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kottke.org posts about documentaries

‘Visible Mending,’ on Love, Death, and Knitting

Beautiful stop-frame animated documentary about why people knit and mend. “When your life is sort of falling apart, you need to create a purpose in it for yourself, and if that purpose is quite small, it doesn’t matter.” Directed by Samantha Moore.

I’ve also been enjoying Arounna Khounnoraj’s visible mending and other handmade projects, on Instagram at bookhou.

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Ursula K. Le Guin documentary on PBS

If you’re in the US, most PBS stations will be showing the documentary Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin on August 2nd, so that’s your Friday night sorted.

Features interviews with the author, her family and friends, and the generation of sci-fi and fantasy writers she influenced, like Margaret Atwood, Neil Gaiman, and Michael Chabon, as well as gorgeous animations illustrating her work as she reads.

One comment I noted when she passed in 2018:

One of the many, many things Le Guin gave us was a subtle one: that the “science” in science fiction could also be the social sciences, and that, indeed, without it, no science fiction could be entirely complete.
โ€” Catherynne Valente on Twitter

And this great thread by Jeet Heer, including:

Le Guin was part of a great shift in science fiction, often called New Wave, which had many dimensions (literary, countercultural, feminist) but was also a move from xenophobia to xenophilia.

I loved this from her Rant About “Technology” which, sadly, seems to have gone offline when that site was redesigned.

Technology is the active human interface with the material world.

… But the word is consistently misused to mean only the enormously complex and specialised technologies of the past few decades, supported by massive exploitation both of natural and human resources.

And of course this great acceptance speech when she received the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

(Via Eliot Peper / Neil Gaiman.)


Orson Welles as a Graphic Artist

There are so many sides to Orson Welles that one of them is bound to get overlooked. Welles was a groundbreaking screen and voice actor, screenwriter, film director, radio producer, etc., etc. He was also a remarkable visual artist, which comes through in his films but is often attributed away to his great collaborators like cinematographer Gregg Toland. Even as a child, teen, and very young man, Welles was almost ruined by the fact that everything he did, he seemed to do so much better than the people around him. He was an undiscriminating prodigy, which is a very dangerous thing to be.

A new documentary by Mark Cousins, The Eyes of Orson Welles, focuses on Welles’s output in drawing, sketching, painting. It tries to recenter visual art as an essential, not accidental part of Welles’s work, and at the same time use it as a pathway to try to understand him as a person and artist.

I haven’t seen this documentary, but I’m very excited about it. Welles is one of those figures whose genius in his work almost obscures him; any new route in is welcome. It also doesn’t feel like a typical hagiographic documentary; it feels appropriately irreverent and experimental, two things which Welles almost was.


Kermit mourns

Australia celebrated Toad Day Out this past weekend, resulting in the deaths of thousands of toxic cane toads.

Cane toads were introduced to north Queensland canefields from South America in 1935 to eat pest beetles. The slimy interlopers couldn’t jump high enough to reach the beetles at the top of the cane stalks and, instead, rapidly spread in search of food. Millions of them now threaten many local species and spread diseases such as salmonella across northern Australia.

Ick. The hallucinogenic amphibians were profiled in the documentary Cane Toads: An Unnatural History. Ribbit in peace.


Seems like this would have made a

Seems like this would have made a better mockumentary.

Rolling Stones singer Mick Jagger escaped an assassination plot hatched in 1969 by the Hells Angels, a new British Broadcasting Corp. documentary has claimed.

The men tried to reach Jagger by sea. “The boat was hit by a storm and all of the men were thrown overboard.” They all survived but made no other attempt on his life.


Lengthy update on what Al Gore has

Lengthy update on what Al Gore has been up to since the 2000 Presidential Election, including his work on global warming, documented in An Inconvenient Truth (my review).


An Inconvenient Truth

In the 1960s, a young Al Gore had the good fortune to study under Roger Revelle at Harvard University. Revelle was one of the first scientists to claim that the earth may not be able to effectively deal with all of the carbon dioxide generated by the earth’s rapidly increasing human population. The American Institute of Physics called Revelle’s 1957 paper with Hans Suess “the opening shot in the global warming debates”. Gore took Revelle’s lessons to heart, becoming a keen supporter of the environment during his government service.

Since losing the 2000 Presidential election to George W. Bush, Al Gore has focused his efforts on things other than politics; among other things, he’s been crisscrossing the world delivering a presentation on global warming. Gore’s presentation now forms the foundation of a new film, An Inconvenient Truth (view the trailer).

In organizing my thoughts about the film, I found I couldn’t improve upon David Remnick’s review in the New Yorker. In particular:

It is, to be perfectly honest (and there is no way of getting around this), a documentary film about a possibly retired politician giving a slide show about the dangers of melting ice sheets and rising sea levels. It has a few lapses of mise en scene. Sometimes we see Gore gravely talking on his cell phone—or gravely staring out an airplane window, or gravely tapping away on his laptop in a lonely hotel room—for a little longer than is absolutely necessary. And yet, as a means of education, “An Inconvenient Truth” is a brilliantly lucid, often riveting attempt to warn Americans off our hellbent path to global suicide. “An Inconvenient Truth” is not the most entertaining film of the year. But it might be the most important.

Watching the film, I realized — far too late to move to Florida and vote for him in 2000 — that I’m a fan of Al Gore. He’s smart & intellectually curious (the latter doesn’t always follow from the former), understands science enough to explain it to the layperson without needlessly oversimplifying, and despite his reputation as somewhat of a robot, seems to be more of a real person than many politicians. As Remnick says:

One can imagine him as an intelligent and decent President, capable of making serious decisions and explaining them in the language of a confident adult.

The film has some small problems; many of the asides about Gore’s life (particularly the 2000 election stuff) don’t seem to fit cleanly into the main narrative, the connection it makes between global warming and Katrina is stronger than it should be, and the trailer is a little silly; this is a documentary about Al Gore and global warming after all, not The Day After Tomorrow or Armageddon. But the film really shines when it focuses on the presentation and Gore methodically and lucidly making the case for us needing to take action on global warming. An Inconvenient Truth opens in the US on May 24…do yourself a favor and seek it out when it comes to your local theater.


Henry Abbott lets us know about Flint

Henry Abbott lets us know about Flint Star, a documentary film about basketball in Flint, Michigan. “It’s amazing to watch. Six year olds who can dribble between their legs and hit a fadeaway. Dribble penetration followed by vicious alley-oop dunks. Flagrant fouls that will make you bark out loud as you’re watching the DVD in bed next to your sleeping wife.”


Television documentaries are slow, repetetive, and information-poor

Television documentaries are slow, repetetive, and information-poor. The Brian Greene series on string theory had the same problem.