#cinema-verite

#cinema-verite

American cinema-verite demigod Frederick Wiseman's latest is a 6,000-course tasting menu of a documentary, like one of those supercuts with all the delicious food on offer in Studio Ghibli films. Most of the 95-year-old's career has been dedicated to chronicling US institutions, but here he returns to the strain of Francophile work he has dipped into since the mid-90s (he lives in the country part-time). In this case, he infiltrates the Michelin triple-starred Le Bois sans Feuilles restaurant in Ouches in the Loire,

In my recent Filmmaker conversation with Julia Loktev about the making of her monumental documentary, My Undesirable Friends, I cited the work of the late documentary filmmaker Joel DeMott, because I believe there is a straight line between DeMott's approach in the late 1970s to shooting vérité documentary using shoulder-mounted 16mm cameras and Loktev's latter-day methods using iPhones. DeMott, who died in June, has been eulogized in obits in Documentary and The New York Times,