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“The only difference between children and grown-ups is that the grown-ups are unsupervised.” This line, uttered in the second half of Bill Ross IV and Turner Ross’s seventh feature Gasoline Rainbow, is not particularly framed as words of wisdom. The award-winning filmmakers have explored American life through places, people, and their interconnectedness since the late 2000s in a way that’s far from linear. A multitude of voices, characters (or simply people) populate the screen, their practice exploratory before it aims at any definitive answers. The why and the why-not are irrelevant questions, yet every new offering feels as profound as life itself. Gasoline Rainbow, a premiere in this year’s Venice Orizzonti sidebar, benefits from their trademark hybrid filmmaking, placing nonprofessional teenage actors on a thrilling 513-mile journey from Wiley, Oregon, to the Pacific Ocean.

Tony (Tony Abuerto), Micah (Micah Bunch), Nichole (Nichole Dukes), Nathaly (Nathaly Garcia), and...

From "Modern Lusts," Berghahn 2020, 340PPErnest Borneman not only wrote the greatest detective novel set in the movie-business, with one of the best titles, The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor (1937), but was also a screenwriter, editor, producer, distributor and director who worked closely with two cinema colossi, John Grierson and Orson Welles. He was also a painter, musician, revered jazz critic and historian of African-American life, a radical agitator and sexologist whose stated aim was to destroy the patriarchy. Modern Lusts, the first biography of this protean polymath, reveals a man who did everything, knew everyone, and remained in the forefront of avant-garde art and politics, Black liberation and sexual freedom, like some ultra-woke Zelig. Never in the field of human culture was so much done, so many met, now known to so few.Born in Berlin in 1915, Borneman attended Karl Marx school and by 15 had met Brecht, with whom he collaborated over the decades,...

Marcel Carrière doesn’t act like a man who helped to change the course of cinema history. At the age of 83, he is still a boyish, endlessly curious and inventive character who spins the most amazing yarns. One minute he’s explaining how he helped top up Stravinsky’s hip flask with a nip of the composer’s favorite Johnny Walker, the next he’s explaining how he grabbed a few illicit shots of Paul Anka at New York’s Copacabana Club, right under the Mob owners’ noses by posing as a tourist. But most astonishing of all is the time he snuck some footage of Jean-Paul Sartre flirtatiously playing the piano to a young admirer, much to the chagrin of his famous partner, Simone De Beauvoir.

Carrière takes all these things in his stride, offering them up as amusing anecdotes, and it perhaps explains his approach to filmmaking. Under the banner of Direct Cinema,...

A True Original: Alberto Cavalcanti is showing from September 9 – October 12, 2018 in the United States.Champagne CharlieIf Dickensian fiction story of Nicholas Nickleby were to be filmed today, he’d be a young man incessantly searching Craigslist and wondering what college education is really good for. At least that’s the impression one gets watching Alberto Cavalcanti’s lively adaptation, The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (1947), which perfectly captures the angst of urban youth fitted with stellar education and plenty desire for work, but dire economic prospects—an apt topic both today and at a time when Cavalcanti made his British fiction films, during and immediately after the Second World War.In his native Brazil, Cavalcanti has been celebrated for his avant-garde modernist films, including his debut, Nothing But Time (1926), and his collaboration with Walter Ruttman on Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis (1927), which serves as an important reference in the...

Foreplays is a column that explores under-known short films by renowned directors. Len Lye's N or Nw (1938) is free to watch below.New Zealander Len Lye is known, above all, for his experimental short films—such as A Colour Box (1935), Colour Cry (1953), or Free Radicals (1958)—where he would work directly by drawing and painting on or manipulating the film strip in a variety of ways. But, throughout his prolific career, he also worked with classical animation, live-action film (including a series of war documentaries), as well as pieces that combined a number of these techniques. Lye’s incessant curiosity drove him to develop his interests in many different artistic fields: beyond drawing and painting, he took photographs and built kinetic sculptures, and he produced a large body of writing that covers different styles, forms, and genres. N or Nw (1937) is one of the four films Lye did for the...

Icarus Films

While many still view the documentary as the ugly stepsister of the glamorous feature picture, the truth is that non-fiction has played an important part in the development of film, being just about as old as the art itself. The term itself was coined some 90 years ago by young Scottish academic John Grierson during his review of Robert Flaherty’s 1926 ethnographic piece Moana, a film funded by Paramount Pictures that aimed to document the traditional lives of the Polynesians.

Pioneer Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov developed the genre further with his experimental work in the late 20s and beyond, though the documentary would be taken in a different direction entirely during the 1930s and 40s, used as a war-time tool rather than a means of education or entertainment. It wasn’t until the 1960s that a new generation of young filmmakers in the Us and Europe took steps to...

At the height of his notoriety, the great Russian director came to Britain for a whistlestop tour of everything from Bloomsbury to Windsor and Hampton Court. As a new exhibition opens up his dazzling sketchbooks, we reveal a different side of Eisenstein

Sergei Eisenstein was the most notorious filmmaker in the world in 1929, when he made a six-week visit to Britain. Three years earlier, his Battleship Potemkin had created a sensation in Germany and was banned outright in most countries outside Soviet Russia, for fear its impact would incite mutiny and revolution. But it was also admired by all who managed see it, from a young David Selznick starting his career in Hollywood to the British documentary impresario John Grierson, who used a private screening for MPs to extract funding for films to counteract such dangerous propaganda.

Potemkin received its long-delayed British premiere at a glittering private Film Society screening,...

It’s been a couple months since the last edition of What’s Up Doc? placed Michael Moore’s surprise world premiere of Where To Invade Next at the top of this list and in the meantime much shuffling has taken place and much time has been spent on various new endeavors (namely my Buffalo-based film series, Cultivate Cinema Circle). Finally taking its rightful place at the top, D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hagedus’ Unlocking the Cage is in the midst of being scored by composer James Lavino, according to Lavino’s own personal site. Though the project has been taking shape at its own leisurely pace, I’d expect to see the film making its festival debut in early 2016.

Right behind, the American direct cinema masters is a Texan soon to make his non-fiction debut with Voyage of Time. Just two weeks ago indieWIRE reported that Ennio Morricone, who scored...

It’s been a surprisingly interesting month of moving and shaking in terms of doc development. Just a month after making his first public funding pitch at Toronto’s Hot Docs Forum, legendary doc filmmaker Frederick Wiseman took to Kickstarter to help cover the remaining expenses for his 40th feature film In Jackson Heights (see the film’s first trailer below). Unrelentingly rigorous in his determination to capture the American institutional landscape on film, his latest continues down this thematic rabbit hole, taking on the immensely diverse New York City neighborhood of Jackson Heights as his latest subject. According to the Kickstarter page, Wiseman is currently editing the 120 hours of rushes he shot with hopes of having the film ready for a fall festival premiere (my guess would be Tiff, where both National Gallery and At Berkeley made their North American debut), though he’s currently quite a ways away from his $75,000 goal.

Well folks, after a rather long and brutal winter (at least for me here in Buffalo), we are finally heading into the wonderful warmth of summer, but with that blast of sunshine and steamy humidity comes the mid-year drought of major film fests. After the Sheffield Doc/Fest concludes on June 10th and AFI Docs wraps on June 21st, we likely won’t see any major influx in our charts until Locarno, Venice, Telluride and Tiff announce their line-ups in rapid succession. In the meantime, we can look forward to the intriguing onslaught of films making their debut in Sheffield, including Brian Hill’s intriguing examination of Sweden’s most notorious serial killer, The Confessions of Thomas Quick, and Sean McAllister’s film for which he himself was jailed in the process of making, A Syrian Love Story, the only two films world premiering in the festival’s main competition.

It should come as no surprise that Cannes Film Festival will play host to Kent Jones’s doc on the touchstone of filmmaking interview tomes, Hitchcock/Truffaut (see photo above). The film has been floating near the top of this list since it was announced last year as in development, while Jones himself has a history with the festival, having co-written both Arnaud Desplechin’s Jimmy P. and Martin Scorsese’s My Voyage To Italy, both of which premiered in Cannes. The film is scheduled to screen as part of the Cannes Classics sidebar alongside the likes of Stig Björkman’s Ingrid Bergman, in Her Own Words, which will play as part of the festival’s tribute to the late starlet, and Gabriel Clarke and John McKenna’s Steve McQueen: The Man & Le Mans (see trailer below). As someone who grew up watching road races with my dad in Watkins Glen,...

Now that the busy winter fest schedule of Sundance, Rotterdam and the Berlinale has concluded, we’ve now got our eyes on the likes of True/False and SXSW. While, True/False does not specialize in attention grabbing world premieres, it does provide a late winter haven for cream of the crop non-fiction fare from all the previously mentioned fests and a selection of overlooked genre blending films presented in a down home setting. This year will mark my first trip to the Columbia, Missouri based fest, where I hope to catch a little of everything, from their hush-hush secret screenings, to selections from their Neither/Nor series, this year featuring chimeric Polish cinema of decades past, to a spotlight of Adam Curtis’s incisive oeuvre. But truth be told, it is SXSW, with its slew of high profile world premieres being announced, such as Alex Gibney’s Steve Jobs...

The holidays are winding down and that means we at Ioncinema.com are gearing up for our annual pilgrimage to Park City where an A-list of documentaries is now set to premiere. Earlier this month Tabitha Jackson and the Sundance doc programming team let the cats out of the bag, unsurprisingly announcing much anticipated Us Doc Competition titles such as the Ross Brothers’ Western, Louie Psihoyos’ Racing Extinction, Marc Silver’s 3 1/2 Minutes and Lyric Cabral and David Felix Sutcliffe’s (T)Error, along with some surprises like Bryan Carberry and Clay Tweel’s bizarro Kickstarted doc Finders Keepers (see trailer below). Having been produced by the fine folks behind The King of Kong and Undefeated, the film bears all the markings of its well regarded pedigree, yet appears to be of even odder ilk, following the story that unfolded when a severed human foot was discovered in a grill bought at a North Carolina auction.

Ian McDonald’s award-winning documentary on India’s young blind chess players, Algorithms, has been shortlisted for a Grierson Award in the Best newcomer documentary category. The Grierson awards are the most prestigious documentary awards in the UK.

“We are really thrilled to make the shortlist”, said Ian McDonald, “It is a great honour and it also means it will bring the story of India’s blind chess community to the attention of an audience in the UK and beyond”.

Directed by British filmmaker Ian McDonald and produced by Indian producer Geetha J, the documentary has already screened at over twenty international film festivals and won six awards, including Best Film at Film SouthAsia in Kathmandu. New York based First Run Features, a leading distributor of independent films in America, acquired the North American rights to the film early this year.

Lorraine Heggessy, Chairman of the Grierson Trust said, “Winning...

Each year at the Academy Awards, two presenters have to conjure new ways of announcing the Best Documentary Feature award without using the words ‘truth’ or ‘honesty,’ and usually fail.

Certainly, documentaries have the Hollywood studios at a disadvantage when it comes to capturing unscripted reality. However, as an independent art-form, the documentary is a fascinating genre with rules of its own, which it constantly rewrites.

To mark the release of Alex Gibney’s latest film, The Armstrong Lie on DVD, here is a selection of ten of the most vital documentaries of the past one hundred years. Films to move, haunt, shock, amuse and stay with you forever.

Man with a Movie Camera (1929)

The start of the ‘Documentary’ movement is often attributed by to John Grierson, the pioneering Scotsman who deduced in the 1920s that cinema, far from being simply a frivolous form of mass entertainment, was a powerful...

How can one describe Petra Costa's film "Elena"? If it's just the facts, one could say that it's a documentary about Costa searching for answers and understanding about her sister Elena, who committed suicide when she was a child. And yes, it is that, but it is also so much more than that. It's a cinematic rendering of a memory; a visualization of a person long gone, made real again through ephemera. It's a journey through one's own darkness, a deeply personal poem of film that manages to also be incredibly humane and universal. This is avant-garde autobiographical filmmaking at its finest, and the results are stunningly beautiful, and achingly emotional within a lyrical and dreamlike aesthetic. Filmmaker John Grierson defined documentary filmmaking as "the creative treatment of actuality," which has come to be the most apt descriptor for the wide range of films about real life and reality.

Think silent films reached a high point with The Artist? The pre-sound era produced some of the most beautiful, arresting films ever made. From City Lights to Metropolis, Guardian and Observer critics pick the 10 best

• Top 10 teen movies

• Top 10 superhero movies

• Top 10 westerns

• Top 10 documentaries

• Top 10 movie adaptations

• Top 10 animated movies

• More Guardian and Observer critics' top 10s

10. City Lights

City Lights was arguably the biggest risk of Charlie Chaplin's career: The Jazz Singer, released at the end of 1927, had seen sound take cinema by storm, but Chaplin resisted the change-up, preferring to continue in the silent tradition. In retrospect, this isn't so much the precious behaviour of a purist but the smart reaction of an experienced comedian; Chaplin's films rarely used intertitles anyway, and though it is technically "silent", City Lights is very mindful of it own self-composed score and keenly judged sound effects.

At its heart,...

In memory of pioneering Scottish documentarian John Grierson (1898-1972), each year The Grierson Trust recognizes the best documentary filmmaking through the British Documentary Awards. This year's first prize winner for Most Entertaining Documentary was awarded to "Nina Conti: A Ventriloquist's Story-Her Master’s Voice" while the time traveling story of the deterioration of the poorest areas of London, "The Secret History of Our Streets: Deptford High Street" was awarded Best Historical Documentary. When Dawn Airey, Chariman of the Grierson Trust opened the evening he commented that, "All the nominations share one thing: the burning desire to reveal the human story at the centre of them." Here is the full list of Grierson winners- Best Documentary on a Contemporary Theme -7/7: One Day in London Best Documentary on a Contemporary Theme -Law of the Jungle Best Documentary on Current Affairs- Syria: Across the Lines Best Arts Documentary-Imagine: The...

French-Canadian director and cinematographer who pioneered handheld camera techniques

Michel Brault, who has died of a heart attack aged 85, was one of the great unsung heroes of cinema. The French-Canadian director and cinematographer could have claimed, in all modesty, to have pioneered handheld camera techniques, leading to cinéma vérité in France (and thus to the Nouvelle Vague) and Direct Cinema in the Us.

It all began in 1958 with Les Raquetteurs (The Snowshoers), which Brault co-directed with Gilles Groulx and shot in 35mm with a relatively lightweight camera carried on his shoulder. The 15-minute film, which explores life in rural Quebec, was seen by Jean Rouch, the French anthropologist film-maker, who invited Brault to France to be chief camera operator on Chronicle of a Summer (1960), in which a cross-section of Parisians are asked to respond to the question: "Are you happy?"

Rouch and his co-director, the sociologist Edgar Morin, were not...

How can one describe Petra Costa's film "Elena"? If it's just the facts, one could say that it's a documentary about Costa searching for answers and understanding about her sister Elena, who committed suicide when she was a child. And yes, it is that, but it is also so much more than that. It's a cinematic rendering of a memory; a visualization of a person long gone, made real again through ephemera. It's a journey through one's own darkness, a deeply personal poem of film that manages to also be incredibly humane and universal. This is avant-garde autobiographical filmmaking at its finest, and the results are stunningly beautiful, and achingly emotional within a lyrical and dreamlike aesthetic. Filmmaker John Grierson defined documentary filmmaking as "the creative treatment of actuality," which has come to be the most apt descriptor for the wide range of films about real life and reality.

Sheffield Doc/Fest | Dunoon film festival | A Nos Amours | Seret – The London Israeli film and television festival

Sheffield Doc/Fest

Sheffield doesn't quite have the same ring as Cannes or Venice, but in documentary terms it's a fair comparison. This is a market and a meeting place for professionals, and guests this year include Walter Murch, Jonathan Franzen, Trevor McDonald and Captain Sensible, as well as just about every British documentarian you can think of. But this is also the place to see the latest in non-fiction film: 120 films, many of them premieres, on topics ranging from Pussy Riot to Uri Geller's CIA missions, Indonesian genocide, and Bradley Wiggins.

Various venues, Wed to 16 Jun

Dunoon film festival

Edinburgh and Glasgow festivals bring world cinema to Scotland, but this inaugural festival brings Scottish cinema to Scotland, and helps put a seaside town on the cultural map. There are some recent international releases,...

Film-maker whose documentaries allowed the subjects to speak for themselves

The documentary film-maker Michael Grigsby, who has died aged 76, strove to convey the experiences of ordinary people, and those on the margins of society. His subjects ranged from Inuit hunters in northern Canada and North Sea fishermen to Northern Irish farmers, Vietnamese villagers and, most recently, ageing American veterans of the Vietnam war.

He made more than 30 films – many of them for Granada TV's World in Action and Disappearing World – which were marked by the way in which they allowed their subjects to speak for themselves. Taking his films back to the communities he had filmed for their approval became a vital part of Grigsby's process of securing trust. Some – like the Inuit – would subsequently use his films to explain their lives to outsiders.

Grigsby's questions were never heard and he abhorred commentary, preferring brief captions or the overlaid voices...

Stefan Kudelski, inventor of the first portable professional sound recorder, died Saturday in Switzerland at the age of 84. Word of his death came in a statement from the Kudelski Group, the company he founded. Kudelski created the Nagra (meaning “will record” in his native Polish) in 1951, revolutionizing the world of audio recording for filmmakers. The device, weighing between 8 and 20 pounds, was “one of the tools that made the French New Wave possible, by allowing the young directors in the late 50s and early 60s … to shoot a scene almost anywhere they could think of shooting one,” Randy Thom, director of sound design for Skywalker Sound, told All Things Considered host Melissa Block. Kudelski sold the device to Radio Luxembourg, Italy’s s Rai and the BBC as well as ABC, NBC and CBS in the U.S., according to the Nagra Audio website. Kudelski went on to win five Oscars...

A documentary about Bobby Fischer has won a top prize at the Grierson Trust's British Documentary Awards. Bobby Fischer Against the World chronicled the life of the chess grandmaster until his death in 2008. It was awarded the 'Best Cinema Documentary' trophy at the ceremony in London, hosted by Grayson Perry. BBC Two's film about author Terry Pratchett and assisted suicide was awarded the 'Best Contemporary UK Documentary'. 'Best Series' went to BBC Two's Protecting Our Children, a programme that focused on social workers in Bristol. The awards were dedicated to Scottish director John Grierson, and marked its 40th anniversary this year. Entries for the awards needed to have had the first UK screening between May 1, 2011 and April 30, 2012 to be considered for an award. Judging (more)...

★★★★★ The visionary potential of today's cinema is infinite. Yet the antediluvian truism of having a greater understanding of the future by looking to the past remains paramount in film history. The techniques of yesterday, such as those demonstrated in Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (1925), have been digitised and refashioned to adhere to the demands of a modern audience. Visual crafts, including the theory of montage, have dominated movie culture for decades. It's timely then that the BFI's latest offering compares two of history's most groundbreaking socio-political films, Battleship Potemkin and John Grierson's Drifters (1929).

Read more »...

On 5 November, the BFI will once again bring together the infamous double-bill of Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (1925) and John Grierson's Drifters (1929), released in a special Dual Format bundle as part of The Soviet Influence strand, featuring a new restoration of Potemkin and the high definition debut of Drifters. To celebrate this classic reunion, we've kindly been given Three copies of the Dual Format release to give away to our lucky readers, courtesy of our friends at the BFI. This is an exclusive competition for our Facebook and Twitter fans, so if you haven't already, 'Like' us at facebook.com/CineVueUK or follow us @CineVue before answering the question below.

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(1941-43, BFI, E)

Created in 1930 by John Grierson, the British documentary movement reached its apotheosis during the second world war as the Crown Film Unit. Its dominant figure was Humphrey Jennings, "the only real poet the British cinema has yet produced", as Lindsay Anderson put it in the influential 1954 Sight & Sound essay reprinted in the excellent booklet accompanying this outstanding second part of the BFI's three-volume collection of Jennings's work.

The war transformed the Cambridge literary scholar and surrealist painter into a great artist, his heart beating with that of the nation in five masterly movies. First came two 10-minute patriotic-propagandistic films: The Heart of Britain (1941) (narrated for its American audience by Ed Murrow) and Words for Battle (1941), where Laurence Oliver reads from Milton, Blake, Browning, Kipling, Churchill and Lincoln. These were followed by the near flawless Listen to Britain (1942), a paean to communal music-making; Fires Were Started (1943), a feature-length...

Documentaries made by the Post Office in the 1930s to highlight social issues heralded a new style of film-making

Pioneering documentary films made by the Post Office in the 1930s may look stilted and wooden now but they were actually the prototypes of a new type of film-making, a study co-authored by a Cambridge academic claims.

The short films, shown in cinemas before the main feature from the early 1930s onwards, were self-conscious advertising by the Gpo. But their makers, led by the great documentary director John Grierson, also sought to show contemporary British life and believed that they should have a "socially useful purpose", inspired by Soviet film-makers such as Sergei Eisenstein.

The unit's best-known film is Night Mail, made in 1936, showing the overnight express carrying the post from London to Edinburgh. It is part-scripted by Wh Auden with the famous refrain: "This is the night mail crossing the...

Lynne Ramsay's drama starring Tilda Swinton fights off opposition from a strong shortlist to win best film at ceremony

• Lff awards: in pictures

Lynne Ramsay's bold and memorable adaptation of Lionel Shriver's novel We Need to Talk About Kevin was named best film at the BFI London film festival awards on Wednesday.

The film is Ramsay's first in nearly 10 years and only her third since her breakthrough, Ratcatcher. At a ceremony in London her new film, which came out on general release last Friday, was named best film from a strong shortlist including Steve McQueen's Shame and Terence Davies's The Deep Blue Sea.

The director John Madden, who chaired the category's jury, said they had been struck by the "sheer panache" of a shortlist with "great storytellers".

He added: "In the end, we were simply bowled over by one film – a sublime, uncompromising tale of...

Tilda Swinton, We Need to Talk About Kevin Lynne Ramsay's British family drama We Need to Talk About Kevin, which stars Tilda Swinton as the mother of a young mass murderer, won the Best Film Award at the 2011 BFI London Film Festival (Lff). The Lff awards ceremony was held this evening in Central London; comedian Marcus Brigstocke hosted the event. Jury chair John Madden and fellow judge Gillian Anderson presented the Best Film award. The Best British Newcomer award went to actress Candese Reid for her performance in Tinge Krishnan's dark social drama Junkhearts. Edgar Wright and Minnie Driver presented the award. Pablo Giorgelli was given the Sutherland Award Winner for the Argentinean drama Las Acacias, described as "a slow-burning, uplifting and enchanting story of a truck driver and his passengers." The Sutherland Award, this year presented by Terry Gilliam, is given to the director "of the most...

We’ve just been sent the winners list for The BFI London Film Festival 2011 and massive congrats to We Need to Talk About Kevin director Lynne Ramsay and all her cast and crew for winning the award. I’ll just make this post about the winners but I’m sure we’ll do a reaction post imminently. So watch this space. See see our review of We Need to Talk About Kevin, click here or here for all our Lff 2011 coverage.

Winners in a nutshell

Best Film: We Need to Talk ABout Kevin, directed by Lynne Ramsay Best British Newcomer: Candese Reid, actress, Junkhearts Sutherland Award Winner: Pablo Giorgelli, director of Las Acacias Grierson Award for Best Documentary: In the Abyss: A Tale of Death, A Tale of Life directed by Werner Herzog BFI Fellowship: Ralph Fiennes and David Cronenberg (as previously announced)

BFI London Film Festival Announces 2011 Award Winners

London – 10.30pm,...

Are you surprised that this year, some of the most anticipated films at the Toronto International Film Festival actually are by (gulp) Canadian filmmakers? Largely known to many for their solicitousness, their skills in the rink, and their charming way of saying the letter “o,” the Canadians often inspire jealousy in their film-loving neighbors to the south because of the wide-ranging institutional support that they provide for national filmmakers. The National Film Board of Canada, for instance, both produces films and distributes them to the far reaches of the country… and has been doing so for over 7o years, when it was founded as part of the National Film Act of 1939. Indeed, the first Nfb commissioner was none other than John Grierson, the great Scottish producer and a father of modern documentary. (Today, it seems that the Usps could use a little love in the vein of the immortal Night Mail,...

Film director whose work included the wartime masterpiece Western Approaches

The director Pat Jackson, who has died aged 95, was best known for the semi-documentary war film Western Approaches (1944). This neglected classic – a feature-length portrait of the Battle of the Atlantic – was shot under the auspices of the Ministry of Information's Crown Film Unit and predominantly filmed at sea under hazardous conditions. The shoot's logistical nightmares were compounded by the vast size of the Technicolor camera. Jackson himself devised the story of the imminent convergence of a German U-boat and an English ship which is on the way to save a group of comrades in a lifeboat.

Jackson was in his late 20s when he shot Western Approaches with the outstanding cameraman Jack Cardiff and a cast of amateur actors. It was a remarkable achievement that remained unsurpassed throughout the writer-director's lengthy career. The film was well received in Britain and...

"Cars 2, directed (like several great Pixar films of the last two decades) by John Lasseter, finds itself in the unlucky position of the not-so-bright kid in a brilliant family," finds Slate's Dana Stevens. "No matter if his performance in school is comfortably average; he'll always be seen as a disappointment compared to his stellar siblings. There's nothing really objectionable about Cars 2, although parents of young children should be warned that a few evil vehicles meet violently inauspicious ends. It's sweet-spirited, visually delightful (if aurally cacophonous), and it will make for a pleasant enough family afternoon at the movies. But we've come to expect so much more than mere pleasantness from Pixar that Cars 2 feels almost like a betrayal."

Nick Schager for the Voice: "Pixar's Cars franchise takes a sharp turn from Nascar mayhem and rural red-state-targeted 50s nostalgia to 007 espionage with this upgraded sequel, though in its...

In the 1920s and 30s it was a struggle against the censors to get the likes of Battleship Potemkin shown in the UK. Now the BFI is celebrating these pioneering Russian films

Some Russian films of the early 20th century that sent shockwaves through Europe, making an impact outside the realm of cinema, are celebrated in a two-month BFI Southbank season. John Lehmann, poet, Hogarth Press editor, and brother of novelist Rosamond, wrote in 1940 that their appearance in London "was an event that had a decisive formative influence on the minds of the most alert of the new generation". Yet the films' arrival was staggered to say the least.

Bedecked with endorsements from Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, the world's most famous couple, Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin had done sensational business in Germany in 1926, but distributors' hopes of repeat success in Britain ran aground. "Officialdom," complained an out-of-character Daily Express,...

The upcoming exhibition Beauty Culture, which opens on May 21 at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Century City, will feature a new 30-minute documentary directed by Lauren Greenfield. As per the Annenberg Foundation's press release, Greenfield's film, which includes interviews with several photographers and subjects included in the exhibition, "accompanies the venue’s sweeping, unprecedented photographic exploration of how feminine beauty is defined, challenged and revered in modern society." Among the film’s subjects are photographers Albert Watson, Melvin Sokolsky and Tyen; fashion models Crystal Renn, Carmen Dell'Orefice and Emme; and agents Eileen Ford and Bethann Hardison. Jamie Lee Curtis, daughter of famous beauty Janet Leigh, is one of the personalities providing additional commentary. Filmmaker and photographer Lauren Greenfield's credits include Thin, kids + money, Girl Culture and Fast Forward: Growing up in the Shadow of Hollywood. Thin won the John Grierson Award for Best Documentary at the London Film Festival.

Documentary pathfinder Richard Leacock (1921-2011) passed away yesterday at the ripe age of 89. Readers are probably more familiar with the two documentary movements he helped refine, Direct Cinema and Cinéma Vérité, than his work on the Direct Cinema doc Primary (1960). Produced by former Life magazine editor and correspondent Robert Drew, shot by Leacock and Albert Maysles (whose work with his brother David include Gimmie Shelter and Grey Gardens) and edited by D.A. Pennebaker (the rock documentarian who brought us Don't Look Back, Monterey Pop, and Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars), Primary chronicled the 1960 Wisconsin Democratic Primary between John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey. The joint forces of Drew, Maysles, Pennebaker, and Leacock on Primary, with the aid of mobile cameras, faster film stocks, and mobile sound equipment gave rise to the Direct Cinema movement.

Direct Cinema, often considered synonymous with Cinéma Vérité (they are very different, but that's...

Fifty years ago, Thorold Dickinson kickstarted the first British film studies course at Ucl. It didn't last long – but its influence did

It's 50 years since film first became a university subject in Britain. Earlier dates are arguable, but on 16 January 1961 Thorold Dickinson gave his inaugural lecture in the physics theatre at University College London, accompanied by a programme evoking the dawn of cinema. Later dates have also been argued, and the general perception of film studies and its origins still involves a very 1970s blend of structuralism, semiotics, and psychoanalytic theory. Dickinson's department was a more free-spirited affair and has paid the price in obscurity and misrepresentation.

The idea had come from the BFI, the money from Wardour Street, and the Slade was in the frame largely because its director, William Coldstream, had in his 1930s youth dabbled in documentary under the tutelage of John Grierson. Coldstream's old colleagues were...

I assume many readers of this site take an active interest in the filmmakers and films comprising what critic Robert Koehler has called “the cinema of in-betweeness.” Each year now seems to bring a couple more of these mysterious objects, and while some are undoubtedly richer than others, it’s fascinating to see how their reversible reality effects work across a global range of social situations (see Dennis Lim’s New York Times article for an overview). The mere blurring of documentary and fiction doesn’t really account for the films under consideration, and the wavering truth of observational footage is not news (John Grierson’s oft-quoted description of documentary as “the creative treatment of actuality” is just inexact enough to hold up). The films that Koehler and Lim write about devise quixotic methods to register the resistance of their making. These formal strategies are inextricably linked to the representation of poverty,...

Britain is about to become a different country – the loss of the Ark Royal is the least of it

One of my presents for the Christmas of 1956 was a fat little book called All About Ships and Shipping, edited by Ep Harnack and very nicely got up by Faber & Faber with semaphore flags and rolling waves impressed on its blue cloth binding. Its prettiness helps explain its survival in boxes and cupboards for more than half a century, its original tuition (example: how to tell a barque from a brigantine) long forgotten. This week I took it out to look at the Royal Navy's fleet list in that long-ago era. Classes were lined up below their different silhouettes: cruisers, minelayers, destroyers, frigates, monitors, minesweepers, torpedo boats. There was still one battleship in service, the Vanguard, a turreted shape I can just remember seeing through a North Sea mist, but the...

Films that use lip synching, staged scenes and other truth-massaging techniques are making our old definitions of 'documentary' look decidedly – well, artificial. Xan Brooks goes after the facts

First, a warning about the truth or otherwise of what you are about to read. This is an article about documentary features. Specifically, it is an article about documentary features that alert us to the fact that they are documentary features. Documentaries that lift the bonnet to show the engine. Documentaries that remind us that they are authored pieces of work as opposed to some objective, inviolate truth. Films are made by film-makers, after all, just as newspaper features are written by journalists with one eye on the deadline and the other on the tea break. They cherry-pick their sources and manipulate their material. As such, they are not entirely to be trusted.

The Arbor is a superb new film by the British artist Clio Barnard.

Originally published in the Guardian on 26 August 1968

People get the kind of cinema their Government deserves. This was the theme of the lecture delivered by Mr John Grierson, the documentary film maker, at the Edinburgh Film Festival on Saturday, where he spoke of "The Motion Picture and the Political Leadership".

Mr Grierson began with a typically individual assessment of cinema and television. Visual poetry, he said, was missing from the present output. "I am reminded that people talk of England as being a trifle sick – which is to say more accurately and significantly, that the country isn't feeling very great about things, and maybe that is a very good reason for not making films that feel great about things.

"But if you remember the history of the cinema, you will remember that when a nation feels really miserable it is apt to get inspired about the nature of the misery.

One of Alberto Cavalcanti's supreme masterworks

Alberto Cavalcanti (1897-1982), born in Brazil to Italian parents, is one of the key figures in movie history. He studied law and architecture in Europe before making a reputation in France as a production designer and a pioneer director of the style that became known as poetic realism. In the mid-1930s John Grierson recruited him for the British documentary movement (his most famous picture from that time is Coal Face), and during the second world war Michael Balcon brought him to Ealing to give the studio's output a shot of documentary realism. Known to his colleagues as "Cav" and signing his movies with just his surname, his first film there was Went the Day Well? (1943), the best, most ferocious picture of the war years. He followed it with three films very much in the British vein Balcon sought to mine: Champagne Charlie,...

He was behind the Ealing films and made a handful of the most polished, imaginative and enjoyable movies of the 1940s. It's time the name of Alberto Cavalcanti was better known, argues Kevin Jackson

'Directed by Cavalcanti" runs the last of the black-and-white title credits. Back in the 1940s, the ordinary chap in the Odeon's ninepenny stalls is baffled, even annoyed. Who on earth is this jumped-up foreigner, thinking he's so bloody famous that he doesn't need a first name? (In fact, Cavalcanti was widely seen as one of the most self-effacing, charming men ever to have worked in film.) And why is a bloody Eyetie in charge of a British film – let alone an Ealing film, the most British productions of all? (In fact, Cavalcanti was Brazilian.) But those in the audience who had noticed the unusual credit once or twice before settled deeper into their red plush seats,...

Two highly-anticipated second feature films from U.S. underground filmmakers will be making their World Premieres all the way over at the 64th annual Edinburgh International Film Festival, which will run for twelve days on June 16-27. The films are Rona Mark’s The Crab and Zach Clark’s Vacation!.

The Crab, which screens on June 21, is the touching story of a verbally abusive man born with two enormous, mutant-like hands; while Vacation!, which screens on June 20, tracks four urban gals let loose in a sunny seaside resort down South.

Both Mark and Clark previously screened their debut features at Eiff. Mark’s Strange Girls screened there in 2008 and Clark’s Modern Love Is Automatic screened in 2009. Both films also ended up as runners-up in Bad Lit’s annual Movie of the Year award, again Strange Girls in 2008 and Modern Love in 2009. Sadly, these two masterpieces are still unavailable on...

The Times BFI 53rd London Film Festival announced its winners at the high profile awards ceremony held at London’s Inner Temple this evening. Hosted by journalist and broadcaster, Paul Gambaccini, the six awards were presented by some of the most respected figures in the film world. Best Film In recognition of original, intelligent and distinctive filmmaking, the new award for Best Film was judged by an international jury chaired by Anjelica Huston and fellow jurors John Akomfrah, Jarvis Cocker, Mathieu Kassovitz, Charlotte Rampling and Iain Softley. The Star of London for Best Film was awarded to Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet and was presented by Anjelica Huston.. On behalf of the jury Anjelica Huston (Chair) said: “A masterpiece: Un Prophete has the ambition, purity of vision and clarity of purpose to make it an instant classic. With seamless and imaginative story-telling, superb performances and universal themes, Jacques Audiard has made a perfect film.

They.ve called him Canada.s David Lynch, but Guy Maddin defies definition. His weirdo cinematic dreamscapes, often featuring friend and collaborator Isabella Rossellini, are the artful product of a vivid and unique imagination. Maddin.s films have fervent followers around the world and he is finally being honoured at home. The National Film Board of Canada, the public film production house which has produced 13,000 productions and won 5000 awards including 70 Academy Award nominations, has been a friend and support to cinema artists since its inception in 1939. Documentarian John Grierson and animator Norman McLaren helped shape Canadian culture through their often experimental work developed in the Nfb environment. The Nfb, which is supported by taxpayers. money, holds a...

If there's a director out there who is deserving a larger audience, it's Guy Maddin. I plan to write more about that another time, but for now, I wanted to direct you to this piece of awesomeness. The Toronto International Film Festival is already planning a pretty killer line-up, and it's now been boosted by Mr. Maddin himself. The Nfb has announced that Night Mayor will have its world premiere at the festival. (The picture above is one of the stills from the film.)

As I told you back in March, Night Mayor is a short drama that came out of Maddin's experiences immersed in the Nfb archives. That might suggest that this will be some sort of creative montage, but nothing is typical in Maddin's world. The film is set in 1939, when Scottish immigrant John Grierson (father of Brit and Canadian documentary film) founded the National Film Board of...