Documentary Films and Programs

Subterms

    More stories

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      ‘The War on Disco’ Explores the Racial Backlash Against the Music

      by

      “The War on Disco,” a new PBS documentary, explores the backlash against the genre and the issues of race, gender and sexuality that informed it.The plan was simple enough: Gather a bunch of disco records, put them in a crate and blow them to smithereens in between games of a doubleheader between the Chicago White Sox and Detroit Tigers at Comiskey Park. What could possibly go wrong?This was the thinking, such as it was, behind Disco Demolition Night, a July 1979 radio promotion that went predictably and horribly awry. The televised spectacle of rioters, mostly young white men, storming the field in Chicago, sent shock waves through the music industry and accelerated the demise of disco as a massive commercial force. But the fiasco didn’t unfold in a vacuum, a fact the new “American Experience” documentary “The War on Disco” makes clearer than a twirling mirror ball.Premiering Monday on PBS, “The War on Disco” traces the rise, commodification, demise and rebirth of a dance music genre that burned hot through the ’70s, and the backlash against a culture that provided a safe and festive place for Black, Latino, gay and feminist expression. Originating in gay dance clubs in the early ’70s and converted into a mainstream sensation largely through the 1977 movie “Saturday Night Fever,” disco engendered simmering resentment from white, blue-collar kids who weren’t cool enough to make it past the rope at Studio 54 and other clubs. The film details disco’s role as a flashpoint for issues of race, class, gender and sexuality that still resonate in the culture wars of today.“Saturday Night Fever” helped turn disco from a club phenomenon into a mainstream sensation.Alamy, via PBS“These liberation movements that started in the ’60s and early ’70s are really gaining momentum in the late ’70s,” Lisa Q. Wolfinger, who produced the film with Rushmore DeNooyer, said in a video call from her home in Maine. “So the backlash against disco feels like a backlash against the gay liberation movement and feminism, because that’s all wrapped up in disco.”When the Gay Activist Alliance began hosting feverish disco dances at an abandoned SoHo firehouse in 1971, routinely packing 1,500 people onto the dance floor, the atmosphere was sweaty and cathartic. As Alice Echols writes in her disco history book “Hot Stuff,” gay bars, most of them run by the mob, traditionally hadn’t allowed dancing of any kind. But change was in the air largely because of the ripple effect of the Stonewall uprising in 1969, when regulars at a Greenwich Village gay bar fought back against the latest in a series of police raids. Soon discos were popping up throughout American cities, drawing throngs of revelers integrated across lines of race, gender and sexual orientation.Some of disco’s hottest artists were Black women, including Gloria Gaynor and Linda Clifford (who is a commentator in the film). Many of the in-demand DJs, including Barry Lederer and Richie Rivera, were gay. In its heyday disco was the ultimate pop melting pot, open to anyone who wanted to move through the night to a pulsating, seemingly endless groove, and a source of liberation.“The club became this source of public intimacy, of sexual freedom, and disco was a genre that was deeply tied to the next set of freedom struggles that were concatenate with civil rights,” said Daphne Brooks, a professor of African American studies at Yale University who is featured in the film, in a video interview. “It was both a sound and a sight that enabled those who were not recognized in the dominant culture to be able to see themselves and to derive pleasure, which is a huge trope in disco.”Studio 54 in 1978, as seen in “The War on Disco.” The club was famous for its glamorous clientele and restrictive door policy.Alamy, via PBSAll subcultures have their tipping points, and disco’s began in earnest in 1977. The year brought “Saturday Night Fever,” the smash hit movie about a blue-collar Brooklynite (a star-making performance from John Travolta) who escapes his rough reality by cutting loose on the dance floor. Inspired by the movie, middle-aged thrill seekers began dressing up in white polyester and hitting the scene. The same year saw the opening of Studio 54 in Manhattan, which became famous for its beautiful-people clientele and forbidding door policy.“There was this image of the crowd outside the door on the news, with people being divided into winners and losers,” said DeNooyer, the “War on Disco” producer. “And the majority were losers because they didn’t get by the rope. It was an image that spoke powerfully, and it certainly encouraged a view of exclusivity.”At least one man had reason to take it all personally. Steve Dahl was a radio personality for Chicago’s WDAI, spinning album rock and speaking to and for the white macho culture synonymous with that music. On Christmas Eve in 1978 Dahl lost his job when the station switched to a disco format, a popular move in those days. He didn’t take the news well. Jumping to WLUP, Dahl launched a “Disco Sucks” campaign and, together with the White Sox promotions director Mike Veeck, spearheaded Disco Demolition Night.Organizers expected around 20,000 fans on July 12, 1979. Instead, they got around 50,000, some of whom sneaked in for free. Admission was 98 cents (WLUP’s frequency was 97.9), leaving attendees plenty of leftover cash for beer. Located in the mostly white, working-class neighborhood of Bridgeport, Comiskey Park had a built-in anti-disco clientele.During the first game of the doubleheader, fans threw records, firecrackers and liquor bottles onto the field. By the time the crate of records was blown up, the place was going nuts, with patrons storming the field and rendering it unplayable. The White Sox had to forfeit the second game.The Disco Demolition Night promotion at Chicago’s Comiskey Park quickly spun out of control, with thousands of people storming the field.Chicago History Museum, via PBSThere were other anti-disco protests around the country in the late ’70s, but none so visible or of greater consequence. As the film recounts, reaction was swift; radio consultants soon began steering toward nondisco formats. “Disco Demolition Night was a real factor, and it did happen very quickly,” DeNooyer said. “And we hear from artists in the film who experienced that.” Gigs started drying up almost immediately.Commercial oversaturation didn’t help. Disco parodies were becoming rampant, including a memorable one in the 1980 comedy “Airplane!,” and novelty songs had been around since Rick Dees’ “Disco Duck” in 1976 (followed up by the lesser-known “Dis-Gorilla” in 1977). But the film makes clear that the Disco Demolition fiasco and resultant coverage was a major factor in the death of disco’s mainstream appeal.“The War on Disco” also features a 2016 interview with Dahl, who insists racism and homophobia had nothing to do with that particular display of anti-disco fervor. Demolition Night attendees who were interviewed for the film echo this sentiment.“I would not dispute that is their truth,” Brooks said. “But I think one of the insidious ways that white supremacy has done a number on this country is that it permeates every aspect of our cultural lives. People don’t want to be told that they’re entangled in something that’s not entirely of their control.”It’s also important to note that disco didn’t die so much as its more mainstream forms ceased to be relevant. The music and the culture morphed into other dance-ready genres including house music, which ironically emerged in Chicago. When you go out and cut loose to electronic dance music, or EDM, you are paying homage to disco, whether you know it or not. The beat is still pulsating. The sexual and racial identities remain eclectic. The Who may have bid “Sister Disco” goodbye in their 1978 song, but the original spirit lives on. As Brooks put it, “Its vibrancy and its innovations just continued to gain momentum once the spotlight moved away from it.”The culture, and its devotees, outlived the clichés. Disco is dead. Long live disco. More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      ‘After Death’ Review: Visions at the Brink From Those Who Returned

      by

      A documentary about near-death experiences crescendos with redemptions and literal come-to-Jesus moments.The faith film “After Death” enters a crowded field of testimonials about near-death experiences, a staple of YouTube videos and bookstores. This documentary convenes a supergroup of writers and survivors: from early expounders like the author Raymond Moody (widely credited with coining the term “near-death experience”) and the cardiologist Michael Sabom, to such recent best-selling names as the pastor Don Piper (“90 Minutes in Heaven”) and a surgeon, Mary Neal (“To Heaven and Back”).The members of the group recount their forays into the hereafter, illustrated with murky re-enactments of what brought them there: a car accident, an abdominal rupture, a near-drowning, a plane crash. There’s the initial pretense of scientific objectivity, but it soon feels beside the point. These accounts crescendo naturally with redemptions and literal come-to-Jesus moments.In the documentary, written and directed by Stephen Gray and co-directed by Chris Radtke, not much deviates from the usual tropes: People drift out of their bodies and journey into light, love, and new awareness (with PBS “Nova”-style trippy imagery). That sounds transcendent, and reassuring, but the stories are rolled together in a hash of editing, and the speakers can be oddly low energy. One exception is Howard Storm, a professor-turned-minister who believes he was hustled not toward heaven but to the darkest reaches of hell.Released on more than 2,000 screens by the studio behind the recent child trafficking movie “Sound of Freedom” — at a time when a majority of Americans say near-death experiences are possible — this film also closes with a QR code to buy more tickets. But whether you believe these phenomena are spiritual journeys or visions created by the human mind (or both), the film loses its sense of epiphany in the lackluster jumble of its moviemaking.After DeathRated PG-13. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 113 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Yellow Door: ’90s Lo-Fi Film Club’ Review: Cinema Education

      by

      This documentary is both a look at a small, obsessive film club that formed in the early ’90s in South Korea and an origin story of the director Bong Joon Ho, who was in the group.Every filmmaker, including the great ones, starts somewhere — even if that means making a low-rent stop-motion short called “Looking for Paradise” that’s about a stuffed gorilla searching for freedom while fighting a caterpillar that emerged from its fecal matter. That was how a young, student Bong Joon Ho made his debut, a saga detailed in “Yellow Door: ’90s Lo-Fi Film Club,” a charming documentary about a cohort of South Korean cinephiles formed in 1992.Before becoming one of the world’s most acclaimed contemporary auteurs (through movies including (“Parasite,” “Okja” and “Snowpiercer”), Bong found an education as part of this tiny, makeshift film academy made up of graduate students and other film lovers. The documentary, directed by Lee Hyuk-rae (who was part of the group), gathers the club members to reminisce about these early days, when they’d congregate in a yellow-painted office to watch and study bootleg VHS copies of art-house movies.Their interests were representative of what was then a larger, budding wave of South Korean cinephile culture that would produce major talent, including Bong and the filmmaker Park Chan-wook, though most of the other members of this particular group went on to have careers outside of film.The documentary carries a couple of interesting insights into Bong’s own origins: There’s a surprisingly profound kernel of emotional acuteness in his amateur debut, along with an early instance of the motif of basements that shows up in many of his later films. But the doc mostly amounts to a sweet nostalgia trip about a niche group of obsessive young people. It’s also an ode to young adulthood itself: For most of the group, latching on to cinema was simply a means of finding a community, and themselves.Yellow Door: ’90s Lo-Fi Film ClubNot rated. In Korean, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 24 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Deep Rising’ Review: Who Gets to Mine the Ocean Floor?

      by

      Matthieu Rytz’s documentary about the bounty at the bottom of the sea examines the fight over whether to reap these riches or preserve them.Documentaries on ecological crises often begin by scaring the bejesus out of viewers before adding a note of tempered optimism. For “Deep Rising,” a film about the race to mine the deep seabed (in particular, the floor beneath the Pacific’s vast Clarion-Clipperton Zone), the director Matthieu Rytz eschews shock for awe, and inflammatory rhetoric for measured persuasion.The director’s choice of his two chief characters proves richly dialectical. Gerard Barron is the hipster CEO of The Metals Company, a Canadian mining concern focused on harvesting polymetallic nodules containing nickel, manganese, cobalt and copper among other minerals that the so-called green economy craves. (“Please get nickel!,” Elon Musk can be heard saying in an audio clip.) Sandor Mulsow is a warm, serious-minded marine geologist and the former head of the Office of Environmental Management and Mineral Resources at the International Seabed Authority, the organization the U.N. has tasked with protecting the ocean floor.Rytz takes care not to lionize or demonize either man. Even so, the pitch Barron gives a roomful of high-net investors sounds too good — and low-impact — to be true.The composer Olafur Arnalds’s string-led score and the actor Jason Momoa’s sonorous narration add to the film’s argument that where the world’s biodiversity and the seafloor’s still mysterious environs are concerned, caution and care are paramount.The footage of iridescent creatures with billowing tentacles or translucent bodies mesmerizes but it also creates contemplative pauses amid the documentary’s facts, interviews and the damning history of the mining industry. The optimism here resides in the filmmaker’s trusting his audience to grapple with the entwined fates of the seafloor, its inhabitants and humankind.Deep RisingNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 88 Shares129 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Four Daughters’ Review: The Role Family Plays

      by

      This documentary from Kaouther Ben Hania restages pivotal moments from a family’s life.Re-enactment is not an unusual or particularly novel tool in documentary filmmaking yet recently it seems to have made a pointed resurgence — perhaps because the method has a distinct relationship to trauma and offers a compelling means of picking open old wounds for cathartic and/or healing purposes. Think “Framing Agnes,” “Procession,” and Nathan Fielder’s HBO series “The Rehearsal.”“Four Daughters” is another re-enactment film, distinct for the sense of intimacy and familiarity it brings to seemingly extraordinary circumstances. Olfa Hamrouni, a Tunisian woman, has four daughters, two of whom disappeared in 2015 to join ISIS in Libya. Directed by Kaouther Ben Hania, the documentary blends direct testimony by Olfa and her two youngest daughters, Eya and Tayssir, with stagings of pivotal scenes from the family’s life. The talking-heads style confessions, beautifully framed in velvety shadows, resemble stained-glass portraits.The docufictional interludes are performed by Eya and Tayssir, as well as two actresses who play the lost daughters Ghofrane (Ichraq Matar) and Rahma (Nour Karoui). A separate actress also plays Olfa (Hend Sabri), though Ben Hania shifts between the fictional drama and a behind-the-scenes perspective, meaning we occasionally see Olfa directing her double and tweaking the performances to conform to her version of events.We learn that Eya and Tayssir, only teenagers when they fled Olfa’s home, turned to Islamic extremism as a form of rebellion; Olfa, because of an upbringing punctuated by violence and misogyny, raised her daughters with an iron fist. Despite the documentary’s exciting hybridity, the conceit is more interesting in theory than it is in practice. The re-enactments map out the family’s tension and lay bare their wounds, but the lost daughters remain cyphers — the appeal of radicalization frustratingly murky through the end.Four DaughtersNot rated. In Arabic, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in Movies

      The Best True Crime to Stream: Stories That Are Very Scary, and Real

      by

      Four terrifying, unnerving picks across television, film and podcast.It’s the time of year when I tend to push the boundaries of how many scary stories I can stomach. That includes horror movies, but also, true crime offerings that I may have skipped. Of course, with true crime, that self-soothing mantra of “at least it’s not real” doesn’t apply, which makes it all the more haunting. Here are four picks that shook me to my core.Documentary“Beware the Slenderman”On May 31, 2014, in Waukesha, Wis., Anissa Weier and Morgan Geyser, then 12 years old, lured their friend and classmate Payton Leutner into a forest and stabbed her 19 times. Weier and Geyser were trying to appease the fictional character Slender Man, a tall, lanky, faceless ghoul and modern-day boogeyman whose image had been disseminated on the Creepypasta Wiki, a horror-centric online forum. The girls believed that if they killed their friend, they would save their families from Slender Man’s wrath and get to live forever in what they called Slender Mansion.This 2016 documentary, directed by Irene Taylor Brodsky, uses chilling footage of the girls recounting the precipitating events to police officers hours after the stabbing. And Brodsky spent 18 months with the parents of Weier and Geyser ahead of their trial on charges of attempted first-degree murder.Particularly hard to shake is how Slender Man captivated young people. The character originated from a Photoshop challenge to create convincing paranormal images, then spread to platforms across the web and became the basis of popular online games. In the documentary, mental health experts talk about the role of internet as companion; the abundance of grotesque imagery online; and what I found most disturbing: the concept that a meme with great spreadability is in fact a virus of the mind.Docuseries“John Wayne Gacy: Devil in Disguise”The term “killer clown” would normally send me running for the hills. But I was curious about this 2021 six-episode Peacock docuseries, which is a comprehensive exploration of the crimes committed by the serial killer John Wayne Gacy, who preyed on boys and men and was sentenced on 33 counts of homicide in 1980. Gacy, who had been a respected and well-connected figure in his Chicago community and who performed for children as Pogo the Clown, was executed at an Illinois prison in 1994.Along with interviews of investigators, a sister of Gacy’s and family members of victims — as well as film of the excavation of his home, under which dozens of bodies were buried — the series includes a great deal of previously unseen footage of a 1992 interview with Gacy by the F.B.I. profiler Robert Ressler, who is credited with creating the term “serial killer.” (For “Mindhunter” fans, Ressler inspired the character of Special Agent Bill Tench.) Most indelible to me is how utterly ordinary and unremarkable Gacy seemed.While serial killers like him have often been too heavily glorified, there is value in not forgetting the systemic failures that allowed such horrors to continue unchecked. Much as they did with the crimes of Jeffrey Dahmer, the police ignored warnings and pushed aside clues, including pleas from a victim who’d survived, because of entrenched homophobia.Podcast“Dr. Death”: Season 1I decided to binge this 10-episode series on a 12-hour road trip with my dogs. Not even one episode in, I had to pull over and get out of my car for some air. But I persevered, so don’t let that dissuade you.Season 1 of this Wondery podcast, reported and hosted by the science journalist Laura Beil, tells the story of Christopher Duntsch, a young neurosurgeon who arrived in Dallas in 2010 and charmed his patients with confidence and charisma. He claimed that he could cure back pain when nothing else worked. Under his care, which amounted to butchery, over 30 patients were severely injured; two died.As stomach-turning as these accounts are, revelations about how he slipped through the medical system are worse.“In the Dark”: Season 1In 1989, 11-year-old Jacob Wetterling was kidnapped on a dead-end country road in his small Minnesota town, a kidnapping that would fuel an already fast-growing national paranoia: that pedophiles were snatching up America’s children. The search that followed was one of the largest manhunts in U.S. history. Though the investigation was terribly mishandled — as the host Madeleine Baran, an investigative journalist, and a team of reporters make clear over nine episodes and two bonus episodes of this American Public Media podcast (it found a new home at The New Yorker earlier this year).For 27 years, there were no answers, but a couple of weeks before Season 1 was set to debut, in 2016, Wetterling’s remains were discovered, changing everything and taking a story from decades ago and placing it breathlessly in the present. More

    • 100 Shares159 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Milli Vanilli’ Review: Blame It on the Fame

      by

      Luke Korem’s documentary retraces the manufactured pop duo’s rise and fall, while asking pertinent questions about the price of stardom.The performers Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus earn your empathy in the documentary “Milli Vanilli,” a jolting, eye-opening investigation on how fame destroyed them. The war-of-words film, directed by Luke Korem, unfolds like a whodunit.The film retraces the bonkers events of Morvan and Pilatus’s naïve rise to the top in the late 1980s as Milli Vanilli, the image-forward pop duo who secretly lip-synced prerecorded songs to live audiences. Their hits included “Girl You Know It’s True” and “Baby Don’t Forget My Number.”At first, the duo needed money to escape poverty, but their celebrity status kept them hooked, and their German producer, Frank Farian, held the bait.And then, the documentary revisits their fall: During a live performance on MTV in 1989, the song started to skip, exposing them as frauds. In 1998, Pilatus died of an overdose. “I lost my sobriety and every sense of reality,” we hear him say in the film.Impressively, Korem gets those who ran the business side of Milli Vanilli, including officials at Arista Records, to spill the juicy details on what actually happened to the duo: Morvan and Pilatus became Farian and the label’s scapegoats. As presented here, it’s easy to see how this could be the basis for a horror film by Jordan Peele.Morvan is the heart of the documentary; he reflects on the group’s past treatment (he thinks they deserved that revoked Grammy) and raises still-relevant questions about the way the music industry exploits vulnerable performers. Charles Shaw, one of the real singers behind Milli Vanilli, says that Farian, who also worked with the group Boney M., “made most of his money on Black artists, and it worked.”Milli VanilliNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. Watch on Paramount+. More

    • 150 Shares119 Views

      in Movies

      ‘To Kill a Tiger’ Review: The Survivor Who Refused to Be Shamed

      by

      In this unflinching documentary, a young girl in rural India and her father fight an entrenched village culture to seek justice for her brutal rape.Nisha Pahuja’s documentary “To Kill a Tiger” opens with a startling image: a 13-year-old girl braids her hair in close-up as her father relates, in gutting voice-over, how she was raped by three men. Pahuja had planned to mask the girl’s face in post-production, but when Kiran (her pseudonym in the film) saw the footage at age 18, she chose to reveal herself in the film. It’s a defiant gesture on her part, to refuse the shroud of shame.“To Kill a Tiger” is a film bristling with such invigorating defiance. It follows Kiran and her parents, who live in a village in northeastern India, as they seek justice with the help of activists from Srijan Foundation, an advocacy organization. Interviews with other villagers reveal the tribalist, deeply patriarchal values that ensnare Kiran. Both men and women chastise her for her supposed irresponsibility and suggest brazenly that she marry one of her rapists to restore her “honor” and the village’s harmony.Kiran and her family are heroes, but this isn’t a simple tale of heroism. The film lays bare the uneasy and inadequate avenues available to survivors seeking justice. Is the long ordeal that pushes the family into debt and forces Kiran to repeatedly rehash her trauma making a difference? Is a fight that pits the family against their entire community worth it? Does the imprisonment of the perpetrators offer any real succor to the victim or upend the patriarchy?“To Kill a Tiger” doesn’t offer any easy answers. But in staying close to Kiran’s father, who refuses to let his daughter bow her head, and to the girl, who speaks with hope and flinty confidence, one thing is clear: The revolution begins at home.To Kill a TigerNot rated. In Hindi, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 5 minutes. In theaters. More