The Big Picture

Great stories, in reality, aren’t the only ingredient needed to make a successful documentary. Filmmakers also need patience, perseverance, creativity, luck and, of course, funding. To say that co-directors Pamela Green and Jarik van Sluijs have a great story to tell is an understatement. Largely unknown and unappreciated, Alice Guy-Blaché was, without question, one of the most important figures in motion picture history. Now, Green and van Sluijs are using digital cinema technology to gather, assemble and organize a wide range of information to get Guy-Blaché’s story ready for the big screen. And what a story it is.

For more than four decades the Downtown Community Center in Lower Manhattan has been a vital resource for training and nurturing independent filmmakers, in particular documentary filmmakers. For most of that time DCTV has called a landmarked 1896 firehouse home. The center reached a significant milestone recently, as the funding is finally in place for a new theatre there that one DCTV executive called “the last piece of the puzzle.”

Russia has a long and proud tradition of 3D films and now comes a new entry. Already selected as the Russian entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 86th Academy Awards, director Fedor Bondarchuk’s Stalingrad claims to be Russia's first movie ever to be completely produced with digital stereoscopic 3D technology.

Digital Cinema Report celebrates its eleventh anniversary this month and, rather bizarrely I admit, the milestone made me think of one of the most famous (and surely most often misquoted) conversations in movie history. Even though it’s comedy I think the scene speaks rather eloquently about the ongoing and never-ending dynamic between the creative community and the engineers who supply them with technology that is always better than ever. The conversation takes place, of course, in the cult classic This is Spinal Tap between heavy metal rocker Nigel Tufnel (played by Christopher Guest) and documentary filmmaker Marty DiBergi (Rob Reiner). They are speaking about the band’s unique amplifiers.