We watched three movies this week.

• Man Bites Dog (Belgium, 1992. In French.). I thought I had seen this. If I had, I blacked out the memory. Documentary film crew follows a serial killer around as he "does his work". An astonishing indictment of the filmmakers' and the audience's complicity in filmic acts of violence.
• Rivers and Tides (Germany, 2002. In English) A documentary about the work of Andy Goldsworthy, a land artist who creates ephemeral work with the stuff of nature, organizing leaves in a gradient of their changing hues, for example, or forming sinuous shapes out of icicles, or stacking rocks to form seed-shaped towers that will eventually fall when the tide comes in. A quiet and contemplative film, as befits its subject.
• Capturing the Friedmans (U.S. 2003) Another documentary about a father and son in Long Island who are accused and convicted of child molestation. Did they really do it? You decide. The most amazing part of this picture is that the family had a tremendous archive of film and video taken before and after the arrest. One of the most astounding portraits of a family ever made, in the same realm as The Loud Family and Grey Gardens. Extremely powerful.

But there's more. Next up: The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant. It's summer blockbuster time, in other words, a good time to stay out of the theatres and catch up on classics that have been reissued on DVD.

LINK | 1:32 AM | TB

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