"The internet's own boy" (2014), directed and produced by Brian Knappenberger, is an American biolographical documentary about the programming prodigy and information activist Aaron Swartz. Swartz helped in the development of the basic internet protocol RSS, co-funding of Reddit and his fingerprints can be found all over the internet. The documentary is telling the story of his groundbreaking work in social justice and political organising combined with his aggressive approach to information access which landed him in a two year legal nightmare - ending up with him taking his own life at the age of 26. His story touched a nerve with people far beyond the online communities in which he was a celebrity.
The documentary is a very personal story about what we lose when we are tone deaf about technology and its relationship to our civil liberties.
The film is narrated by people from Swartz's life including his mother, brother, girlfriends co-workers and other people connected to him in one way or another such as Tim Berners-Lee who's known as the inventor of the World Wide Web.
The Internet's Own Boy - Theatrical Trailer from Hammer Creative on Vimeo.
The documentary premiered in the 2014 Sundance Film Festival and served as the opening film at the 2014 Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival. It also won the "Sheffield Youth Jury Award" at Sheffield Doc/Fest same year. It received positive response from critics, a 93% rating with an average score of 7.3 on Rotten Tomatoes.
The film is a good, but a bit of a heavy watch. The story is told by interviews, V.O, some actuality e.g when the brother is showing Swartz's old room and archive footage of interviews and other clips from when Swartz was still alive. The crew, interviewer and the director can't be seen in the doc, but there's a few times you can hear the interviewer when he's asking a question to the interviewee.
"McCullin"(2012), directed by David Morris and Jacqui Morris, tells the story of Don McCullin who's classed by many as the greatest living war photographer and often cited as an inspiration for today's photojournalists. In the documentary we see him, for the first time, talking about his career of covering wars and humanitarian disasters on almost every continent, a career that lasted him three decades. From 1969 to 1984 McCullin was the Sunday Times of London's star photographer, covering stories from the civil war in Cyprus to the war i Vietnam, from the man-made famine in Biafra to the plight of the homeless in the London of the swinging sixties.
The documentary does not only explore McCullin's life and work, but also how the ethos of journalism has changed throughout his career. It shows the history of photojournalism told trough the lens of one of its most acclaimed photographers.
McCullin official UK trailer - in cinemas & Curzon on Demand from 1 January from Curzon Artificial Eye on Vimeo.
The documentary was nominated for "Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director or Producer" and "Best Documentary" at the 66th British Academy Film Awards. It also won the award for "Best Use of Footage in a Cinema Release" at the 2014 Focal International Awards. It has a 100% rating and an average rating of 7.3?10 at Rotten Tomatoes.
I love the story telling aspect of the documentary and find it inspiring how they have managed to make a very interesting, emotional and powerful feature length documentary by interviewing only 2 people; Don McCullin himself and Sir Harold Evans, former editor at the Sunday Times. You never see any crew or any interviewer. The documentary is only focusing on McCullin's story, revealing the honest truth about wars and tragedies.
There's a powerful atmosphere in the documentary from the beginning to the end. What dominates the documentary is the black-and-white still images taken by McCullin. They engrave themselves on our minds and McCullin talks about them in an honest way, revealing a powerful story to every image. Other than the still images the documentary consists of a lot of archive footage from different wars and conflicts, and very little actuality. The V.O used in the doc mainly is taken from the interviews with McCullin, but also the interview with Evans and clips from archive footage and radio.
"Bowling for Columbine" (2002), directed by the political documentary filmmaker Michael Moore. In the documentary Moor himself goes to explore the circumstances that lead to the 1999 Columbine High School massacre. He documents how two student easily acquired four pieces of fire arms, despite of having a history of arrests, juvenile detention, counselling sessions and drug dependencies. With his signature sense of angry humour Moore take a deep examination of America's culture of fear, bigotry and violence in a nation with wide spread gun ownerships. He explore how the U.S has ended up as the country with the highest number of gun related killings on Earth, interviewing people such as Charlton Heston (former president of the National Rifle Association) and showing examples of a bank giving a free gun by just opening a bank account.
The documentary brought Moore international attention as a rising filmmaker and won numerous awards including Academy Awards for "Best Documentary Feature", the Independent Spirit Award for "Best Documentary Feature" and the César Award for "Best Foreign Film". "Bowling for Columbine" is considered to be one of the greatest documentary of all time.
Pivot - Bowling for Columbine :30 TV Spot "What Is It?" from Adam Silver on Vimeo.
The title of the film refers to the story that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the two students responsible for the Columbine High School massacre, attended a school bowling class 6 am on the day they committed the attacks on the school. Moore refers to the concept of bowling later in the film as well, both in interviews and the Michigan Militia use bowling pins for their target practise.
Moore uses a lot of humour in the documentary, eg clips of stand up comedians and montages. About 20 minutes in the film we can hear the Beatles song "Happiness Is a Warm Gun" playing during a montage where we see people buying guns, residents of Virgin, Utah, a town that passed a law requiring all residents to own guns, people firing rifles at carnivals and shooting ranges, Denise Ames operating a rifle, Gary Plauche killing Jeff Doucet who had killed and molested Plauche's son, a man who takes his shirt off and is shot during a riot and more. Even though there are a lot of humorous elements in the film there's never a point where you as a viewer feel that this isn't a serious documentary, covering a serious topic. It's more like the humorous elements underlines how ridiculous some of the laws, that the documentary covers, are and how crazy some of the "reasons" behind these gun laws are when you look at the statistics of number of people killed by guns in U.S compared to other countries.
The documentary is very well made, interesting and keeps the audience's attention at all times. Michael Moore does a brilliant job as a presenter, as usual, not pretending to be an expert but instead asking the questions like any normal human would. The only voice over you hear in the documentary is Moore and even though some of the interviewees are spotted multiple times in the documentary it's only Moore that you are following through the entire doc.
I like the colour, the music and the way they underline the seriousness in McCullin and I would like to try to do something similar with the documentary for this unit. In all of his interviews he's placed in locations with interesting backgrounds that underlines who he is as a character, but without being distracting. Similar to "McCullin" we'll also most likely be using archive footage and images. I like the way they're doing it in the documentary by having the pictures standing still with black bars on the side. It gives the impression "this is the truth, this is how it is". There isn't any effects on the sides of the image it's just black bars to fill the frame, and the image is standing completely still, it isn't moving to make it more "interesting" to look at. When we are showing the images we want to use we need to decide whether we want to show them in a "fancy way" or in a, maybe, less fancy but more "honest" way.
Both "The internet's Own Boy" and "Bowling for Columbine" shows multiple different characters, which is probably the same as we'll be doing with this documentary. It's therefore interesting to see the ways they use to introduce the different characters and how they make the transitions between each character.
In terms of presenter or not I really like style of "Bowling for Columbine" where you follow one character on a journey to find find out something/solve a problem. I'd like to do a similar style for "Are we numb" to have a presenter go on a journey and talk to people to find out whether our generation are being numb or not.
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