Word: films
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...half a dozen cameramen prowled the crowd catching the mood-but not the meaning-of the event. Several performers (Janis Joplin, Otis Redding, Ravi Shankar) come through with a jolting, immediate intensity, but watching Monterey Pop is like listening to an LP with pictures. Twenty years from now, the film may have value as a historical curiosity. Surely the sight of such frenetically phony stunts as Jimi Hendrix mounting, igniting and finally destroying his electric guitar will seem as quaint as newsreels of the Lindy do today. But Pennebaker ultimately lets down the present as well as posterity by refusing...
...Maysles' phrase, "a part of the American dream." Salesman's central figure is a middle-aged Massachusetts Irishman named Paul Brennan, whom his cronies nickname "The Badger." He holds one of the MidAmerican Bible Co.'s better than average sales records, but as the film progresses, his luck turns ("I can't get any action . . . These people are croaking me"). He finally quits to sell roofing and siding. In the film's last scene, The Badger stands framed in the doorway of his Florida motel room, confessing failure to a fellow salesman and barely brushing...
Salesman is surely one of the most moving and accomplished examples of cinema verite so far. Yet ultimately, the Maysles brothers are crippled by the inherent limitations of their technique. Although they use flash-forwards and other devices of fictional film, they are still bound to include only what actually happened in front of their camera. They cannot re-create or conjecture; they must rely solely on the moment itself. Federico Fellini once asked, "Why should people go to the movies, if films only show reality through a very cold, objective eye? It would be much better just to walk...
...ANTONIO'S documentary "In the Year of the Pig" has done something it's getting harder and harder to do--it has made the Vietnamese War real. This is no easy task now that 1965-style moral indignation has waned and the War has become an idea. The film succeeds brilliantly because its director has exploited the possibilities of the documentary form and seen its relevance to our perception of the war as part of our lives...
...genius of de Antonio is that he realizes that we see the actual War as a sort of documentary film. The same tensions between involvement and detachment that we experience looking at a film we also experience "looking" at the war or, for that matter, any contemporary historical event...