It’s been a great year for documentaries, from Chad Friedrichs‘s exploding of The Pruitt-Igoe Myth to filmic glimpses into the lives and work of artists including Marina Abramović, Gerhard Richter, Ai Weiwei, Wayne White, and Gregory Crewdson. Many of these films owe a debt to Ken Burns, whose signature effects include “a way of energizing still photographs, of adding complex sound effects and period music, of using not only a third-person narrator…but first-person voices, reading journals and diaries and love letters and newspaper accounts that give the experience of the past something that feels real and feels human,” he tells the MediabistroTV crew in the below video. Watch to learn how Burns, who says he knew at age 12 that he wanted to make movies, got his start “trying to tell stories and [using] American history to tell those stories that I wanted to tell.”
First-time director Alison Klayman’s documentary about artist Ai Weiwei is one step closer to an Oscar nomination. Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, which debuted this year at Sundance (where it was awarded a special jury prize) before moving on to festivals from Rio to Reykjavik and a summer U.S. theatrical release, has made the shortlist of 15 films eligible for the Oscar for best documentary. Announced last week by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the list also includes Detropia, Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady’s musing on the Motor City; Rory Kennedy‘s extraordinary chronicle of the life of her mother, Ethel; and Chasing Ice, the story of photographer James Balog’s quest to gather undeniable evidence of climate change. The final list of five films will be announced along with the rest of the Oscar nominations on January 10.
Klayman was granted unprecedented access to Ai Weiwei, as well as his family and others close to him. During the eventful three years of filming, the Chinese government shut down his blog, beat him up, bulldozed his newly built studio, and held him in secret detention. “I want to give people a chance to spend time with Weiwei, listen to his voice and his opinions, see his flaws, and experience the conditions of his life,” says Klayman in her director’s statement. “The idea is to allow audiences to evaluate Weiwei’s choices and, I hope, to be inspired by his courage and humanity.” Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry is playing this evening at the Museum of Modern Art. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with Klayman. Not in New York? The film is available on DVD and iTunes. continued…
Vogue is going all out for its 120th anniversary. Following a triumphant turn on the big screen in R.J. Cutler’s 2009 The September Issue, the magazine is out with a stunning coffee table book that celebrates the work of legendary Vogue fashion editors such as Grace Coddington (who is having quite a year), Polly Mellen, Carlyne Cerf de Dudzeele, and Babs Simpson. These behind-the-scenes figures also take center stage in a new documentary, In Vogue: The Editor’s Eye, now airing on HBO.
Produced and directed by docu-maestros Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, the film is a feast of interviews about famous Vogue images (Mellen steals the show with a moving recollection of her now-famous 1981 shoot with Richard Avedon, a naked Nastassia Kinski, and a Burmese python) and musings on the slippery role of a fashion editor, all artfully combined with a running chronology of the magazine through the ages, including the servicey Mirabella interregnum of 1971-1988. “The people who are responsible for the fashion images are the fashion editors,” says a Prada-clad Anna Wintour. “They have always been our secret weapon, so it seemed to me that we could celebrate Vogue, and also, at the same time, celebrate these great editors.”
Frank Gehry in a 1976 interview, now digitized and online in the SCI-Arc Media Archive.
You’ve exhausted your Netflix queue and watched every episode of Homeland (twice), but fresh video wonders await you in the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc)’s Media Archive, which is now online with more than 1,000 hours–and counting–of architecture and design lectures, symposia, and events dating to 1974. Among the video trove is this 1976 interview with Frank Gehry. “The work of Donald Judd fascinates me. It’s sort of using cheap materials and getting a lot of response out of it,” a 47-year-old Gehry tells Shelly Kappe. “I guess that’s minimal art…I’m not just interested in minimal art, though. I don’t think that’s my whole thing, although it appears that way in some of the buildings. I’m more into the illusionary qualities of a building and creating a visual richness without it really being there. You almost have to trip over it. I guess it’s minimal in that sense.”
Created with funding from the Getty Foundation (as part of the “Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture” initiative) and the National Endowment for the Arts, the web-based archive also includes rare footage of Charles Eames, Zaha Hadid, David Hockney, Rem Koolhaas, John Lautner, Thom Mayne, Eric Owen Moss, and Kazuyo Sejima, among hundreds of others. And many of the architects and artists appear more than once, providing opportunities to analyze their development over the span of their careers. Don’t miss the “Exhibits” section, which features handpicked assortments of videos around particular themes. Delve into one called “Unfrozen Music (and Dancing)” and you’ll encounter Richard Neutra‘s wife, Dione, singing folksongs and accompanying herself on the cello.
Ori Gersht, “Pomegranate” (2006). Courtesy Noga Gallery of Contemporary Art.
“‘Pomegranate,’ started with my imagining a bullet going through the fruit and causing it to bleed. My initial associations were with pomegranates in old masters painting and their Judeo-Christian symbolism. A [Juan] Sánchez Cotán painting and [Harold] Edgerton photograph then emerged from my unconscious. The final film is a fusion of these three elements.
For the production, I worked with a film-commissioning group in London called Film and Video Umbrella. With their production team, I constructed a wooden window in the studio and hung the fruit and vegetables from the top frame. When we lit the vegetables, very simply, and looked at them through the camera lens, the transformation was instant: they looked very painterly. For the shooting, we consulted with a special-effects expert, who constructed a special gun and devised a mechanism that allowed us to control the speed of the pellets.
After the filming, I realized that the fusion between the Cotán painting and the Edgerton photograph was also the fusion between opposite ends of a spectrum. Cotán was attempting to achieve compositional equilibrium through painstaking mathematical calculations, while Edgarton, who was trying to freeze time, captured a perfectly balanced composition from an event that happened in a flash, conceivable only through the mediation of the camera.”
-Photographer and artist Ori Gersht in an interview with Ronni Baer that appears in the catalogue for “History Repeating,” the first full survey of Gersht’s work. The exhibition is on view through January 6 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
A scene from the Hanoch Levin opera The Child Dreams, for which artist Gottfried Helnwein designed the sets and costumes. (Courtesy First Run Features)
Austrian-born Gottfried Helnwein is the rare artist who can give Gerhard Richter a run for his money when it comes to hazy-haunting figuration that evokes–beautifully, repulsively, beautifully again–unspeakable atrocities. But while Richter has tackled everything from Düsenjägers to deckchairs, Helnwein, now 64, continues to focus on children. It’s a central theme he discovered during his student days in Vienna when he began to paint small watercolors of bandaged and wounded children, based on World War II forensic photos. People were shocked by the work, and Helnwein was just as stunned by their reaction. “The strange thing for me was always that the horrible stuff that was going on, the violence against children that couldn’t defend themselves, was not a problem for people,” he says in Gottfried Helnwein and the Dreaming Child, a documentary that opens today at New York’s Quad Cinema. “War was not a problem for them. The Holocaust was not a problem. But an innocent image–a watercolor! a tiny watercolor!–would upset them.”
Filmmaker Lisa Kirk Colburn follows Helnwein, a charismatic cross between Alice Cooper and Christopher Walken (with an Austrian accent), as he takes on the role of production designer for the Israeli Opera’s world premiere of The Child Dreams, by the late Hanoch Levin. Peopled by nameless characters such as “The Bleeding Man,” the opera tells a universal story about the tragedy of a child. Helnwein arrives in Tel Aviv with a grand vision that he fights to preserve amidst logistical limitations, opera star egos, Israeli labor laws that soon put the kibosh on child actors, and a stubborn yet brilliant lighting designer named Bambi. It’s fascinating to watch Helnwein, unaccustomed to creative compromise, navigate the details and politics of a large-scale theatrical production, whether by rolling up his sleeves to daub cobalt onto a foam boulder so that it matches a craggy Caspar David Friedrich scene or micromanaging the stage makeup (“Give him something to make him more the face of evil,” he directs a makeup artist). In the end, Helnwein is pleased. “It brought all of the children I have painted before together,” he says of the opera’s fourth act (pictured above). “I treat the staging like a canvas, but it’s three-dimensional and everything moves.”
Pause in your feverish purchasing of sale-priced MZ Wallace totes and discounted perfect gifts from The Future Perfect for a Black Friday breather: “Now and Later” by Andrew Kuo. The New York-based artist–best known for his intrapersonal infographics–created the 30-second video for MTV’s Art Breaks, a series of bite-sized video artworks commissioned by Creative Time and MoMA PS1 that revives the MTV “Art Break” segments from 1985. Having relaunched earlier this year with videos by the likes of Rashaad Newsome and Mads Lynnerup, Art Breaks returns this month (and through April 2013) with a new crop of artists, including Semâ Bekirovic and Cody Critcheloe. In creating “Now and Later,” Kuo looked to Chris Burden‘s 1973 “Through the Night Softly,” in which the artist was filmed wiggling through a galaxy of broken car glass–footage that would later be inserted amidst the commercials on a Los Angeles television station.
Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates is a big proponent of vaccines, but he’s also a sucker for highly infectious ideas, like the ones that spread rapidly thanks to the viral envelope known as the TED Talk. Gates is not alone. Today comes word that the TED Talks posted online have topped one billion views–every 17 seconds, a new person around the world begins watching one of the 1,400 or so videos, according to TED HQ. Thanks to an army of volunteer translators, the talks are available in more than 90 languages.
“The spread of these talks across languages and borders suggests that intellectual curiosity is demonstrably alive and well,” said TED Curator Chris Anderson in a statement issued today. “Maybe the Internet isn’t dumbing us down after all.” To celebrate the billion-view milestone, notable TEDsters have created playlists of their favorite TED Talks. Among the first crop of “TopTED” lists is that of Gates, whose 13 favorite TEDtalks include one by his wife and another by Microsoft alum Nathan Myhrvold as well as Susan Cain‘s discussion of “the power of introverts” and magician David Blaine explaining how he held his breath underwater for 17 minutes.
With a career that began with acclaimed children’s books, surged into iconic 1960s protest posters, blossomed into lavish books of erotica, and included dalliances with architectural design, advertising, and sculpture, Tomi Ungerer evades easy description. (Reader, he has published almost as many books as Steven Heller!) The Alsatian-born illustrator gets his close-up in Far Out Isn’t Far Enough: The Tomi Ungerer Story, a documentary that makes its U.S. premiere tomorrow at the DOC NYC film festival.
“Once you start digging into Tomi’s personal history and then start studying the body of his work, you realize quite quickly that he has visually captured on paper every moment his eyes have witnessed,” director Brad Bernstein tells us. “And when you consider that his life began in 1931 in the lead-up to WWII in such a cataclysmic place like Strasbourg, on the border of France and Germany, you realize that from three years old Tomi was recording the most seminal events of the 20th century–in Europe and America. That’s not such a bad starting place for a documentary, this combination of art and narrative, right?” The deal was sealed when Bernstein flew his crew to Strasbourg and spent three days with Ungerer. Six bottles of Alsatian wine later, neither director nor subject could wait to get the cameras rolling. Read on for the film’s trailer and more of our interview with Bernstein.
How and where did you first encounter the work of Ungerer? The first time I read about Tomi Ungerer was in a New York Times article in 2008, and I thought I was seeing his work for the first time. Certainly I was hearing his story for the first time. But as I did more research I realized I had indeed seen parts of his portfolio in the form of his anti-war (Vietnam) posters and his famous Village Voice campaign, “Expect The Unexpected.” I guess being a native New Yorker the VV slogans and art were stamped into my subconsciousness and it took some dusting off by the Times for me to realize it had been with me all along–or at least some of his work.
What surprised you the most about Ungerer as a person? What surprised me the most is how honest Tomi is with himself and others. He realizes he hasn’t always said or done the nicest of things, but he also realizes he can’t apologize for it so he kind of owns his past and wears it as both a badge of courage and shame. But I’m also meeting him at at his octogenarian stage, where he’s mellowed out in some respects, so I can only wonder what a terror he was forty years ago! I could never have made this film then! continued…
In 1948, John Cage paid a visit to the anechoic chamber at Harvard University, an echo-free room that had recently been built for the purpose of physics research. Surrounded by foot-thick concrete walls that bristled with sound-absorbing wedges, he had an epiphany: “I heard that silence was not the absence of sound but was the unintended operation of my nervous system and the circulation of my blood,” wrote Cage. He credited that experience, along with the white paintings of his Black Mountain College chum Robert Rauschenberg, with leading him to compose 4’33”. The composition, divided into three sections, consists of four minutes and thirty-three seconds in which the performer plays nothing. On the occasion of Cage’s 100th birthday, his most famous work gets a graphic design twist from Nicholas Blechman (art director of The New York Times Book Review), Irene Bacchi, and Leonardo Sonnoli. The trio created “Heidelberg Speedmaster” (below), an offset print interpretation of 4’33” and named for the industrial printing machine at work in the video, recorded last Friday at La Pieve Poligrafica in Rimini, Italy. Each of the composition’s three parts are also interpreted in posters designed by Blechman, Bacchi, and Sonnoli (two of the posters are pictured above). And now, your moment(s) of Zen:
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Vogue is going all out for its 120th anniversary. Following a triumphant turn on the big screen in R.J. Cutler’s 2009 
Microsoft founder and philanthropist 
How and where did you first encounter the work of Ungerer?
![[Harold] Edgerton](http://webmuseum.mit.edu/images/DIAmed/HEE-NC-64002.L.jpg){kind=link}