Obstinate Battles for Documentary Memory: Patricio Guzmán Resources Online

Regular readers will know, hopefully, that Film Studies For Free issues forth only on the topics that take its fancy. It receives no commercial or other patronage, and it does not respond to 'prompts' for its hypertextual-utterances: nor does it want any! It loves and supports free online culture, and it prefers to make its own reading, viewing and blogging choices. Sometimes, though, it does get independently inspired by commercially-available film releases or new offline publications of a very worthwhile kind, as was the case today. And the result is a little bit of unsolicited free advertising...

FSFF was so HAPPY to hear that Chilean documentarist Patricio Guzmán's films The Battle of Chile (1975-1978), The Pinochet Case (2001) and a particular personal favourite, Chile, Obstinate Memory (1997 - see the opening sequences above) have been released on a new DVD by a great and longstanding supporter of Latin American film culture -- Icarus Films -- that it decided to mark this very auspicious occasion with a related scholarly links-list in honour, and warm appreciation, of Guzmán's hugely important films.

• Articles on Guzmán's website:

• MOVIES THAT MARKED ME FOREVER
• When I was about eight or nine years old (I really don’t remember exactly)...
• THE DOCUMENTARY EXPLOSION
• THE LOST IMAGES
• PIECES OF LIFE
• STAINS ON THE NEGATIVE
• OBLIVION AS A CENTRAL THEME
• THE CHILEAN DOCUMENTARY, A PANORAMIC LOOK

• Pat Aufderheide, 'Interview with Patricio Guzmán', Center for Social Media, Oct. 25, 2002

• Pamela Biénzobas, 'Patricio Guzmán's Salvador Allende: The Personal Painting of a Universal Myth', Senses of Cinema, Issue 34, January 2005

• Katherine Bliss, 'Review of Chile, Obstinate Memory/Battle of Chile', The Public Historian, Vol. 21, No. 1, Winter 1999

• Judy Branfman, 'Poking in the wound or reclaiming history? Documentary Films as Gendered Historical Memory in Post-Dictatorship Chile and Spain', CSW Update, October 2007
  

• Michael Chanan, 'The Changing Geography of Third Cinema, originally published in Screen Special Latin American Issue (edited by Catherine Grant and Jackie Stacey), Volume 38 number 4 Winter 1997

• Michael Chanan, 'The economic condition of cinema in Latin America ', Third World Affairs 1985, London: Third World Foundation, pp.379-389

• Michael Chanan, 'Latin American Cinema in the 90s. Representational Space in Recent Latin American Cinema', E.I.A.L. ESTUDIOS INTERDISCIPLINARIOS DE AMERICA LATINA Y EL CARIBE, Vol. 9, No. 1, enero-junio 1998 (Cultura visual en América Latina, Editor invitado: John Mraz)

• Michael Chanan, New Cinemas in Latin America (1960-1995), from The Oxford History of World Cinema, ed. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, OUP, 1996

• Hugo Chaparro Valderrama, 'Patricio Guzmán according to Jorge Ruffinelli', El ojo que piensa, 2002
  

• First Run/Icarus Films Presskit for THE BATTLE OF CHILE (1975-1978), CHILE, OBSTINATE MEMORY (1997), THE PINOCHET CASE (2001), Films by Patricio Guzmán
  

• First Run/Icarus Films Presskit for SALVADOR ALLENDE (2004), Film by Patricio Guzmán

• Jim Hillier, 'The Battle of Chile/La batalla de Chile, Patricio Guzmán, 1975–9', 100 Documentary Films (London: BFI/Palgrave, BFI Film Guides, 2009 (scroll down to Ch. 14))
  

• Sarah Kessler, 'An Imperfect Cinema', The Brooklyn Rail, September 2009
  

• Nicola Marzano, 'Third Cinema Today', Offscreen Journal, Vol. 13, Issue 6, 2009
  

• Nicola Marzano, 'The Art of Hunger: re-defining Third Cinema', 16:9, November 2009 - 7. årgang - nummer 34

• Zuzana M. Pick, 'Chilean cinema: ten years of exile (1973-83)', from Jump Cut, no. 32, April 1987, pp. 66-70
  

• Margaret Power, 'Chile, Obstinate Memory', H-LatAm, H-Net Reviews. September, 1998
  

• Margaret Power, 'The Battle of Chile', H-LatAm, H-Net Reviews. August, 1998
  

• Juan Carlos Rodríguez, The Postdictatorial Documentaries of Patricio Guzmán: Chile, Obstinate Memory, The Pinochet Case, and Island of Robinson Crusoe, PhD Thesis, Duke University 2007
  

• Antonio Traverso, 'Unsettled Screens: The Cinema of Latin America', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 9 No. 12, March 2005
  

• And a very special bonus for French or Spanish speakers: … à Valparaiso (1963 France/Chile 29 mins, directed by Joris Ivens, with a script by Chris Marker and assistance from Patricio Guzmán). See Adrian Danks' Senses of Cinema article on this film here.

Happy birthday Albert Maysles! Videos and Other Links

[The video embedded above presents a conversation with] one of America's foremost non-fiction filmmakers, Albert Maysles who along with his brother David (1932-1987) is recognized as a pioneer of direct cinema, the distinctly American version of French cinéma vérité. Their seminal early films Salesman (1968), Gimme Shelter(1970), and Grey Gardens (1976) became cult classics and are still finding new rapturous audiences. On the occasion of the publication of A Maysles Scrapbook: Photographs/Cinemagraphs/Documents, Maysles screens selections from filmed portraits of Orson Welles, Marlon Brando, and Truman Capote, and takes audience questions (courtesy of Hammer Museum at UCLA, March 10, 2009 on YouTube).

'The documentary filmmaker Albert Maysles describes how using his digital video camera inspired him "to tape the little things that I witness in everyday life. They’d be pieces of poetry"', Aisling Kelliher, Everyday Cinema, MIT Media Lab

'We can see two types of truth here. One is the raw material, which is the footage, the kind of truth that you get in literature in diary form – it’s immediate, no one has tampered with it. Then there’s the other kind of truth that comes in extracting and juxtaposing the raw material into a more meaningful and coherent storytelling form, which finally can be said to be more than just raw data.' Stella Bruzzi citing Albert Maysles in 'The Talented Mr Ripley', EnterText 1.2, Spring 2001

It's Thanksgiving and Albert Maysles's birthday today. It's very much a poignant timing for the latter occasion as the artist (and partner to Christo) Jeanne-Claude (Denat de Guillebo), who featured in a series of the Maysles's Brothers' films, died on November 18, 2009. But, this year, Film Studies For Free is marking all three observances, and giving thanks for the Maysles's highly influential filmmaking, with its usual tribute of links, below, to high-quality scholarly and other interesting online resources, in addition to the great video embedded above.

Video and website resources:

• Albert Maysles interviewed about In Transit (with clips) at Index Magazine, 2008

• Albert Maysles's video interview at the People's Archive

• Kevin B. Lee's video essay on Grey Gardens (1975, Albert and David Maysles, Ellen Hovde, Muffie Meyer) with commentary by Vadim Rizov

• Shooting People's Albert Maysles Glasses website

• Grey Gardens Online - official website

• RealPlayer video of Albert Maysles with Christo and Jeanne-Claude

• Gimme Shelter at Google Video

• Elaine Heinzman, 'A Musical Trip to Grey Gardens', NPR, March 5, 2008

Interviews with or about the Maysles:

• Williams Cole, 'Uncontrolled Cinema: Albert Maysles', The Brooklyn Rail, July 2006

• Jonathan B. Vogels, 'Conversations with Scholars' series, Americana, Spring 2009

• Joy Yoon, 'Albert Maysles: The Ultimate Salesman', New Order, 2002

Scholarly/critical articles:

• Chloe Aaron, 'The Video Underground', Art in America, May 1971

• Søren Birkvad, 'A Battle for Public Mythology: History and Genre in the Portrait Documentary', Nordicom Review 2/2000
  

• Joseph Heumann and Robin L. Murray, 'Dark Days: A narrative of environmental adaptation', Jump Cut, No. 48, Winter 2006
  

• Tim O'Farrell, 'Review of Jonathan B Vogels, The Direct Cinema of David and Albert Maysles. Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press, 2005', Screening the Past, Vol. 20, 2006
  
•  
• Tim O’Farrell, 'No Direction Home: Looking Forward from Don’t Look Back', Senses of Cinema, 38, 2006

• H. Russell Searight, 'Review of: The Beales of Grey Gardens By Albert and David Maysles (Directors)'

• Warren Spector, 'Review of Salesman', Cinema Texas Program Notes, Vol. 14, No. 3, March 27, 1978

Cinephilia celebrated and explored in IndianAuteur

Image from The Cloud-Capped Star (Meghe Dhaka Tara, 1960) by Ritwik Ghatak (Adrian Martin's favourite Indian film)

A Film Studies For Free quickie first-off today, just to bring you news of the new issue (no. 7: November 25- December 25) of the IndianAuteur  E-magazine. In particular, FSFF wanted to flag up its fascinating series of articles on film festivals and cinephilia, crowned by a truly fantastic interview with one of the most prodigiously talented and productive cinephile film-writers out there, Adrian Martin.

You can read the issue online by clicking here; and you can download it by clicking here (for the .zip file). The magazine's great e-archive of past issues is here. Below, FSFF has pasted the table of contents of direct links to all those articles from the new issue which available online:

AUTEUR

The Legend of Herr Zolka: Anuj Malhotra

COVER STORY

Paradise Lost: Kshitiz Anand

Cinephilia in India: Nitesh Rohit

Porgramming a film festival: Sachin Gandhi

Seeing is Believing: Supriya Suri

Cinephile, Adjectiv- Cinephilia in Romania : Anamaria Dobincuic

Winds From The East: Sagorika Singha

Multiplexes, Multi-Million AND Multi-Wood: Anuj Malhotra (there's a problem loading this page so far)

Interview

Adrian Martin