The Documentary Expands
Friday, March 12, 2010, 1:30 p.m.
Theater 3 (The Celeste Bartos Theater), mezzanine, The Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Education and Research Building
Includes the following films:
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Grass: A Nation’s Battle for Life
1925. USA. Directed by Merian C. Cooper, Ernest B. Schoedsack. Silent, with English intertitles. Approx. 64 min.
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The Bridge
1929. The Netherlands. Directed by Joris Ivens. Silent, with no intertitles. 12 min.
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Rain
1929. The Netherlands. Directed by Joris Ivens. Silent, with no intertitles. 12 min.
The documentary model set forth by Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922) would not satisfy nonfiction filmmakers for long. Several divergent tendencies soon emerged, including epic scale and poetic lyricism. Merian C. Cooper (1893–1973) and Ernest B. Schoedsack (1893–1979)—soon to be parents of King Kong—opened up Flaherty’s anthropological approach to sprawling proportions in their Grass: A Nation’s Battle For Life, which captured the annual migration of 50,000 Iranian tribesmen in search of grasslands. The Dutch political documentarian Joris Ivens (1898–1989) began his long career with two stunning visual evocations of his native country.
In the Film exhibition An Auteurist History of Film
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