Category Archives: documentary

a great gospel concert (Film: Amazing Grace – Aretha Franklin, 2018)

Posted on August 13, 2019 by admin

In January 1972, Aretha Franklin gave two concerts on two consecutive days at a Baptist church in Los Angeles. The 29-year-old soul and R&B singer had already gained worldwide fame and the unofficial crown of Queen of Soul Music. In … Continue reading →

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the last great festival (Film: Message to Love – Murray Lerner, 1996)

Posted on August 8, 2019 by admin

In August 1970, more than 600,000 people invaded the Isle of Wight, located near the south coast of England and populated in the ordinary times by less than 100,000 inhabitants, to attend the third edition of the Pop Music Festival. … Continue reading →

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a controversial posterity (Film: Golda – Sagi Burnstein, Udi Nir, Shani Roznes, 2019)

Posted on June 14, 2019 by admin

The historical perception left behind by Golda Meir is very different in Israel and in the Jewish Diaspora. The Jews of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe as well as those in the United States remember her as one … Continue reading →

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Clouzot films Picasso (Film: Le mystère Picasso – Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1956)

Posted on June 13, 2019 by admin

Pablo Picasso and a few other important artists of the 20th century (Constantin Brancusi is another example) had a love affair mixed with fascination with the photographic and film cameras. They recognized them as a means of artistic expression and … Continue reading →

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a special kind of documentary about a special kind of woman (documentary: Shooting the Mafia – Letizia Battaglia, 2019)

Posted on June 9, 2019 by admin

‘Shooting the Mafia‘ is a documentary that tells the story of the life of a woman who is our contemporary, but whose biography is very different from that of most people around her and us. The merit of the Irish … Continue reading →

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youth of a genius (Film: Young Picasso – Phil Grabsky, 2019)

Posted on May 17, 2019 by admin

1907 was an ‘annus mirabilis’ (a wonderful year) in the history of art and in the life of Pablo Picasso. It was the year when Picasso painted ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon’, a painting that overturned all the traditional conceptions of composition, … Continue reading →

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the greatest anti-Impressionist (Film: Degas: Passion for Perfection – David Bickerstaff)

Posted on April 27, 2019 by admin

I had the chance to visit last month the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, a respectable institution, designed as a place of spiritual recollection and of discovery of a selection of treasures of art and civilization, modeled (keeping the proportions) after … Continue reading →

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the greatest dialog about movies ever (Film: Hitchcock/Truffaut – Kent Jones, 2015)

Posted on April 26, 2019 by admin

‘Hitchcock / Truffaut‘ is a movie about a book about movies. And much more. It’s a movie about the book that many of the movie fans (I among them) think of as the best book ever written about movies. A … Continue reading →

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portraits and letters (Film: Cézanne, Portraits of a Life – Phil Grabsky, 2018)

Posted on March 15, 2019 by admin

Paul Cezanne’s life can be divided into two very different periods. Born in 1839 in a prosperous family, with a banker father, he chose a life and artistic career very different from the expectations of the bourgeois environment. All his … Continue reading →

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traveling the world, traveling the mind (documentary: Sans Soleil – Chris Marker, 1983)

Posted on February 16, 2019 by admin

‘Sans Soleil‘ is a movie that is hard to fit in any category, same as its director Chris Marker (1921 – 2012) was a cinematic persona hard to characterize or place into a single shelve of the French film history. … Continue reading →

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