Wednesdays in June | 25 Documentaries
Is there a more perfect medium to explore film history than the documentary? In a sense, the first films were documentary recordings of the world in front of the lens, and filmed records of historical events, countries and cultures otherwise inaccessible to viewers, and even simply footage of life in motion in cities and towns and lands both exotic and inhospitable are invaluable documents of the past that text and still images can't fully capture.
Most importantly, the history of cinema—the artistic richness of imagery and storytelling and performance, the technical innovations and aesthetic evolutions, the beauty and power of a triumphant sequence in motion—is best illustrated with actual clips that allow audiences to experience the subject under consideration directly. Books allows for great depth when exploring the lives of artists and the backstory of production but a well-made documentary helps us fully experience the ephemeral glory that is cinema: the expression of an image, the subtlety of a performance, the power of a directorial choice to enhance a dramatic situation or sell a visual gag.
In addition to narrative features about Hollywood, TCM’s "Hollywoodland" spotlight invites viewers to explore a plethora of facets of films and filmmaking with 26 documentary features and shorts and one epic documentary series. The series opens with the respective TCM debuts of two documentaries and Film: The Living Record of Our Memory (2021) provides a fitting introduction to the project. The stars of this film are the archivists all over the world dedicated to preserving and restoring films from the distant (and sometimes not-so-distant) past. Director Inés Toharia Terán explores challenges they face and celebrates their efforts with examples of films they've saved, some of them thought lost forever but for their work.
From French film preservationist and historian Serge Bromberg and filmmaker Eric Lange come The Invention of Cinema: Cinema's First Colors (2022) and The Invention of Cinema: Cinema Finds Its Voice (2022). They make a match of sorts as they explore the decades-long efforts by filmmakers and inventors to develop, respectively, a film process able to record and project the full range of color and a technically feasible system for recording and playing sound synchronized with the moving image. They both explore how the intersection of technology and commerce guided the exploration of different solutions. Rare clips guide us through the early efforts and illustrate how failed experiments informed subsequent efforts. Leonard Maltin narrates the American version of these French-produced documentaries. And in the era of the multiplex and home viewing, Going Attractions: The Definitive Story of the Movie Palace (2019) is a reminder of just how important the movie-going experience was in the glory days of Hollywood, and how these lavish temples to cinema vanished almost entirely in the modern era.
At heart of the series is Women Make Film: A New Road Movie Through Cinema (2019). The title suggests a history of women filmmakers but this epic, ambitious 14-part series from filmmaker Mark Cousins is anything but a traditional documentary. It's more like a companion to his 2011 series The Story of Film: An Odyssey (previously featured on TCM). Where the earlier series offered a fresh, at times idiosyncratic take on the history of cinema, Women Make Film tackles nothing less than the way filmmakers tell their stories and communicate meaning to audiences. Cousins organizes this odyssey into 40 discreet chapters and he draws every one of the hundreds of examples from films directed by women. It's an ingenious and effective way to showcase the legacy of women in cinema and introduce us to forgotten and overlooked directors from all over the world worthy of further exploration. Tilda Swinton, Adjoa Andoh, Jane Fonda, Sharmila Tagore, Kerry Fox, Thandiwe Newton and Debra Winger join Cousins to narrate the journey. The episodes play out over four successive Wednesdays.
Of course, there would be no films without the filmmakers themselves. Oscar Micheaux: The Superhero of Black Filmmaking (2021) profiles the life and work of an artist who forged a career outside of the studios to make films about black lives in early 20th century America for African-American audiences neglected by Hollywood. His legacy is undeniable—he directly confronted race and racism and such taboo subjects as miscegenation and lynching in his dramas—yet for decades his work was overlooked by film historians. Today, Micheaux is celebrated as the godfather of African-American filmmaking and a pioneering independent filmmaker.
Les Blank followed Werner Herzog into the South American jungle to chronicle the making of Herzog's dream project Fitzcarraldo (1982) and came out with Burden of Dreams (1982), not just a making-of piece but a portrait of obsession, ingenuity, and at times reckless risk taking in the pursuit of making art. It's a "making of" documentary like no other. The maverick life of Samuel Fuller—newspaperman, pulp author, infantryman and filmmaker—is told through his own words and films in A Fuller Life (2013), a portrait directed by his daughter Samantha Fuller, while The True Adventures of Raoul Walsh (2014) surveys the career of another kind of independent spirit who forged a long, successful career within the studio system. And it's not just about the directors. Image Makers: The Adventures of America’s Pioneer Cinematographers (2019) casts its lens on seven masters whose work behind the camera helped define the look of Hollywood movies and expand the expressive possibilities of the art of cinema and Carl Laemmle (2019) looks at the producer and founder of Universal Studios.
The third evening kicks off with Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession (2004), a loving tribute to the most influential cable channel that you've never heard of. The ad-free movie channel, programmed like a mix of arthouse cinema and the repertory house, thrived in Los Angeles during in the 1970s and 1980s and became a favorite of filmmakers and cineastes alike until its sad demise. Its influence was limited to its relatively small audience but that audience had enormous influence on the film world. The story behind the labor of love is fascinating—and a little tragic—in its own right. Pauline Kael, the outspoken film critic of The New Yorker, also wielded enormous influence. What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael (2018), which profiles the writer whose passion drove her prose and whose reviews helped drive the public conversation around many movies, helps modern audiences understand just how and why she became such an essential critic in her time.
A trio of films take on the failings of American filmmaking in the 20th century. Paul Robeson: Tribute to an Artist (1979) won an Oscar for its portrait of the artist and activist who became the first African-American leading man in Hollywood, which lacked roles befitting his talent and stature. The Celluloid Closet (1995) addresses Hollywood's portrayals of gay and lesbian characters through its first century, characters suggested rather than overtly acknowledged in demeaning stereotypes either played for laughs or marked as sinister threats. The landmark documentary was released just as new voices in American Independent cinema were tackling queer stories, forcing Hollywood to take a more nuanced and complex approach to queer characters. Yellowface: Asian Whitewashing and Racism in Hollywood (2019) looks at the long road for Asian representation in American movies, which routinely cast Caucasian stars to play Chinese and Japanese characters and during World War II resorted to offensive stereotypes in its propagandistic portraits of Japanese characters.
On a lighter note, Soundies: A Musical History Hosted by Michael Feinstein (2007) explores the brief era of the original music videos. The musical film shorts were produced to play on a visual jukebox in the 1940s, a technology that never really took off but left behind a rich library of filmed performances from legends like Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Cab Calloway to popular singers such as Doris Day, Anita O'Day and Nat King Cole. That's quite a legacy for a technology that never caught on.
The final night of "Hollywoodland" celebrates the contributions of often unsung and unknown artists who work behind the scenes. Harold and Lillian: A Hollywood Love Story (2015) profiles two such artists: Harold Michelson, an art director and storyboard artist on some of the greatest films ever made, and Lillian Michelson, who ran a Hollywood research library that was an essential resource for hundreds of productions in an era before the Internet connected artists to archives all over the world. Harold earned Oscar nominations for the production design of Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) and Terms of Endearment (1984) but otherwise they were unknown to most filmgoers. Within Hollywood, however, they were legendary, not just for their work, but as teachers, inspirations, and supportive and encouraging friends, and Daniel Raim's loving documentary frames their influence within the story of a lifelong love affair.
A few years before Harold and Lillian, Raim featured Harold Michelson in Something's Gonna Live (2009), which he subtitled "Six Great Hollywood Cinema Artists on Film Classics." Michelson joins production designers Robert Boyle, Henry Bumstead and Albert Nozaki, and cinematographers Conrad Hall and Haskell Wexler, friends and fellow artist who look back on their contributions to some of the greatest films ever made: The Birds (1963), North by Northwest (1959), To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), In Cold Blood (1967), and more. It's also a celebration of a particular kind of filmmaking from an earlier era and a reminder of the collaborative nature of filmmaking.
By Design: The Joe Caroff Story (2022) profiles the artist whose graphic design of the titles and movie poster art for such films as West Side Story (1961), A Hard Day's Night (1964) and Manhattan (1979), and the James Bond gun logo are inextricably part these films' identities. Floyd Norman: An Animated Life (2016) introduces audiences to the first African-American animator at Walt Disney Studios and his decades-long career working on such films as Sleeping Beauty (1959), The Jungle Book (1967) and Toy Story 2 (1999). From the unknown to the iconic, High Noon on the Waterfront (2022) explores the impact of the blacklist on Hollywood through an imagined conversation between Carl Foreman (voiced by Edward Norton) and Elia Kazan (voiced by John Turturro)
The series ends with music. Max Steiner: Maestro of Movie Music (2019) looks over the life and art of the composer who won three Academy Awards and earned over two dozen nominations for scoring such classics as King Kong (1933), Gone With the Wind (1939), Casablanca (1942) and The Searchers (1956). And finally King of Cool (2021) tells the story of singer, actor and Rat Pack legend Dean Martin, who personified the idea of "cool" in public but led an entirely different life offstage and offscreen.
