video2zero

Third Place – Man on Wire. In 1974 Philippe Petit defies police, gravity and all concerns of self-preservation to spend 45 minutes dancing on a wire suspended between the twin towers of the WTC.

Standout character was the NY City insurance commissioner who provided the team with fake IDs to enter the WTC. A truly strange character, who calls to mind an image of what Frank Zappa might have looked like if he’d chosen to go into insurance rather than music.

Second Place - Shine A Light. Making a Rolling Stones concert movie devoid of visual cliches was never going to happen while Mick and Keith were still ambulatory. But Scorsese tried. No limo shots, no hurrying down backstage corridors, no low angle wide shots of Keith silhouetted against the arc lights, no glamorous groupies, no Clintons bopping in the upper circle – no audience shots at all. And all this with a dozen of Hollywood’s top cinematographers and film-makers manning the cameras. Masterly restraint at its finest.

First Place – Standard Operating Procedure. Errol Morris finally offers some insight into the weird blog posts he has been writing in the New York Times over the past year or so. By relentlessly morphing the now iconic images of Abu Gharib back into snap-shots, and abstracting the happy snappers as helpless everymen – Morris creates what will surely emerge as the enduring testament to this sorry episode. Is it art? Who knows – but stylistically the production is at once classic and avant avant-garde.

Related posts:

1. Errol Morris – re-enactments and truth “Critics argue that the use of re-enactments suggest a callous disregard on the part of a filmmaker for what is true. I don’t agree....