Film
The two filmmakers probe the ethics and surprise of documentary.
Films that combine documentary and poetics.
Huddled in front of a suite of bulletin boards filled with military charts, folding his fingers over papers as if they were slices of pizza, licking his lips, jowls quivering—this is Senator Joseph McCarthy as he appeared live on ABC in 1954 as part of the 36-day, 188-hour televised extravaganza that would come to be known as the Army-McCarthy Hearings. He’s berating a colonel, insinuating that “phony charts” have been submitted to the floor of the Senate. “The television audience,” he yells, “they are the jury in this case.”
In the aftermath of Eric Garner’s murder, a Black protester shouts at a group of cops, “Black officers, Puerto Rican officers, nobody likes you! Nobody. You are hated. You’re hated in New York and throughout the United States. This isn’t ignorance. This is anger, officer!” This scene from Stephen Maing’s character-driven documentary Crime + Punishment is another testimony to the rampant racial inequity in the United States.
At the risk of using a common critical canard: Leigh Ledare’s The Task is “a movie for anyone who” has ever been paralyzed with resentment when told they need to check their privilege—but then, maybe it’s for those whose disabusement has yet to begin.
The directors’ latest work will be shown alongside the sweltering, grimy films that inspired it.
The director on ritual, the pain of creation, and her new film, Madeline’s Madeline.
Examining the politics of representation.
The artist reflects on the personal and creative challenges that led to her first feature-length documentary, Instructions on Parting, which recently premiered at MoMA.
A film uncovers an episode at the origins of the civil rights movement.
The Argentine filmmaker on colonialism, recreating history, and Zama.
To witness the vulgar, Zap Comix–inspired panorama in Manuel DeLanda’s 1979 film ISM ISM—its blubbering testicle-breasts and segmented-plumber’s-pipe phallus scrawled in marker on the tiled walls of a Manhattan subway station, just to start—is to share in the brief, bewildering encounter a commuter may have had with street art before the soap and cleaning brushes arrived.
A film investigating memory and history, premiering exclusively on BOMB, with a brief interview by Alex Zafiris.
A rediscovered milestone in independent black cinema.
An experimental documentary on border crossing, less about that place than what it represents.
The late Iranian filmmaker’s final work is an ethereal study of the mechanics of cinema.
Four generations of unhappiness populate the French auteur’s latest.
Featuring selections by Jaime Manrique, David Grubbs, Molly Surno, Lynn Melnick, Lucio Pozzi, and more.
A story of immigration and integration.
