16 mm film is a historically popular and economical gauge of film. 16 mm refers to the width of the film ; other common film gauges include 8 mm and 35 mm. It is generally used for non-theatrical film-making, or for low-budget motion pictures. It also existed as a popular amateur or home movie-making format for several decades, alongside 8 mm film and later Super 8 film. Eastman Kodak released the first 16 mm "outfit" in 1923, consisting of a camera, projector, tripod, screen and splicer, for US$335. RCA-Victor introduced a 16 mm sound movie projector in 1932, and developed an optical sound-on-film 16 mm camera, released in 1935.
High School is a 1968 American documentary film by Frederick Wiseman that shows a typical day for students and faculty at a Pennsylvanian high school during the late 1960s. It is one of the first direct cinema documentaries. It was shot over five weeks between March and April 1968 at Northeast High School in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The film was not shown in Philadelphia at the time of its release, because of Wiseman's concerns over what he called "vague talk" of a lawsuit.
King: A Filmed Record... Montgomery to Memphis is a 1970 American documentary film biography of Martin Luther King Jr. and his creation and leadership of the nonviolent campaign for civil rights and social and economic justice in the Civil Rights Movement.
Man with a Movie Camera is an experimental 1929 Soviet silent documentary film, directed by Dziga Vertov, filmed by his brother Mikhail Kaufman, and edited by Vertov's wife Yelizaveta Svilova. Kaufman also appears as the eponymous Man of the film.
Peter Watkins is an English film and television director. He was born in Norbiton, Surrey, lived in Sweden, Canada and Lithuania for many years, and now lives in France. He is one of the pioneers of docudrama. His films present pacifist and radical ideas in a nontraditional style. He mainly concentrates his works and ideas around the mass media and our relation/participation to a movie or television documentary.
Flesh is a 1968 American film directed by Paul Morrissey and starring Joe Dallesandro as a hustler working on the streets of New York City. It highlights various Warhol superstars, in addition to being the film debuts of both Jackie Curtis and Candy Darling. Also appearing are Geraldine Smith as Joe's wife and Patti D'Arbanville as her lover.
Timecode is a 2000 American experimental film written and directed by Mike Figgis and featuring a large ensemble cast, including Salma Hayek, Stellan Skarsgård, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Suzy Nakamura, Kyle MacLachlan, Saffron Burrows, Holly Hunter, Julian Sands, Xander Berkeley, Leslie Mann and Mía Maestro.
Gimme Shelter is a 1970 American documentary film directed by Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin chronicling the last weeks of The Rolling Stones' 1969 US tour which culminated in the disastrous Altamont Free Concert and the killing of Meredith Hunter. The film is named after "Gimme Shelter", the lead track from the group's 1969 album Let It Bleed. Gimme Shelter was screened out of competition as the opening film of the 1971 Cannes Film Festival.
A pseudo-documentary or fake documentary is a film or video production that takes the form or style of a documentary film but does not portray real events. Rather, scripted and fictional elements are used to tell the story. The pseudo-documentary, unlike the related mockumentary, is not always intended as satire or humor. It may use documentary camera techniques but with fabricated sets, actors, or situations, and it may use digital effects to alter the filmed scene or even create a wholly synthetic scene.
Miklós Jancsó was a Hungarian film director and screenwriter.
Hand-held camera or hand-held shooting is a filmmaking and video production technique in which a camera is held in the camera operator's hands as opposed to being mounted on a tripod or other base. Hand-held cameras are used because they are conveniently sized for travel and because they allow greater freedom of motion during filming. Newsreel camera operators frequently gathered images using a hand-held camera. Virtually all modern video cameras are small enough for hand-held use, but many professional video cameras are designed specifically for hand-held use such as for electronic news-gathering (ENG), and electronic field production (EFP).
Filmmaker, or "Filmmaker: a diary by george lucas", is a 32-minute documentary made in 1968 by George Lucas about the making of Francis Ford Coppola's 1969 film The Rain People.
Overlord is a 1975 black-and-white British war film written and directed by Stuart Cooper. Set during the Second World War, around the D-Day invasion, the film is about a young British soldier's experiences and his meditations on being part of the war machinery, including his premonitions of death. The film won the Silver Bear - Special Jury Prize at the 25th Berlin International Film Festival. “Overlord is not about military heroics; on the contrary, it is about the bleakness of sacrifice”, Cooper said.
Chris Metzler is an American film director known for documentaries. His documentary Everyday Sunshine: The Story of Fishbone (2010) is listed in the 100 Best Documentaries ranked by the Tomatometer at Rotten Tomatoes
Storm de Hirsch (1912–2000) was an American poet and filmmaker. She was a key figure in the New York avant-garde film scene of the 1960s, and one of the founding members of the Film-Makers' Cooperative. Although often overlooked by historians, in recent years she has been recognized as a pioneer of underground cinema.
Paul Ruckert was an Australian film producer and cinematographer. He was active between 1930 and 1980 and produced a wide variety of short films and documentaries under the banner of Invincible Pictures. The films included comedies, travelogues, natural history documentaries and commercials. While not achieving huge financial success with his ventures his films were sold and distributed widely within Australia and overseas. In 1999 he was recognised for his lifelong contributions with a one-hour special by Ray Martin at the end of Channel 9's "Our Century" series, as he supplied a lot of historical footage for that program.
5 Broken Cameras is a 94-minute documentary film co-directed by Palestinian Emad Burnat and Israeli Guy Davidi. It was shown at film festivals in 2011 and placed in general release by Kino Lorber in 2012. 5 Broken Cameras is a first-hand account of protests in Bil'in, a West Bank village affected by the Israeli West Bank barrier. The documentary was shot almost entirely by Palestinian farmer Emad Burnat, who bought his first camera in 2005 to record the birth of his youngest son. In 2009 Israeli co-director Guy Davidi joined the project. Structured around the destruction of Burnat's cameras, the filmmakers' collaboration follows one family's evolution over five years of turmoil. The film won a 2012 Sundance Film Festival award, it won the Golden Apricot at the 2012 Yerevan International Film Festival, Armenia, for Best Documentary Film, won the 2013 International Emmy Award, and was nominated for a 2013 Academy Award.
How to Change the World is a 2015 documentary film directed and written by Jerry Rothwell. It documents how the founding members of Greenpeace created the green movement.
Sing Faster: The Stagehands' Ring Cycle is a 1999 documentary film directed by Jon H. Else, that explores the work – and leisure activities – of a crew of stagehands at the San Francisco Opera, as they prepare and rehearse for a production of Richard Wagner's complete Der Ring des Nibelungen. The cycle, a set of four operas with a combined performance time of seventeen hours, is regarded as the most ambitious production an opera company can mount. The film was distributed by the American Public Broadcast Service as part of its Independent Lens series.
The Newsreel, most frequently called Newsreel, was an American filmmaking collective founded in New York City in late 1967. In keeping with the radical student/youth, antiwar and Black power movements of the time, the group explicitly described its purpose as using "films and other propaganda in aiding the revolutionary movement." The organization quickly established other chapters in San Francisco, Boston, Washington, DC, Atlanta, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles and Puerto Rico, and soon claimed "150 full time activists in its 9 regional offices." Co-founder Robert Kramer called for "films that unnerve, that shake people's assumptions…[that] explode like grenades in people’s faces, or open minds like a good can opener." Their film's production logo was a flashing graphic of The Newsreel moving in and out violently in cadence with the staccato sounds of a machine gun. A contemporary issue of Film Quarterly described it as "the cinematic equivalent of Leroi Jones's line 'I want poems that can shoot bullets.'" The films produced by Newsreel soon became regular viewing at leftwing political gatherings during the late 1960s and early 1970s; seen in "parks, church basements, on the walls of buildings, in union halls, even at Woodstock." This history has been largely ignored by film and academic historians causing the academic Nathan Rosenberger to remark: "it is curious that Newsreel only occasionally shows up in historical studies of the decade."
