My Review of American Masters: Hannah Arendt: Facing Tyranny directed by Chana Gazit & Jeff Bieber

 This was an interesting doc on the famous scholar of tyranny and authoritarianism. I knew of her work on this, but also knew of her contradiction in endorsing authoritarianism in the United States with her support for Jim Crow laws in the American South (her views on feminism and human rights are also sketchy). The fact that she was driven out of Germany for the same reasons, but could easily defend American race laws has always put her at arms-length with me. Learning about her liberal zionist sentiments gave me insights to how she holds these different views—though it was unfortunate that the documentary did not cover the above controversial views that she held, the most it goes is the fallout over her coverage of the Eichmann trial. Certainly she was not the only Jewish refugee from Germany to hold such views, but it is disappointing that one who should know better felt so comfortable with the moral hypocrisy (and yet she could not understand how her idol Martin Heidegger could be an unrepentant Nazi). 

The documentary does not give a thorough outline of her opinions or works, but a rough, safe look at the most notable points of her life & career. I was surprised this documentary got made at all given the current crackdown on anything with US funding that criticizes totalitarianism, fascism, and the like. Arendt came to the USA as she thought it was the only free democratic multicultural country, but the Cold War and Red Scare showed her how easily the empire embraced totalitarianism. 

As surface level informative as this documentary is, it skips and glosses over too much for my taste.

My Review of The Blues Accordin’ to Lightnin’ Hopkins directed by Les Blank (and Skip Gleason)

 I hate to be one of those "I liked X before it was popular"  hipster-types, but I really was into the Blues before Sinners (2025). I got into the Blues and Jazz after watching Ken Burns' Jazz documentary as a kid. It (and old-school music in general) has been a personal love of mine ever since. Of course, even in the early-2000s it was unusual for an African-American millennial to be into African-American folk music (which the Blues is), but it didn't bother me none. As it is, one of my favorite Blues musicians if Samuel "Lightnin'" Hopkins and this 30 minute Les Blank documentary is about him and the people of his neighborhood in Centerville, Texas. 

This documentary works on the classic "stream-of-consciousness" style of most of Les Blank's documentaries. We get introduced to the subject(s) of the doc and we just follow them around and let them show us what they want. In this case, Lighnin' Hopkins wanted to show his neighbors and some of his fellow musicians at a rodeo show and cookout where they would socialize and play some of their songs. While this doc is mainly about Hopkins—the breakout star would be Mance Liscomb who would get his own Les Blank documentary a few years later. The people are all quintessential Les Blank docu-subjects that you are use to seeing in his works. 

I glad that docs like this exist that just let the people show themselves as they wanted to be seen and I can't wait to watch more docs from him.

My Review of The Queen of Basketball (2021) directed by Ben Proudfoot

 With all the…”rage” over women’s basketball now, it can be easy to forget about the early days of women in the sport. Certainly in the pre-Title IX era when American women were given next to no support to participate in any kind of athletic competition. The late-Lucy Harris emerged as the dominate player in women’s basketball on the eve of Title IX and this documentary shined a light on her achievements and honored her before she passed away. It is a short documentary, but still a very good one and the best one I have seen produced by the NYT.

My Review of Festival (1967) directed by Murray Lerner

 This documentary/concert film marks the beginning of the era of Baby-Boomer concert film genre that ran into the mid-70s. This film shows the genesis of the popular image of the counterculture movement in the United States. It is based around the Newport Folk Festival between the years of 1963-1966. You have an assorted mix of Upper-Class New Englanders, Left-wing intellectuals, hipsters, and the beginning of the more drug-induced spin-off of the hipsters: the hippies. The editing of this film by Howard Alk points the way to the more extreme-styles of the Monterey Pop film of the following year, but we are not all the way there yet. It does give you a diverse, if uneven, sample of the music of the folk scene of the mid-1960s.

This may be one of the most diverse festival films—musically—of the era as you get not only "folk" music, but the Blues, Country, Bluegrass, Gospel, folk-rock and all the subgenres of those styles that were around at the time. I can appreciate that it had something for everyone and musicians who would not interact with each other anywhere else would meet at Newport, Rhode Island. Yes, a certain eccentric Minnesotan was the star attraction during this era in folk circles, but the film does try to balance him out and share equal time to performers who obvious were not as famous or worshipped. While this film can get lost after the concert films that came after it—it still is an interesting watch as a time capsule or as look at how much more political these functions were before the LSD started flowing.

My Review of Chez Jolie Coiffure (2018) directed by Rosine Mbakam

 What a beautiful little documentary this was. Chez Jolie Coiffure is a cinéma vérité documentary about an undocumented Cameroonian hairdresser named Sabine and her salon that she runs in an underground mall in Belgium. The film is done totally in the salon and it documents the daily life of Sabine, her employees, and her customers and it commentates on the wider community of African immigrants in Belgium. For me, it is an interesting look at how immigrant communities outside the United States deal with the issue of immigration, trying to get citizenship in a system that tries to make it impossible, and how folks deal with their everyday lives in the meantime. This is the first film I have watched by the film-maker Rosine Mftego Mbakam, but it won't be my last.

My Review of Muhammad Ali (2021) directed by Ken Burns, Sarah L. Burns, David McMahon

 This is one of the best, if not the best, of Ken Burns' biographical documentaries. This is also, production-wise, the most modern of Ken Burns' documentaries even compared to his Vietnam War documentary. It is an excellent introduction to the 21st century of the figure of Muhammad Ali. Ali was considered by many as one of the greatest athletes of the 20th Century. There have been infinite documentaries surrounding the life of Muhammad Ali examining every factor and detail imaginable. Including this doc, we've had three alone in the last 12 months (Sep 2021) so any new documentary had to be either be a very well intro or a doc that had some sort-of new info on Ali that no one has heard about in the last 44 years. This doc smartly went the route of the former and it has paid-off well.

This documentary uses the "Ken Burns style" with Ali masterfully. This doc in a way benefits from Ali's  own decades of myth-making by now having a template. The challenge for Burns & co. was sorting through the myth and showing the actual histories. Luckily we have quite a few people very close to Ali including his brother, 2nd & 3rd wives, and 2 of his daughters as well as a host of friends and associates and archival photos and films that help aid in this. If you are someone who is familiar with Ali's story than you will not learn anything new here, but if you are new to him or not very familiar to him than this is a perfect place to start. There will be hundreds of other documentaries to watch afterwards concerning him, but this may be the perfect starting place.

Shifting to the documentary itself, I have to say I was impressed at the new modern feel that it gave off. I had just watched Burns' previous documentary on Ernest Hemingway and it feels like the production went ten-fold into the future. This is the second documentary Ken Burns has done on a famous boxer after his excellent documentary on Jack Johnson the first black heavyweight boxing champion (who's legacy figures throughout this documentary). I'm not sure if it was the addition of his daughter and son-in-law as co-directors with Ken Burns (Burns was the primary producer and his son-in-law David McMahon was the head writer). For me, it was mainly the use of music that lifts this documentary. The incidental/filler music was made specifically for this  documentary by Jahlil Beats, while the musical selection consulted/curated by Peter Miller (the producer for Burns' Jazz doc) is possibly one of his best musical soundtracks ever for one of his documentaries. It elevated this documentary for me in a way that none of his docs have done since Jazz (the first Ken burns doc I ever watched). I also enjoyed hearing Keith David back as the narrator—a very appropriate choice here.

It is interesting seeing the evolution of Ken Burns' career from 1981 to now. When he first started, his documentaries were wedded to the romantic notions of America: the myths, the Dream. As he kept going and kept learning—and kept being held accountable when he dropped the ball, his willingness to look American history straight in the face and look at the ugly parts with as much passion as the pretty parts has made him a better film-maker and dare I say a better person. It is interesting to see how the same man who made The Civil War, made The Vietnam War. The guy who made the romanticized-documentary on Huey Long in 1985 made a 1000-times better one on Muhammad Ali. True evolution, true growth, true awakening of an artist. Just like Muhammad Ali.

Short thoughts on the Ken Burns' Hemingway documentary

It's always a bonus for me as both a cinephile and a bibliophile when I can talk about both at the same time. Unfortunately, not so much here as I have read only a few of Hemingway's short stories. I've never been really big into Hemingway and this documentary, while raising my interest some, has not done so much. I tend to be more into white modernist writers like Faulkner or Joyce. But I am sure I can muster up the strength for at least two Hemingway novels. Toni Morrison writes about Faulkner at length in her book Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination in-which she was trying to make an argument to read Hemingway with a very meta-critical eye, but it sort-of turned me off to the guy. This documentary confirmed to me that, indeed, Ernest Hemingway was a very terrible person who could write. 

As far as this documentary itself, it is what you would expect from Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. Their biographic documentaries all seem to follow the same 3-part pattern that they have perfected over the years. I have observed that there is sightly more archival non-Ken Burns interview footage used here than you usually see in a Ken Burns doc, but if you can use it, use it. I probably won't watch this doc again for a long time simply because the subject has no interest to me, but it is what I like in a Ken Burns doc style-wise.

My Review of King in the Wilderness (2018) directed by Peter W. Kunhardt

 There have been a few docs that cover the late years in the life of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., but this may be the lengthiest examination of it. These days we have the Santa Clause-version of MLK that even his enemies now invoke for their agenda. This documentary looks at the darkest time of his career from the vespers at Watts to his assassination in Memphis, Tennessee (1965-1968). He'd never been popular in his lifetime with a majority of white Americans, but he looses ground with the younger generations of black Americans as well when the Black Power Movement begins. When he come out publicly against the Vietnam War he looses much of the remaining support outside of his inner-circle. The doc has a lot of photos that I had never seen before and certain footage that I had seen, but from different angles. This is King at his lowest point, but also at his maturest morally and revolutionary. I definitely recommend this to people who aren't familiar to post-Selma MLK.

My Review of Trances (1981) directed by Ahmed El Maânouni

 This is one of the most underrated music documentary of all time. I first saw this movie randomly on the TCM (Turner Classic Movies) channel in the United States and it blew me away. I knew a little about Moroccan music and gnawa, but this group Nass El Ghiwane is something special. They are the forerunners of interpreting Moroccan folk music in the post-independence era. This documentary tracks this group in 1981 and gives an overview of their history and influences. The film balances the narratives of their background with their musical selections. 

Nass El Ghiwane broke with traditional Arabic music popular at the time in North Africa and went for a combination of more traditional Moroccan music which is based in Berber and Sub-Saharan African culture and they symbolized this by using all Moroccan instruments and replacing that key Arab instrument–the oud–with that key African instrument: the banjo. They also included Sufism in their music in a big way that contemporary groups at that time rarely did. Their shows also were a way for folks to vent their grievances with Moroccan society and the government at that time and their lyrics summed up the general mood very matter-of-factly. If Moroccan or African music is not your thing than, you don't have a reason to watch this. But if you like those genres, this movie is required viewing.