by Robert Hunt
The last few years have seen a flood of documentary films of nearly every kind, from biographies of people and cultural events both great (Susan Sontag and Bob Marley) and obscure (the Beatles' fan club president?), to speculative films so enamored of their own wool-gathering that they never get around to making a point (unless you believe that the carpet in The Shining looks like the Apollo 11 launchpad...). Such thematic diversity makes it hard to discern exactly why we're seeing such a torrent of nonfiction films, but perhaps it's a logical after-effect of the information age: Now that we've filmed and recorded nearly everything in the world, we need someone to sort through it all and, if they're lucky, make sense of it.…
by Robert Hunt
The last few years have seen a flood of documentary films of nearly every kind, from biographies of people and cultural events both great (Susan Sontag and Bob Marley) and obscure (the Beatles' fan club president?), to speculative films so enamored of their own wool-gathering that they never get around to making a point (unless you believe that the carpet in The Shining looks like the Apollo 11 launchpad...). Such thematic diversity makes it hard to discern exactly why we're seeing such a torrent of nonfiction films, but perhaps it's a logical after-effect of the information age: Now that we've filmed and recorded nearly everything in the world, we need someone to sort through it all and, if they're lucky, make sense of it.…