UnionDocs

“I wonder why life is so damn hard”.

  Britton, South Dakota (2003) begins without titles. When the screen fills with even-toned black and white images of children posed on the main drag of some small American town, you must rely on contextual clues to situate this scene. The film’s texture, and the scratches and tears...

The “City Symphony” is not a coherent cinematic tradition, but a syncretic notion cradled at the intersection of three films made between 1926 and 1929: Alberto Cavalcanti’s Rien que les heures (1926), Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis (1927), and Dziga Vertov’s Man...

Rather than dampening the excitement around vérité filmmaking, David Holzman's Diary instead announced the birth of a whole new documentary subgenre.

In December, UnionDocs hosted Peter Hutton, one of the avant-garde’s most accomplished filmmakers, for an evening of four films: three old pieces, and footage from a work-in-progress. Since the late 1970s with the first New York Portrait (1978-79), most of Hutton’s films have been short...

The past decade witnessed an explosion of documentary film production, but this growth has not been met by a reciprocal increase in documentary criticism. Richard Brody, Ed Halter, Thom Powers, Lisa Rosman, Aaron Hillis, and Karin Chien discussed the challenges of getting documentaries critically reviewed and brainstormed solutions during this lively panel.

In March, UnionDocs presented a rare screening of Thys Ockersen’s Don Siegel: Last of the Independents (1980) as part of our ongoing Docs on Auteurs series. Prior to the show, co-programmer Cullen Gallagher prepared an interview with Ockersen. For more information on Thys Ockersen or to...

Alban Muja is an artist from Kosovo who is currently doing a residency at UnionDocs through C.E.C. ArtsLink. On November 7th, he screened a short program of videos and films about the nature of names and the uses to which they are put. Spanning the past six years, from Muja’s college...

Last week brought the sad news that amateur filmmaker Robbins Barstow had died at home in Hartford. He was 91. Since the mid-1930s, Barstow had produced more than a hundred films and videos, most of them documents of quotidian family life, all marked by a peculiar narrative sensibility. In the...

Simone Bennett’s The Truth Machine (2007) begins with an epigram: “Truth is a mirror which fell to earth in a million pieces, and each human being picked up a piece, looked at it and saw themselves reflected. And each decided they saw the truth…but not realizing that truth is...