11/12/2022 0 Comments Gapped toothed women![]() A number of gap-toothed women from different walks of life are interviewed, and a wealth of material about being gap-toothed and female is imparted. Les Blank’s Gap-Toothed Women, a half-hour short, has in some ways the most unusual subject, but compromises it with a rather glib and mechanical form. Gapped toothed women series#The three films under review, all showing in the Film Center’s “Stranger Than Fiction” series this weekend, all have some relation to this second category, with varying degrees of success. Indeed, we may find ourselves saving the wrapper even after all the paraphrasable “content” is absorbed. Such works are likely to last longer because we can continue to learn from them, and what we learn has more to do with the process of signification itself, so there is no wrapper to be discarded. (Arguably, if this kind of work gets overvalued and fetishized - as happened to some extent with The Sorrow and the Pity and Hearts and Minds - it might become a substitute for action rather than a vehicle for generating or implementing our activity.)īut another kind of documentary resists such pragmatic uses, and in fact aims to stage a crisis in its own forms of representation, which gives this kind of documentary a different functional value. Functionally they can be regarded as disposable journalism, which is certainly no disgrace: once a document takes us somewhere, it has effectively done its work, and ideally we can carry on from there without its help. Such films are important as documents rather than as texts, and we attend to them for the stories they tell, the people they show, and the subjects they explore, usually without inquiring into the kinds of rhetoric employed. Many valuable documentaries, of course, exist chiefly to let certain voices be heard that might otherwise remain silent: Carole Langer’s Radium City, about a radioactive town in Illinois, is one such example, and Deborah Shaffer’s powerful account of the Sandinista struggle, Fire From the Mountain (which is playing this week at Facets), is another. The unspoken assumption that nonfictional form is a discardable, see-through candy wrapper - a means of organizing and containing information, which can safely be ignored once we get to the goodies inside - not only keeps us ideologically innocent but limits the kinds of content we may find permissible in documentaries. While the issue of representation is at the cutting edge of most debates about film, it usually gets posed in relation to fiction features documentaries, ranging from Shoah to the evening news, are commonly exempted. J.R.ĭirected and written by Luc Moullet and Antonietta Pizzorno This article appeared in the Februissue of the Chicago Reader, and eventually it led to my becoming friends with Romand. Françoise Romand’s Mix-up is surely one of the greatest films I’ve ever reviewed, and I can happily report that it’s become available in recent years on DVD (which isn’t to say that it isn’t still grossly neglected) you can even find it on Amazon in the U.S. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |