| Chain Camera | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Directed by | Kirby Dick |
| Produced by | Eddie Schmidt Dody Dorn |
| Edited by | Matt Clarke |
| Music by | Blake Leyh |
Release date |
|
Running time | 84 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
Chain Camera is a 2001 American documentary film directed by Kirby Dick about the lives of Los Angeles high school students. It premiered at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival.
Chain Camera is made up entirely of footage shot by students at John Marshall High School in Los Angeles. The filmmakers gave Hi-8 video cameras to ten students and asked them to record their lives for one week before passing the cameras on to ten new students. This process continued throughout the school year, and the filmmakers then selected 16 student video diaries for the film.
The film's subjects represent diverse backgrounds in terms of race, religion, socio-economic background, gender, and sexual orientation. Most segments feature scenes of the students interacting with friends and family members as well as personal video diaries in which the subjects analyze their lives. Dick has stated that he did not censor any of the students' footage except in situations that might violate child pornography laws, such as a scene in which a teenager performs a simulated sex act using a banana. [1]
Chain Camera's subjects encounter a variety of different situations and discuss how these have affected their lives. Topics include eating disorders, running away from home, suicide, backyard wrestling, racism, nationality, sexuality, family, AIDS, music, alcoholism, political activism, and graffiti art.
Critics praised the film for its honesty and the diversity of its student subjects. [2] [3] Scott Tobias of The A.V. Club said, "By turns playful, harrowing, intensely moving, and uproariously funny, Chain Camera cuts away all documentary artifice and goes straight to the source, allowing these kids to reveal themselves with the utmost directness and candor." [4] Several critics also made favorable comparisons to Michael Apted's Up series, which has chronicled the lives of several Britons over the course of several decades. [5] [6] Dick has acknowledged Apted's influence and has stated that he plans to follow the Up paradigm by making a sequel film that documents Chain Camera's subjects as adults. [1]
A documentary film or documentary is a non-fictional motion-picture intended to "document reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction, education or maintaining a historical record". Bill Nichols has characterized the documentary in terms of "a filmmaking practice, a cinematic tradition, and mode of audience reception [that remains] a practice without clear boundaries".
The Atomic Cafe is a 1982 American documentary film directed by Kevin Rafferty, Jayne Loader and Pierce Rafferty. It is a compilation of clips from newsreels, military training films, and other footage produced in the United States early in the Cold War on the subject of nuclear warfare. Without any narration, the footage is edited and presented in a manner to demonstrate how misinformation and propaganda was used by the U.S. government and popular culture to ease fears about nuclear weapons among the American public.
Cinéma vérité is a style of documentary filmmaking developed by Edgar Morin and Jean Rouch, inspired by Dziga Vertov's theory about Kino-Pravda. It combines improvisation with use of the camera to unveil truth or highlight subjects hidden behind reality. It is sometimes called observational cinema, if understood as pure direct cinema: mainly without a narrator's voice-over. There are subtle, yet important, differences between terms expressing similar concepts. Direct cinema is largely concerned with the recording of events in which the subject and audience become unaware of the camera's presence: operating within what Bill Nichols, an American historian and theoretician of documentary film, calls the "observational mode", a fly on the wall. Many therefore see a paradox in drawing attention away from the presence of the camera and simultaneously interfering in the reality it registers when attempting to discover a cinematic truth.
Fast, Cheap & Out of Control is a 1997 documentary film by filmmaker Errol Morris.
Derrida is a 2002 American documentary film directed by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman about the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. It premiered at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival before being released theatrically on October 23, 2002.
American High is an American documentary television show about the lives of fourteen students at Highland Park High School, located in the city of Highland Park, Illinois. The series originally aired on Fox and was canceled after four episodes. It was later picked up by PBS and aired in its entirety. The series was created by R. J. Cutler, a documentary filmmaker. The show received the 2001 Emmy Award for Outstanding Non-Fiction Program.
Winged Migration is a 2001 documentary film directed by Jacques Cluzaud, Michel Debats and Jacques Perrin, who was also one of the writers and narrators, showcasing the immense journeys routinely made by birds during their migrations.
Born Rich is a 2003 documentary film about the experience of growing up in wealthy families. It was created by Jamie Johnson, an heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune, and filmed primarily between 1999 and 2001. The film consists primarily of Johnson interviewing 10 other young heirs. These interviews are offset by Johnson's exploration of his own experience and family as he comes into a large inheritance on his 21st birthday. He seeks out how to be a productive person, avoiding the dysfunction that he sees affecting many of the very rich. The film explores the taboo the ultra rich have against talking about their wealth. Johnson believes this secrecy about wealth causes the wealthy to be dysfunctional, and exists because the discussion of their wealth challenges the notion that America is a meritocracy and their right to have their wealth.
Kirby Bryan Dick is an American film director, producer, screenwriter, and editor best known for directing documentary films. He received Academy Award nominations for Best Documentary Feature for directing Twist of Faith (2005) and The Invisible War (2012). He has also received numerous awards from film festivals, including the Sundance Film Festival and Los Angeles Film Festival.
The Gleaners and I is a 2000 French documentary film by Agnès Varda that features various kinds of gleaning. It was entered into competition at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival, and later went on to win awards around the world. In a 2014 Sight & Sound poll, film critics voted The Gleaners and I the eighth best documentary film of all time. In 2016, the film appeared at No. 99 on BBC's list of the 100 greatest films of the 21st century. The film was included for the first time in 2022 on the critics' poll of Sight and Sound's list of the greatest films of all time, at number 67.
A nature documentary or wildlife documentary is a genre of documentary film or series about animals, plants, or other non-human living creatures, usually concentrating on video taken in their natural habitat but also often including footage of trained and captive animals. Sometimes they are about wildlife or ecosystems in relationship to human beings. Such programmes are most frequently made for television, particularly for public broadcasting channels, but some are also made for the cinema medium. The proliferation of this genre occurred almost simultaneously alongside the production of similar television series.
Diary of the Dead is a 2007 American found footage horror film written and directed by George A. Romero. Although independently produced, it was distributed theatrically by The Weinstein Company and was released in cinemas on February 15, 2008 and on DVD by Dimension Extreme and Genius Products on May 20, 2008.
R. J. Cutler is an American filmmaker, documentarian, television producer and theater director.
Voliminal: Inside the Nine is the third video album by American heavy metal band Slipknot. Released December 5, 2006 by Roadrunner Records, the 2-disc DVD set features an 84-minute movie created by band member Shawn "Clown" Crahan. The set also includes live performances, music videos from songs on the band's third studio album, Vol. 3: , and the first unmasked interviews with all of the band members. The movie featured footage recorded from the recording of Vol. 3: through the end of the tour in support of the album spanning a total of 28 months. The DVD was promoted on various websites for the weeks leading up to its limited theatrical release. Critical reception of the album was mixed. Dawn wrote the album has "a raw sound" calling it "an audible treat for thrash and speed metal fans"; however, Billboard would tell fans to "save your cash for the band's next tour". Voliminal would be certified gold, platinum, and double platinum in Australia, the United States, and Canada respectively.
Bloodstained Memoirs is a professional wrestling documentary released online via an official stream in 2009. It is compiled by interviews featuring wrestlers synonymous with different eras in wrestling and different wrestling regions. Production was filmed in the UK, U.S., France, Japan and Italy. When interviewed for Fighting Spirit magazine, director David Sinnott stated, "I don't intend this film to be negative. It's too easy to sell people bad news."
Twist of Faith is a 2004 American documentary film about a man who confronts the Catholic Church about the abuse he suffered as a teenager, directed by Kirby Dick. The film was produced for the cable network HBO and screened at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival. It received an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Feature.
Mark Mori is an American documentary filmmaker, television producer and screenwriter of documentary and reality television series and specials.
Speaking in Code is a character-based documentary directed by Amy Grill about people's obsessions with the techno electronic music lifestyle and the effects on their lives. It follows Modeselektor, the Wighnomy Brothers, Philip Sherburne, Monolake and David Day for three years as they attempt to grow in the techno community, as well as Grill's struggles to complete the film. It was shot in 11 cities and 5 countries.
Found footage is a cinematic technique in which all or a substantial part of the work is presented as if it were discovered film or video recordings. The events on screen are typically seen through the camera of one or more of the characters involved, often accompanied by their real-time, off-camera commentary. For added realism, the cinematography may be done by the actors themselves as they perform, and shaky camera work and naturalistic acting are routinely employed. The footage may be presented as if it were "raw" and complete or as if it had been edited into a narrative by those who "found" it.
Alexis Krasilovsky is an American filmmaker, writer and professor. Krasilovsky's first film, End of the Art World documented artists including Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg. Krasilovsky moved from New York to Los Angeles in the 1970s to pursue her passion for filmmaking, writing and directing films through her company, Rafael Film. She is the writer and director of the global documentary features, Women Behind the Camera and Let Them Eat Cake.