120 posts tagged with documentary by hippybear.
Displaying 1 through 50 of 120.
Ancient Polished Granite Chambers In India With No Explanation
BARABAR, THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL SITE OF THE FUTURE [2h] "2,300 years ago, in India, 5 chambers were carved inside enormous granite rocks. According to rudimentary inscriptions engraved at their entrances, they were purportedly offered by a king to serve as monsoon shelters against rain for a sect. WELCOME TO THE HEART OF ANCIENT INDIA, IN A FORGOTTEN CHAPTER OF ITS PAST... THAT COULD VERY WELL CHANGE HISTORY." [more inside]
Turns out, it was The Last Domino
Genesis -- The Last Domino? PBS documentary [55m], about their final tour from a few years ago. Genesis The Last Domino? tour previously, which wasn't the end, I saw them in November of 2022.
Harmontown Extended Cut
Look, Dan Harmon is a complicated person. Between Community and Rick And Morty he's done a lot. He's also incredibly self-destructive and willing to be open about that. His podcast was popular enough that he went out on a tour, and Harmontown [2014] is the film that documents that tour. This extended version runs 2h40m.
The first time they made a Fantastic Four movie....
I'll just put this here. Maybe people will enjoy it. Doomed: The Untold Story of Roger Corman's The Fantastic Four (Full Movie) 2015 [1h24m]
Remember that one episode of DS9 with the tribbles?
The Making of Star Trek Deep Space Nine Trials And Tribble-ations [32m, complete with commercials] was a documentary which was broadcast on the Sci-Fi Channel in the US on November 4th, 1996. The documentary looks at the writing and production of the episode [Wikipedia] and features footage filmed during production of the episode.
Detroit's Music Scene
Motor City's Burning: Detroit from Motown to the Stooges [1h, 2008, BBC] Is a look at the history of Detroit through the lens of music, from John Lee Hooker to Eminem. It's a really interesting scope through which to view this city.
Believe it or not, people once actually talked about Generation X
Okay, so there's a bug in the bottom corner and a timecode and a pesky watermark, but this MTV News special feature about Generation X from 1991 [50m] is still pretty amazing. Narrated by Kurt Loder.
I thought it was a laugh but people in the audience cry a little
From Sniffles The Mouse to Bugs Bunny to The Grinch... Chuck Jones: Extremes and InBetweens - A Life in Animation [1h24m] (Originally recorded on VHS from Australian TV in 2000.) [more inside]
Load your band into the van and hit the road
What Drives Us [1h30m] is a documentary about being an on-the-road rock and roll band. It's an interesting journey of self-discovery. Directed by Dave Grohl. Includes interviews with unexpected people.
BBC Africa Eye investigates TB Joshua
I hadn't heard of Nigerian charismatic pastor TB Joshua [Wikipedia] until I heard his name floating about during overnight BBC World Service radio programming recently. I looked around and found this: Disciples: The Cult Of TB Joshua, three episodes from BBC Africa Eye [~50m each, YT Playlist, CW: descriptions and depictions of religious manipulation, sexual and physical abuse, other cult leader behavior].
Stikkan
This is completely fascinating. It's the story of the biggest Swedish export to the world, told through an unexpected lens. Stig Anderson [Wikipedia] was the founder of Polar Music, was one of Sweden's most prolific songwriters, and later was entirely intertwined with ABBA. STIKKAN [2024, 1h, Swedish/multi-language with English subtitles] tells the story of his surprising life and career, and it's worth a look! [more inside]
Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory
"LIGO" - Director's Cut [1h46m] is a documentary about the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory [film website] and the painstaking path taken toward realizing and releasing their first major observation. It's a lot of smart people talking about doing complex science in an accessible way. If you like this kind of think, you'll probably like this.
Old News Grey Of Whistle The Test World
An oddity that YouTube decided to share with me -- Queen, 1977, using Old Grey Whistle Test as a promotional tool for their upcoming album News Of The World. The Old Grey Whistle Test Presents Queen News Of The World [2h10m] is a lengthy look into rock and roll fame decades past.
Sincerely Yours...
Presented in three parts -- Sincerely Yours: The Making Of "The Breakfast Club" [IMDb] Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, a lightly-edited [to get past YouTube's robots] examination of the ridiculously iconic 1985 film.
Sub Berlin : The Story Of Tresor
Sub Berlin - The Story of Tresor [1h24m, mixed language with embedded English subtitles] is a 2012 documentary about the Berlin nightclub [Wikipedia] that started before the Wall came down, and was one of the defining actors in the evolution of Techno in the early Nineties.
Six guys from nowhere, given the chance, become something gigantic
The old way the music industry used to work was: a band would be discovered and signed to a contract. Over the course of two, three, four albums the band would be given the chance to develop and grow and see if they connect with an audience. This system worked complete gangbusters for music promoter Don Kirshner and a supergroup of local musicians, witness -- Kansas: Miracles Out of Nowhere [1h16m]. It's both a fascinating look at the industry from a band's perspective, and also a reminder about how brilliant this American prog band really was.
Connections
I just yesterday discovered that all three seasons of James Burke's history series Connections [Wikipedia] are available on the Internet Archive. That's 40 episodes for streaming or download. This comes along with news [ArsTechnica] that Curiosity Stream has a new short series Connections With James Burke [Trailer] now on their platform. Previously, from 2010.
Decrypting the Secret Hieroglyphs: the Pyramid of Pepi II
Decoding Saqqara, the Secret Hieroglyphs of the Pyramids [50m] is a documentary that sort of takes its time. It starts with describing Egypt and pyramids, and then various burial sites, and then it gets into its meat. Cutting edge technology that are used to create views of the necropolis and many other technologies including a lot of human effort, and suddenly they're rebuilding a wall destroyed millennia ago and reading the text off of it. It's a pretty astounding use of technology to recover lost history.
To me, Edward Wood was the Orson Welles of low budget pictures.
The Haunted World Of Edward D Wood Jr [1995, 1h52m] is a documentary about the indefatigable filmmaker of much regrettable redoubtable renown. Also features many of those who conspired in his cinematic crimes.
*gutteral groaning noise*
Boris Karloff: The Man Behind The Monster [1h40m] is a 2021 documentary biography about the British actor who embodied so many monsters across his prolific career on screen and stage.
Monster Madness
A four part documentary about horror film up through the Eighties: Monster Madness Part One: The Golden Age Of Horror Film [1h17m] Part Two: Mutants, Space Invaders, and Drive-Ins [1h32m] Part Three: The Gothic Revival Of Horror [1h22m] Part Four: The Counterculture To Blockbusters [1h2m] I'm hard-pressed to think of a more comprehensive look at these early eras of this genre of cinema.
WARNING
Spooky Season Is Upon Us!
#SpookySeason We're entering that time of hauntings and horrors, and maybe you need some inspiration? Well, the 2013 documentary Halloween Home Haunts [1h25m] is a leisurely stroll through terrifying yards, gristly walk-through, and even some who graduated to professional level. Gain some insight, glean some techniques, and linger in the atmosphere that could lure you to creating your own home haunt! [more inside]
It's 106 miles to Chicago, we have half a pack of cigarettes...
...it's dark, and we're wearing sunglasses. The Stories Behind The Making Of The Blues Brothers [55m] is a 1998 documentary about the 1980 film that defined an era and the likes of which will likely never be made again.
Pop Muzik
There once was a band called XTC. This is their story. This Is Pop [1h13m, 2017].
Oh yeah, he's THAT guy!
It took three years for Colin Hay's band to rise from playing pubs to being the biggest band in the world. Three more years, and Men At Work was over, as was all the momentum for Colin Hay's career. Colin Hay: Waiting For My Real Life [1h24m, 2015] documents the rise, fall, and continuing lingering legacy of one of Australia's biggest musical heroes.
content warning: nuclear war
"The makers of The Atomic Cafe [1982, 1h26m] sifted through thousands of feet of Army films, newsreels, government propaganda films and old television broadcasts to come up with the material in their film, which is presented without any narration, as a record of some of the ways in which the bomb entered American folklore. There are songs, speeches by politicians, and frightening documentary footage of guinea-pig American troops shielding themselves from an atomic blast and then exposing themselves to radiation neither they nor their officers understood." - Roger Ebert [more inside]
I'd say he's like a grumpy pop culture protege of James Burke
I'd really only known Rich Hall [Wikipedia] from his appearances on BBC panel shows. It turns out, he has a whole career doing documentaries trying to explain the United States to a UK audience steeped in US mass media. Rich Hall's Red Menace [2019, 1h30m] begins with an atom bomb and follows the Cold War conflict between the US and the USSR as depicted in cinema and contrasting that with actual history. But he's done so many more! [more inside]
Let your body move to the music
Serving as a tour for both her mammoth Like A Prayer album and her Dick Tracy/I'm Breathless project, Madonna's 1990 Blond Ambition Tour ended in Nice, France on August 5 [1h53m]. It's like a Broadway Musical Tone Poem, with gigantic set pieces, a loose storyline across a 4-act structure, and some of the best concert performances and pop choreography ever put before an audience. [more inside]
All you have to do is keep your hand on the truck
Maybe you heard the This American Life episode about it. Maybe you saw the Broadway musical about it. Well, the 1997 documentary Hands On A Hardbody [1h37m, Wikipedia] can be viewed on YouTube! Explore humanity through watching people slowly lose their minds as they stay awake for days on end trying to win a truck. [more inside]
SRO means Single Room Occupancy
The 2017 documentary Caged Men: Tales From Chicago's Last Remaining SRO Hotels [1h23m] profiles the men who live in and work in the last single room occupancy hotels in Chicago. Men on the tenuous line between housed and unhoused, renting a rapidly-disappearing living situation from long ago that still survives to the modern day.
The big hurrah before it all started to come apart
Journey - Frontiers & Beyond [1h30m] records the band Journey's 1983 tour supporting the Fronteirs album. Peculiarly, it was done by NFL Flims, not an outfit I'd normally turn to for a rock and roll documentary. It's a lot about logistics and the crew who put on the show, as well as the band who were at the absolute height of their powers.
Before Stonewall
Happy Pride Month! The 1984 documentary Before Stonewall [1h26m] came out 15 years after the Stonewall Rebellion, and documents the social/cultural life of queer life in the US before the landmark event in 1969. The struggle for equality is shown across the decades of the 20th Century as history evolves. The documentary received a modern restoration in 2019 and the same year was named to the Library Of Congress National Film Registry. Wikipedia [more inside]
a+e=ig 2023
Happy Pride Month! Indigo Girls. [Wikipedia] Emily and Amy sit with Winona LaDuke and Filmmaker Alexandria Bombach to discuss their new documentary It's Only Life After All with Wajahat Ali. [20m, documentary still at festivals without distribution] We Can Do Hard Things With Glennon Doyle: Indigo Girls: Sexuality, Sobriety, Faith & Freedom [1h7m, audio only, summary article from Yahoo!]. [more inside]
I Enjoy Being A Girl
Happy Pride Month! The first queer woman music artist I ever heard of was Phranc [Wikipedia]. Your All-American Jewish Lesbian Folksinger Tupperware Salesperson. I'm sure many have favorite songs, but here I will share Phranc: Full Life Interview [1h12m], which is a 2021 biographic interview that covers just about everything. The Tupperware documentary mentioned in that interview is Lifetime Guarantee: Phranc’s Adventures in Plastic [1h, Vimeo link]. Bonus: Celebrating LGBTQIA Pride Month: A Visit With Phranc [51m], a glorious Pandemic-vision interview aimed at a younger crowd where Phranc shares her life and her art and teaches paper bow tie making. [more inside]
Radical Harmonies -- The Women's Music Movement Documentary
Happy Pride Month! The 2002 documentary Radical Harmonies [1h27m, Wikipedia, interlacing artifacts] is a thrilling historical document about women making music primarily for women and creating radically equalizing spaces in order to achieve their vision. Featuring a lot of familiar and not-so-familiar faces and voices from across a couple of generations of movers and shakers and musicians. [more inside]
It's been so long! What have you been up to?
The Day Before You Came was released in 1982.
I Still Have Faith In You was released in 2022. That's a long time for a band to be on hiatus. So what went in in between? ABBA - The Missing 40 Years [1h5m] covers the lives and careers of Benny, Bjorn, Agnetha, and Frida and give a fuller picture of the intervening decades for the biggest band in the world.
They inspired nearly everyone who came after them
The 2020 documentary The Ventures: Stars On Guitars [1h30m] tells the story of the most famous instrumental rock and roll band in the world. Having released hundreds of albums across over six decades, this garage band from Tacoma became a global influence on rock and guitar playing whose influence goes beyond measure. If you think you aren't interested in or have no connection to this, you're probably mistaken.
Creating at the intersection of art and mathematics
M.C. Escher: Journey To Infinity [2018, 1h20m] is the story of world famous Dutch graphic artist M.C Escher (1898-1972). Equal parts history, psychology, and psychedelia, Robin Lutz’s entertaining, eye-opening portrait gives us the man through his own words and images: diary musings, excerpts from lectures, correspondence and more are voiced by British actor Stephen Fry, while Escher’s woodcuts, lithographs, and other print works appear in both original and playfully altered form. RogerEbert.com review from Matt Zoller Seitz. [more inside]
The part of 60s music that wasn't Laurel Canyon
Greenwich Village: Music that Defined A Generation [1h32m] is a 2012 documentary that looks at the part of the 60s folk and subsequent rock revolution that wasn't based in California. Guthrie, Seeger, Dylan, Baez.. and that's just the beginning. A really great look at a fascinating era of music that shaped what we all listen to now.
Only Five To Blame
I don't know who exactly is going to watch all three hours of this, aside from me. Duran Duran: Only Five To Blame is a pop culture time capsule of a single band's career. A non-narrative documentary told entirely through popular media appearances, this is the chronicle of a band in their infancy, through into meteoric fame, across breakups and reformations, and finally into the literal present, ending on New Years Eve 2023. It's an astonishing chronological collage demonstrating the enduring capacity of a collection of art school lads from Birmingham and the power of massive egos to keep rock alive in the 2020s. [more inside]
There's nothing stopping you from going to the lobby til this blows over
Here He Is... The One, The Only... Groucho is a 60 minute biographic documentary about Julias Marx, who with his brothers helped revive vaudeville and reshape American entertainment for most of the last century.
Cancel Culture
Smothered - The Censorship Struggles Of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour [1h32m, 2002, Archive.org link] is a quality documentary about a lot of things, but mostly about how a folksy charming comedy show got too edgy for network television.
Whaddya call a person who hangs out with musicians? A harmonica player.
Pocket Full Of Soul: The Harmonica Documentary [1h26m, 2009] is precisely what it says on the tin. I can't think of many who I can picture playing harmonica who don't appear in this movie. It's full of joy and harmonica music. CW: Harmonica Music
Art, AIDS, and New York in the 80's
As part of their monthly documentary series, Vice YouTube brings us the 2020 film Wojnarowicz: F**k You F*ggot F**ker [1h43m, with introduction and director interview 2h20m]. Told through Wojnarowicz's own works and recordings and other material from the time, this is a look at a fierce, angry, brilliant artist burning with rage against the heteronormative world and the unfolding AIDS crisis. [more inside]
If the news is fake, then what is history?
Ian Hislop's Fake News - A True History (BBC) [60m] With his over 30 years on Have I Got News For You, and more years as editor of satirical magazine Private Eye, not to mention his status as a British icon of Standing Up To Power, he knows what is what, and presents the history (and the terrifying future) of fake news and news fakery.
The little black and white movie that could
Love it or hate it, there is no denying the influence and impact of one little movie from 1994. Join everyone involved with the movie in celebrating three decades of Clerks with the late 2022 documentary We're Not Even Supposed To Be Here Today [1h13m]. Covers the entire Clerks trilogy and some of the View Askewniverse, and is mostly a lot of people amazed this even happened. And wow, a lot happened!
Happiness sold more copies than any other hardcover book in 1963
The past as viewed from the past when the past was the present but the past was still the past. A Boy Named Charlie Brown [26m] is an unaired 1963 documentary [Wikipedia] about the comic strip and publishing phenomenon Peanuts, created by Charles Schultz. [more inside]
Bowiemas/Bowienalia 2023
Three David Bowie documentaries for reflection and illumination: Cracked Actor [1975, 55m, Wikipedia], Ricochet [1984, 77m, Wikipedia], and the career spanning fan documentary Metamorphosis Part One, Part Two [45m each]. Bowie would have been 76 years old today.
A funhouse mirror of the now, a picture of what was then
Come Fly With Me: The Story of Pan Am [59m] shows what air travel was from its founding with a Miami-Havana mail route taking on passengers to creme de la creme air travel that finally collapsed after airline deregulation and the race toward the bottom. Relive the most glamorous decades of flying!