to explore it much but it looks great.
And in their cinemas from August 11th-31st they are showing ten documentaries that shook the world.
Films screening:
Minamata: The Victims and Their World
Bowling for Columbine
Death of a Nation - The Timor Conspiracy (with Michael Buerck’s 1984 BBC report on Ethiopia)
McLibel
The Thin Blue Line
The Sorrow and the Pity
the Triumph of the Will
For Freedom
Heshang - The River Elegy
The interesting thing about the films is that they are not all the sort of high-impact docs that we might immediately think of as world changing films in that they do not all support a humanitarian or progressive agenda. As Mark Cousins writes about the series: “This season shows history and film entwined on a global scale. The results are not always edifying.”
There will be another documentary season at the BFI Southbank in September called: Documentary Centeneries: A new look at British documentary. It will cover the work and influence of five British filmmakers who were all born in 1907: Humphrey Jennings, Paul Rotha, Basil Wright, Edgar Anstey and Marion Grierson. Most of the films are from the BFI National Archive, including new prints and some films that are available for the first time since they were first released.
While down on the South Bank I got to see some of the amazing Anthony Gormley sculptures that are part of his Event Horizon exhibition - lifesize casts of his own body on the tops of buildings on both sides of the river. It changes the skyline and is both creepy and very impressive. My little camera couldn’t manage the long shots but here are a few pics of some of the sculptures that were closer to where I was standing.
