Thank you , , , , , (sorry we didn’t get to your question, Joel!) and many others for tuning into my live video with !

It was fascinating to learn more about Gary’s roots in indie music distribution, how that led to him starting the DVD label Plexifilm — I am telling you, in my friend group, we watched every single DVD release they put out in those first few years, from Moog to I Am Trying to Break Your Heart to Gary’s directorial debut Helvetica, and I had no idea of the connections between those films and to Gary.

It was also great to learn more about the genesis of Eno. As I’ve mentioned before, Eno is both a feature doc on Brian Eno and a radical experiment in documentary storytelling, in which each time the film is presented, it’s a new iteration, never to be seen again. I asked Gary how he ensured each version would still be a satisfying cinematic journey, when so much of the runtime is given over to chance. Gary shared some news with me about the future of that film on streaming.

Gary’s long and sui generis career in film has been an inspiration to me, and judging from the comments, to many of you as well. I can’t wait to see what he does next!

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Short films were first officially recognized at the Oscars in 1932 when the 5th Academy Awards introduced two categories honoring live-action “short subject” motion pictures and one honoring cartoons. The Academy would take almost a decade to add a category specifically devoted to documentary shorts, but nonfiction films were represented in this area of the Oscars from the start. In fact, all three of the nominees for Best Live Action Short Subject (Novelty) were documentaries, and one of them was named the winner at the ceremony that November.

In all, seven documentary shorts won Oscars during that time before they received their own category. Following the first documentary to win an Oscar, these shorts proved the need for exclusive awards for nonfiction cinema. While the Academy didn’t honor a documentary at every one of their first 13 ceremonies, they at least nominated nonfiction films for Oscars every year of their awards during that period. Most were shorts recognized in the Novelty category, which was intended, in part, for newsreels, travelogues, and other types of nonfiction works.

What constitutes a documentary is up for discussion, but I’m only considering films that don’t consist solely of scripted reenactments of events performed by professional actors. Give Me Liberty, which won the Oscar for Best Short Subject (Color) in 1937, is technically listed as a documentary on IMDb, but it’s a wholly dramatized, narration-free account of Patrick Henry’s famous “Give me liberty, or give me death” speech in 1775. Similar winners in later years, such as Declaration of Independence, Sons of Liberty, and Teddy the Rough Rider, lack this label, and none of them qualify for this focus.

Excluding those history films, here’s a breakdown of the first seven short documentaries to win Oscars:

Wrestling Swordfish (1931)

Mack Sennett’s eight-minute documentary Wrestling Swordfish officially won the inaugural Oscar certificate for Best Live Action Short Subject (Novelty), though some historians might add an asterisk to its victory. According to the November 8, 1932, edition of Variety, this now-lost record of one of Sennett’s own deep-sea fishing trips originally came in second place during the nominating committee’s vote. The Pete Smith production Swing High, which showcases the trapeze artist family The Flying Codonas, received 133 points, while Wrestling Swordfish earned 128 points. Yet, the 15-person committee reportedly picked the latter as the winner, causing some confusion.

To settle the “mix-up,” the Academy reportedly was to hold a run-off for the new category, with voting opened up to all members following a screening of the two documentary shorts on November 9. According to the following week’s edition of Variety, however, the decision was still being determined by the nominating committee at a meeting held on November 14, with a revote needed because some of its members weren’t present at the final voting. Wrestling Swordfish was again deemed the winner, as acknowledged at the ceremony on November 18 and in the November 22 edition of Variety, but the trade gave no further details on the process.

Some accounts claim that Sennett bullied for the result. IMDb’s trivia notes for both films paint him as a villain in the matter. This also probably could have just ended with a compromise of a tie (after all, Fredric March and Wallace Beery tied for the Oscar for Best Actor that same year due to a rule involving any tally where the outcome has two top choices separated by three or fewer votes). In his 1993 book Behind the Oscar: The Secret History of the Academy Awards, Anthony Holden implies that the Academy Executive Secretary was at fault in the scenario for avoiding his responsibility to cast a tie-breaking vote. We may never know the whole truth.

We also may never know which film deserved the Oscar more. Wrestling Swordfish appears to be lost, with only its positive reviews remaining to indicate its worth. Swing High is a decent spotlight of an impressive act that might not otherwise be seen by its audience without this cinematic record. Its narration is overdone. Its slow-motion sequences are appreciated, adding an element that even those seeing The Flying Codonas live wouldn’t get. I actually might have preferred the mostly lost third nominee, Screen Souvenirs, an archival compilation that treats cinema as a kind of time machine where we can revisit people and events of the past through old film footage.

The big irony of the Wrestling Swordfish win is that Sennett was and remains best known as an icon of slapstick comedy films, yet he received his only competitive Oscar for a work of relatively serious nonfiction. The Keystone Studios founder and former Charlie Chaplin boss was only nominated for one other film. The same year that Wrestling Swordfish won, the Sennett-produced short The Loud Mouth was up for the inaugural Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film (Comedy). That lost to the Hal Roach-produced Laurel and Hardy short The Music Box. Presumably, the results in that race weren’t even close, as there was no dispute or run-off there.

Krakatoa (1933)

Another documentary that’s hard to find today, the 26-minute film Krakatoa won the second Oscar for Best Live Action Short Subject (Novelty). It’s an educational production depicting the 1883 eruption of the titular volcanic island, and its sound design was apparently as significant as its visual spectacle. I wouldn’t know, unfortunately, but reports of its impact on theatrical exhibition make it seem to have been for sound systems what James Cameron’s Avatar was for digital 3D projection. The film was originally narrated by play-by-play sports broadcasting pioneer Graham McNamee, though a 1965 re-release replaced him with actor Joseph Cotten.

City Of Wax (1934)

The nine-minute nature documentary City of Wax won the Oscar for Best Live Action Short Subject (Novelty) the next year, at the 7th Academy Awards. It’s such an emblematic educational film, with its close-up look at honey bees and its droning narration (by actor Gayne Whitman), that you can easily picture it running through a rickety high school projector. But it gets dark at the end, almost seeming to have a political message about the uniformity and disposability of workers in such a system. That probably wasn’t intended.

City of Wax was produced and directed by brothers Horace Woodard and Stacy Woodard, the latter of whom also worked on The Sea, a short documentary nominated in the same category the previous year. They made other nature documentaries together, but later they separately went into business with the U.S. government. Horace Woodard went on to shoot part of the important World War II propaganda film The Negro Soldier, and Stacy Woodard shot part of Pare Lorentz’s classic New Deal propaganda film The River.

Wings Over Everest (1934)

At the 8th Academy Awards, three more documentaries were nominated in the Live Action Short Subject (Novelty) category, while one of the first films we’d classify as a mockumentary, How to Sleep, was nominated and won the Oscar for Best Live Action Short Subject (Comedy). The Novelty winner was the 22-minute film Wings Over Everest, which reminded me of the first documentary Oscar winner, With Byrd at the South Pole, because it similarly presents views of a cold, rough, as-yet inaccessible place that were unavailable to audiences before film cameras could be taken up in airplanes. In this case, that location was the peaks of Mount Everest.

While the film highlights exclusive footage of a historical expedition, and it is part of that era when cinema was commonly a part of scientific exploration, not just a representation, Wings Over Everest is nowhere near an achievement on the level of With Byrd at the South Pole. Most of the film consists of the real people, including pilots Lord Clydesdale and David McIntyre and financial benefactor Lady Houston, in staged reenactments of the lead-up to the flight. And they are as lifeless as you might dread with a documentary. The footage taken from the planes is important, but also not the most exciting, plus the clearer shots are apparently from a later flight.

The Private Life Of The Gannets (1934)

The Novelty category went away after the 8th Academy Awards (as did Comedy shorts), but that didn’t stop nonfiction from being nominated. The Oscars changed its live-action shorts categories to award the best one-reel, two-reel, and color films. An installment of Paramount’s educational Popular Science series (“J-5-1”) was nominated for Best Short Subject (Color), while the music film Moscow Moods was up for Best Short Subject (One-Reel). No documentary won at the 9th Academy Awards. However, as already mentioned, the completely dramatized Short Subject (Color) winner, Give Me Liberty, is labeled as a documentary on IMDb. Also, the significant nonfiction film series The March of Time received a Special Award for revolutionizing the newsreel.

One year later, at the 10th Academy Awards, The Private Life of the Gannets won the Oscar for Best Short Subject (One-Reel). The 10-minute film is another old-fashioned educational nature documentary focused on a single animal, and even compared to the fantastically shot City of Wax, it’s pretty simple. It takes us to the island of Grassholm, off the coast of Wales, to observe the titular seabirds. The one notable thing about the film is that famed documentarian, critic, and theorist John Grierson was one of its cinematographers. And he specifically shot the short’s best footage, a slow-motion sequence of gannets diving into the ocean to catch fish.

Non-winning documentaries nominated that year include another installment of Popular Science (“J-7-1”) and the Pete Smith short Romance of Radium, a fully narrated, acted-out history of the titular element that was helmed by future horror and film noir auteur Jacques Tourneur. The former was up for Best Short Subject (Color) but lost to another Pete Smith production, Penny Wisdom, which is a comedy but also served to promote the newspaper advice columnist Prudence Penny. The latter lost to The Private Life of the Gannets, which was a more unique achievement at the time.

Read more

Short films were first officially recognized at the Oscars in 1932 when the 5th Academy Awards introduced two categories honoring live-action “short subject” motion pictures and one honoring cartoons. The Academy would take almost a decade to add a category specifically devoted to documentary shorts, but nonfiction films were represented in this area of the Oscars from the start. In fact, all three of the nominees for Best Live Action Short Subject (Novelty) were documentaries, and one of them was named the winner at the ceremony that November.

In all, seven documentary shorts won Oscars during that time before they received their own category. Following the first documentary to win an Oscar, these shorts proved the need for exclusive awards for nonfiction cinema. While the Academy didn’t honor a documentary at every one of their first 13 ceremonies, they at least nominated nonfiction films for Oscars every year of their awards during that period. Most were shorts recognized in the Novelty category, which was intended, in part, for newsreels, travelogues, and other types of nonfiction works.

What constitutes a documentary is up for discussion, but I’m only considering films that don’t consist solely of scripted reenactments of events performed by professional actors. Give Me Liberty, which won the Oscar for Best Short Subject (Color) in 1937, is technically listed as a documentary on IMDb, but it’s a wholly dramatized, narration-free account of Patrick Henry’s famous “Give me liberty, or give me death” speech in 1775. Similar winners in later years, such as Declaration of Independence, Sons of Liberty, and Teddy the Rough Rider, lack this label, and none of them qualify for this focus.

Excluding those history films, here’s a breakdown of the first seven short documentaries to win Oscars:

Wrestling Swordfish (1931)

Mack Sennett’s eight-minute documentary Wrestling Swordfish officially won the inaugural Oscar certificate for Best Live Action Short Subject (Novelty), though some historians might add an asterisk to its victory. According to the November 8, 1932, edition of Variety, this now-lost record of one of Sennett’s own deep-sea fishing trips originally came in second place during the nominating committee’s vote. The Pete Smith production Swing High, which showcases the trapeze artist family The Flying Codonas, received 133 points, while Wrestling Swordfish earned 128 points. Yet, the 15-person committee reportedly picked the latter as the winner, causing some confusion.

To settle the “mix-up,” the Academy reportedly was to hold a run-off for the new category, with voting opened up to all members following a screening of the two documentary shorts on November 9. According to the following week’s edition of Variety, however, the decision was still being determined by the nominating committee at a meeting held on November 14, with a revote needed because some of its members weren’t present at the final voting. Wrestling Swordfish was again deemed the winner, as acknowledged at the ceremony on November 18 and in the November 22 edition of Variety, but the trade gave no further details on the process.

Some accounts claim that Sennett bullied for the result. IMDb’s trivia notes for both films paint him as a villain in the matter. This also probably could have just ended with a compromise of a tie (after all, Fredric March and Wallace Beery tied for the Oscar for Best Actor that same year due to a rule involving any tally where the outcome has two top choices separated by three or fewer votes). In his 1993 book Behind the Oscar: The Secret History of the Academy Awards, Anthony Holden implies that the Academy Executive Secretary was at fault in the scenario for avoiding his responsibility to cast a tie-breaking vote. We may never know the whole truth.

We also may never know which film deserved the Oscar more. Wrestling Swordfish appears to be lost, with only its positive reviews remaining to indicate its worth. Swing High is a decent spotlight of an impressive act that might not otherwise be seen by its audience without this cinematic record. Its narration is overdone. Its slow-motion sequences are appreciated, adding an element that even those seeing The Flying Codonas live wouldn’t get. I actually might have preferred the mostly lost third nominee, Screen Souvenirs, an archival compilation that treats cinema as a kind of time machine where we can revisit people and events of the past through old film footage.

The big irony of the Wrestling Swordfish win is that Sennett was and remains best known as an icon of slapstick comedy films, yet he received his only competitive Oscar for a work of relatively serious nonfiction. The Keystone Studios founder and former Charlie Chaplin boss was only nominated for one other film. The same year that Wrestling Swordfish won, the Sennett-produced short The Loud Mouth was up for the inaugural Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film (Comedy). That lost to the Hal Roach-produced Laurel and Hardy short The Music Box. Presumably, the results in that race weren’t even close, as there was no dispute or run-off there.

Krakatoa (1933)

Another documentary that’s hard to find today, the 26-minute film Krakatoa won the second Oscar for Best Live Action Short Subject (Novelty). It’s an educational production depicting the 1883 eruption of the titular volcanic island, and its sound design was apparently as significant as its visual spectacle. I wouldn’t know, unfortunately, but reports of its impact on theatrical exhibition make it seem to have been for sound systems what James Cameron’s Avatar was for digital 3D projection. The film was originally narrated by play-by-play sports broadcasting pioneer Graham McNamee, though a 1965 re-release replaced him with actor Joseph Cotten.

City Of Wax (1934)

The nine-minute nature documentary City of Wax won the Oscar for Best Live Action Short Subject (Novelty) the next year, at the 7th Academy Awards. It’s such an emblematic educational film, with its close-up look at honey bees and its droning narration (by actor Gayne Whitman), that you can easily picture it running through a rickety high school projector. But it gets dark at the end, almost seeming to have a political message about the uniformity and disposability of workers in such a system. That probably wasn’t intended.

City of Wax was produced and directed by brothers Horace Woodard and Stacy Woodard, the latter of whom also worked on The Sea, a short documentary nominated in the same category the previous year. They made other nature documentaries together, but later they separately went into business with the U.S. government. Horace Woodard went on to shoot part of the important World War II propaganda film The Negro Soldier, and Stacy Woodard shot part of Pare Lorentz’s classic New Deal propaganda film The River.

Wings Over Everest (1934)

At the 8th Academy Awards, three more documentaries were nominated in the Live Action Short Subject (Novelty) category, while one of the first films we’d classify as a mockumentary, How to Sleep, was nominated and won the Oscar for Best Live Action Short Subject (Comedy). The Novelty winner was the 22-minute film Wings Over Everest, which reminded me of the first documentary Oscar winner, With Byrd at the South Pole, because it similarly presents views of a cold, rough, as-yet inaccessible place that were unavailable to audiences before film cameras could be taken up in airplanes. In this case, that location was the peaks of Mount Everest.

While the film highlights exclusive footage of a historical expedition, and it is part of that era when cinema was commonly a part of scientific exploration, not just a representation, Wings Over Everest is nowhere near an achievement on the level of With Byrd at the South Pole. Most of the film consists of the real people, including pilots Lord Clydesdale and David McIntyre and financial benefactor Lady Houston, in staged reenactments of the lead-up to the flight. And they are as lifeless as you might dread with a documentary. The footage taken from the planes is important, but also not the most exciting, plus the clearer shots are apparently from a later flight.

The Private Life Of The Gannets (1934)

The Novelty category went away after the 8th Academy Awards (as did Comedy shorts), but that didn’t stop nonfiction from being nominated. The Oscars changed its live-action shorts categories to award the best one-reel, two-reel, and color films. An installment of Paramount’s educational Popular Science series (“J-5-1”) was nominated for Best Short Subject (Color), while the music film Moscow Moods was up for Best Short Subject (One-Reel). No documentary won at the 9th Academy Awards. However, as already mentioned, the completely dramatized Short Subject (Color) winner, Give Me Liberty, is labeled as a documentary on IMDb. Also, the significant nonfiction film series The March of Time received a Special Award for revolutionizing the newsreel.

One year later, at the 10th Academy Awards, The Private Life of the Gannets won the Oscar for Best Short Subject (One-Reel). The 10-minute film is another old-fashioned educational nature documentary focused on a single animal, and even compared to the fantastically shot City of Wax, it’s pretty simple. It takes us to the island of Grassholm, off the coast of Wales, to observe the titular seabirds. The one notable thing about the film is that famed documentarian, critic, and theorist John Grierson was one of its cinematographers. And he specifically shot the short’s best footage, a slow-motion sequence of gannets diving into the ocean to catch fish.

Non-winning documentaries nominated that year include another installment of Popular Science (“J-7-1”) and the Pete Smith short Romance of Radium, a fully narrated, acted-out history of the titular element that was helmed by future horror and film noir auteur Jacques Tourneur. The former was up for Best Short Subject (Color) but lost to another Pete Smith production, Penny Wisdom, which is a comedy but also served to promote the newspaper advice columnist Prudence Penny. The latter lost to The Private Life of the Gannets, which was a more unique achievement at the time.

Read more

Short films were first officially recognized at the Oscars in 1932 when the 5th Academy Awards introduced two categories honoring live-action “short subject” motion pictures and one honoring cartoons. The Academy would take almost a decade to add a category specifically devoted to documentary shorts, but nonfiction films were represented in this area of the Oscars from the start. In fact, all three of the nominees for Best Live Action Short Subject (Novelty) were documentaries, and one of them was named the winner at the ceremony that November.

In all, seven documentary shorts won Oscars during that time before they received their own category. Following the first documentary to win an Oscar, these shorts proved the need for exclusive awards for nonfiction cinema. While the Academy didn’t honor a documentary at every one of their first 13 ceremonies, they at least nominated nonfiction films for Oscars every year of their awards during that period. Most were shorts recognized in the Novelty category, which was intended, in part, for newsreels, travelogues, and other types of nonfiction works.

What constitutes a documentary is up for discussion, but I’m only considering films that don’t consist solely of scripted reenactments of events performed by professional actors. Give Me Liberty, which won the Oscar for Best Short Subject (Color) in 1937, is technically listed as a documentary on IMDb, but it’s a wholly dramatized, narration-free account of Patrick Henry’s famous “Give me liberty, or give me death” speech in 1775. Similar winners in later years, such as Declaration of Independence, Sons of Liberty, and Teddy the Rough Rider, lack this label, and none of them qualify for this focus.

Excluding those history films, here’s a breakdown of the first seven short documentaries to win Oscars:

Wrestling Swordfish (1931)

Mack Sennett’s eight-minute documentary Wrestling Swordfish officially won the inaugural Oscar certificate for Best Live Action Short Subject (Novelty), though some historians might add an asterisk to its victory. According to the November 8, 1932, edition of Variety, this now-lost record of one of Sennett’s own deep-sea fishing trips originally came in second place during the nominating committee’s vote. The Pete Smith production Swing High, which showcases the trapeze artist family The Flying Codonas, received 133 points, while Wrestling Swordfish earned 128 points. Yet, the 15-person committee reportedly picked the latter as the winner, causing some confusion.

To settle the “mix-up,” the Academy reportedly was to hold a run-off for the new category, with voting opened up to all members following a screening of the two documentary shorts on November 9. According to the following week’s edition of Variety, however, the decision was still being determined by the nominating committee at a meeting held on November 14, with a revote needed because some of its members weren’t present at the final voting. Wrestling Swordfish was again deemed the winner, as acknowledged at the ceremony on November 18 and in the November 22 edition of Variety, but the trade gave no further details on the process.

Some accounts claim that Sennett bullied for the result. IMDb’s trivia notes for both films paint him as a villain in the matter. This also probably could have just ended with a compromise of a tie (after all, Fredric March and Wallace Beery tied for the Oscar for Best Actor that same year due to a rule involving any tally where the outcome has two top choices separated by three or fewer votes). In his 1993 book Behind the Oscar: The Secret History of the Academy Awards, Anthony Holden implies that the Academy Executive Secretary was at fault in the scenario for avoiding his responsibility to cast a tie-breaking vote. We may never know the whole truth.

We also may never know which film deserved the Oscar more. Wrestling Swordfish appears to be lost, with only its positive reviews remaining to indicate its worth. Swing High is a decent spotlight of an impressive act that might not otherwise be seen by its audience without this cinematic record. Its narration is overdone. Its slow-motion sequences are appreciated, adding an element that even those seeing The Flying Codonas live wouldn’t get. I actually might have preferred the mostly lost third nominee, Screen Souvenirs, an archival compilation that treats cinema as a kind of time machine where we can revisit people and events of the past through old film footage.

The big irony of the Wrestling Swordfish win is that Sennett was and remains best known as an icon of slapstick comedy films, yet he received his only competitive Oscar for a work of relatively serious nonfiction. The Keystone Studios founder and former Charlie Chaplin boss was only nominated for one other film. The same year that Wrestling Swordfish won, the Sennett-produced short The Loud Mouth was up for the inaugural Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film (Comedy). That lost to the Hal Roach-produced Laurel and Hardy short The Music Box. Presumably, the results in that race weren’t even close, as there was no dispute or run-off there.

Krakatoa (1933)

Another documentary that’s hard to find today, the 26-minute film Krakatoa won the second Oscar for Best Live Action Short Subject (Novelty). It’s an educational production depicting the 1883 eruption of the titular volcanic island, and its sound design was apparently as significant as its visual spectacle. I wouldn’t know, unfortunately, but reports of its impact on theatrical exhibition make it seem to have been for sound systems what James Cameron’s Avatar was for digital 3D projection. The film was originally narrated by play-by-play sports broadcasting pioneer Graham McNamee, though a 1965 re-release replaced him with actor Joseph Cotten.

City Of Wax (1934)

The nine-minute nature documentary City of Wax won the Oscar for Best Live Action Short Subject (Novelty) the next year, at the 7th Academy Awards. It’s such an emblematic educational film, with its close-up look at honey bees and its droning narration (by actor Gayne Whitman), that you can easily picture it running through a rickety high school projector. But it gets dark at the end, almost seeming to have a political message about the uniformity and disposability of workers in such a system. That probably wasn’t intended.

City of Wax was produced and directed by brothers Horace Woodard and Stacy Woodard, the latter of whom also worked on The Sea, a short documentary nominated in the same category the previous year. They made other nature documentaries together, but later they separately went into business with the U.S. government. Horace Woodard went on to shoot part of the important World War II propaganda film The Negro Soldier, and Stacy Woodard shot part of Pare Lorentz’s classic New Deal propaganda film The River.

Wings Over Everest (1934)

At the 8th Academy Awards, three more documentaries were nominated in the Live Action Short Subject (Novelty) category, while one of the first films we’d classify as a mockumentary, How to Sleep, was nominated and won the Oscar for Best Live Action Short Subject (Comedy). The Novelty winner was the 22-minute film Wings Over Everest, which reminded me of the first documentary Oscar winner, With Byrd at the South Pole, because it similarly presents views of a cold, rough, as-yet inaccessible place that were unavailable to audiences before film cameras could be taken up in airplanes. In this case, that location was the peaks of Mount Everest.

While the film highlights exclusive footage of a historical expedition, and it is part of that era when cinema was commonly a part of scientific exploration, not just a representation, Wings Over Everest is nowhere near an achievement on the level of With Byrd at the South Pole. Most of the film consists of the real people, including pilots Lord Clydesdale and David McIntyre and financial benefactor Lady Houston, in staged reenactments of the lead-up to the flight. And they are as lifeless as you might dread with a documentary. The footage taken from the planes is important, but also not the most exciting, plus the clearer shots are apparently from a later flight.

The Private Life Of The Gannets (1934)

The Novelty category went away after the 8th Academy Awards (as did Comedy shorts), but that didn’t stop nonfiction from being nominated. The Oscars changed its live-action shorts categories to award the best one-reel, two-reel, and color films. An installment of Paramount’s educational Popular Science series (“J-5-1”) was nominated for Best Short Subject (Color), while the music film Moscow Moods was up for Best Short Subject (One-Reel). No documentary won at the 9th Academy Awards. However, as already mentioned, the completely dramatized Short Subject (Color) winner, Give Me Liberty, is labeled as a documentary on IMDb. Also, the significant nonfiction film series The March of Time received a Special Award for revolutionizing the newsreel.

One year later, at the 10th Academy Awards, The Private Life of the Gannets won the Oscar for Best Short Subject (One-Reel). The 10-minute film is another old-fashioned educational nature documentary focused on a single animal, and even compared to the fantastically shot City of Wax, it’s pretty simple. It takes us to the island of Grassholm, off the coast of Wales, to observe the titular seabirds. The one notable thing about the film is that famed documentarian, critic, and theorist John Grierson was one of its cinematographers. And he specifically shot the short’s best footage, a slow-motion sequence of gannets diving into the ocean to catch fish.

Non-winning documentaries nominated that year include another installment of Popular Science (“J-7-1”) and the Pete Smith short Romance of Radium, a fully narrated, acted-out history of the titular element that was helmed by future horror and film noir auteur Jacques Tourneur. The former was up for Best Short Subject (Color) but lost to another Pete Smith production, Penny Wisdom, which is a comedy but also served to promote the newspaper advice columnist Prudence Penny. The latter lost to The Private Life of the Gannets, which was a more unique achievement at the time.

Read more

“My son, we don’t know where he’ll grow up,” says filmmaker Daniel Roher. “We live in California right now, but the Great Wild North is very important to me and something that I hope my son appreciates as he gets older.”

Roher answers a question about what it means to raise a child in a landscape that looks very different to the one in which he grew up. Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, kids only knew the analogue age. Facebook didn’t exist until those kids were old enough to legally drink instead of preparing for their university finals, but now with the digital revolution of artificial intelligence (AI), a prospective parent has to ask if their kid will ever get to attend university at all—and will they even have job prospects afterwards or a habitable world?

The Oscar-winning director of Navalny asks some of life’s toughest questions in The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist. Roher joins forces with fellow Toronto native Charlie Tyrell (Broken Orchestra) to ask if bringing a child into the world amid the AI revolution presents a dangerously naïve task or a smart one.

Figures from across the field explain what AI actually is in layman’s terms best they can, and offer radically divergent opinions about the threats and opportunities it represents. Some talking heads say the Doomsday alarm’s already ringing, while others position AI as a radical liberator from the commitments of menial labour, like writing emails or performing repetitive tasks. However, each interview pivots the story as Roher and his wife, actor/filmmaker Caroline Lindy, find their anxieties about parenting spinning about as quickly as the AI race develops.

However, The AI Doc takes a pragmatic approach to the existential crisis at hand. Roher and Tyrell make a fair case that however one embraces or resists AI, it’s already here. Instead, the film emphasizes the need for sound ethical practices to inform its development and integration into daily life in way that’s equitable and both economically and environmentally safe. Much like parenting, these are questions to which ChatGPT lacks the answers among the word salad it tosses when things get complicated. Fortunately, the directors process the case with far more smarts and whit.

POV spoke with Roher and Tyrell via Zoom ahead of The AI Doc’s theatrical release.

POV: Pat Mullen

DR: Daniel Roher

CT: Charlie Tyrell

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

POV: Daniel, now that you’ve been both two experiences with the film, what is more complicated: understanding how AI works or how a baby works?

DR: Babies are very straightforward, so I would say AI. A baby has three or four things that it wants or needs. Like, “I’m hungry, I’m thirsty, I’m stinky. I want a hug.” Once you get the manual down pat for a little baby, it’s straightforward. Now, as the baby grows up, that’s a different story. The skillset of the baby expands, the consciousness of the baby expands, the personhood of the baby expands. As soon as baby’s not a baby anymore, you’ve got a little guy running around with thoughts and opinions of his own. AI is perhaps similar, but much more dense and complicated and frightening and esoteric and spiritual and technical and intimidating. I’d say easier to be a parent and have a baby than it is to wrap your head around AI.

POV: Charlie, do you mind me asking, what is your own perspective about bringing a kid into the world right now? Or was there a different question you had as an access point to the world of AI similar to how Daniel was looking at the question of parenting?

CT: It was kind of the same. Daniel’s kid and my kid were [born] a week apart. All the anxieties and all the questions that Daniel asked, and all the concerns he had—all the panic-attack-driven existential crises he had, I also had. I’m just glad that I had them off camera.

I’ll second what Daniel said about understanding a baby. I’ve had to make the joke during this whole production that my kid has been the easiest part of my life. He sleeps, he eats, and he communicates when he needs something. I was completely driven by the same questions. The only other thing on top of that is another one that Daniel had: As a filmmaker, what’s going to change in that landscape? That’s something I’ve been internalizing a lot and trying to figure out.

POV: How have developments in AI shaped what you guys do as filmmakers?

CT: I can speak to one of the negative things that I feel is happening. This isn’t necessarily just AI, but technology in general: It’s just speeding things up so much. There’s this pressure to feel like you have to create at a pace that’s maybe not a suitable pace for everyone. It’s decreasing the timelines that things are expected now. And it’s also decreasing the duration in which we appreciate things and digest them and have a conversation about them before we move on to the next thing. That needs to be addressed and changed. We need to find a way to slow down a bit because if we keep speeding up, then our heads are all going to blow up.

DR: I use AI as a research tool when I’m writing something. It can be very helpful in that capacity. But beyond that, it hasn’t yet integrated into my life in any meaningful way day-to-day beyond that function. I anticipate that it’s coming. I don’t know how much longer we’ll be making movies in a traditional sense, but while we have the luxury of getting hundreds of people together and actors and cinematographers and producers and all of these people in service of a common vision, telling a story, that’s a really cool thing to get to do. I’m lucky that I at least get to make another one, but I’m anxious for the future, thinking about how it’s impacting the film business right now.

POV: Is it too early to get a sense of impact?

DR: I think it’s going to change really quickly though, Pat. There’ll be less people who are able are empowered to make stuff. There will be fewer writers. There will be fewer cinematographers, directors, fewer things will get made and there’ll be a contraction. That is upsetting and scary. There’s going to be a lot of people who won’t get to live their dreams in a traditional sense, which is upsetting.

POV: In the film, someone makes a comment about the pace at which AI evolves. Where was AI when you started the film compared to where we are now? How much have you seen it grow in the process?

CT: I can speak to the image generation, which you were seeing [beginning] in September 2023. You were seeing image outputs that were like these dream or nightmarish versions of thoughts that you might have. Things that you could type out and say, “Hey, make me an image of this thing.” And the images definitely looked like the thing, but with that same exercise now,  when you say, “I have an idea, let me type it out, let me see what the image generates,” the fidelity of the image is so much stronger. Mistakes like the sixth finger on a person are so rarely happening. Now it’s so much more convincing and so much more refined than it was back then.

DR: When we started making the movie, the experts we were talking to were telling us, “Look out for the next two years.” You’re going to start seeing unemployment. You’re going to start hearing about people losing their jobs. It’s going to start being politicized. People will start discussing how these technologies will be used in autonomous warfare or in surveillance and that’ll occupy the public consciousness. It’ll be a hot-button political issue—all of these “what ifs” when we started are now dominating the headline today, almost like clockwork. That’s been uncomfortable to see unfold in real time.

POV: Can you talk about the choice not to use AI in the animated sequences? Was there ever a conversation about putting into ChatGPT some prompts for animated interludes, compared to the handcrafted work we see in the film?

CT: We wanted to make a really handmade and therefore human made film. Part of it was to be antithetical to the digital space, and to AI, to show things that have that messiness of humans, which is more endearing and warm: fingerprints on a puppet, little mistakes, and little errors. It’s just an aesthetic choice. It’s a way to create a different connections to an audience, to give a platform for introspection for Daniel’s character in the film, as well as more emotional representation. Like the panic attack with his parents, when cycling through all of his drawings super rapidly, that’s a great way to illustrate an existential crisis. It’s a very emotion. By using things by hand, humans who are ultimately pretty tactile and pretty sensory, it helps create that connective tissue for the audience.

POV: There are lots of conversations in the documentary space about the role of AI, especially generative AI. Will there ever be a way for generative AI to have an ethical place in film?

DR: I think it’s tricky. I don’t know what the use case would be. I guess you can think of doing an AI voiceover or something like Morgan Neville got in hot water for with the Anthony Bourdain doc a couple years ago. The guidelines and ethics of these conversations should revolve around the agency of the viewer to understand what they’re looking at and having the full context. If you’re trying to pass something off as authentic and it’s not, that should just be understood as taboo and inappropriate, the same as we do now with plagiarism. But if there’s a big marker on screen that’s like, “This is AI generated,” and it’s intended to be an aesthetic choice and it makes sense, I’m more open to that. But it’s a case that every filmmaker has to be critical and thoughtful about as they’re designing the approach.

CT: The Andy Warhol Diaries from a few years ago created his voice with a large language model. It had the disclaimer at the top, but that’s an artist who was always in his time using new devices and technology, so it fit there. Darren Aronofsky’s film [On This Day…1776] is entirely AI generated. To echo what Daniel said, it’s going to be up to audiences’ tastes and desires. If people are really craving certain stories that can be produced faster, cheaper, and more precisely with AI general imagery, someone’s going to take advantage of that in the marketplace and someone’s going to start creating those. If they find an audience, then they’re going to keep making them and that may grow or may be niche. As with most films that we make, if people want something, someone will make it. It’s going to be up to audiences to decide that. We can decide if it’s a taboo thing, if it’s a cool thing, or if it’s just going to be what takes over. We don’t know.

POV: Are there questions that you would have liked to have asked Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg about where their platforms are heading with the AI?

DR: I think the same line of questioning that we had for all the other CEOs. Those guys are unique in so far as that Zuckerberg was on the forefront of social media. The ‘mis-intended use’ cases for social media were pretty devastating [as the film includes testimony from parents whose kids died by suicide after being prompted by AI], so I’d be curious to know how those guys are thinking about this.

CT: With Zuckerberg and especially Elon Musk, the social media thing is a huge question mark because AI is all over X with Grok. I don’t use Facebook anymore, but it’s infiltrated there. Google’s doing it as well. If you search something, here’s the AI answer first. If you’re trying to use Google Docs, here’s the AI companion that, personally, I didn’t ask for and suddenly it’s there. And with social media, that’s even trickier territory because they can just decide to put it in there. It’s not like people get to vote on what features are added to their social media streams. They just show up.

It’s also scary the things that it can find or the things that AI gets mixed up and says with such confidence. People get their news of what’s happening somewhere else in the world in five seconds and, if it looks convincing, it is convincing. So many people are digesting things as fact when it’s the wrong information.

POV: We all grew up as kids of the late ’80s and early ’90s with things that your kids won’t necessarily grow up with because of digital revolutions and new technology. What are some things from your childhood that you hope your kids get a chance to rediscover, or that you worry they might not get to appreciate?

DR: Heritage Minutes.

CT: The outdoors, the Canadian outdoors specifically, spaces where you go and there’s so much to take in that there is no desire to go to your technology, whether that’s a smartphone or the Gourb. Interacting with the natural world and that’s slow time. I think it’s important to know slow time, and I’m grateful for having learned it. Maybe I didn’t appreciate it when I was a kid as much as I do now, but it’s a corny Canadian dad answer to say, “Just go outside and touch grass.”

DR: It’s important to know a great J-stroke, right?

The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist opens in theatres on March 27.

The post How The AI Doc Brings a Human Touch to an Existential Crisis appeared first on POV Magazine.

CPH:DOX’s 2025 edition opened with Facing War, a documentary presenting the Russo-Ukrainian war through the final year of NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg’s tenure. Though some critics found the film overly cautious in its presentation of political lobbying, its premiere proved unexpectedly well-timed amid Trump’s return to power and anxieties surrounding European alliances.  For CPH:DOX today, as one of the world’s leading documentary festivals, the familiar impulse to pair aesthetic ambition with political mediation feels ever more crucial as wars expand and multiply. Continuing the festival’s Ukraine-focused opening-film tradition, Pieter-Jan De Pue’s Mariinka is exactly the kind of work that […]

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Moving across the landscapes of American society, Wiseman captures people at work, study, and play with his patient, unobtrusive style revealing moments both ordinary and extraordinary inviting us not just to observe, but to reflect and be moved. Our collection of eight films “Frederick Wiseman: American Lives” is Now Streaming.

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The electric guitar has been the most iconic instrument of musical inspiration and social change for almost one hundred years. Today, Yaron Deutsch is the world’s leading electric guitarist who bridges classical and contemporary music. This documentary is a portrait of the artist, and an exploration of the guitar’s evolution in music and electricity. Combining interview, master class, concert, and movie clips, the film asks what it means to interpret a composer’s work, and how legacy thrives in shadows of greatness.

Directed by H. Paul Moon

Produced by Thomas Fichter

Music composed by Fausto Romitelli, Pierluigi Billone, Rebecca Saunders & Klaus Lang

Music performed by @YaronDeutsch & @taleaensemble

Cameras and editing by H. Paul Moon

Additional camera by Kyabell Glass

Concert lighting design by Abigail Hoke-Brady

Concert recording and mix by Caley Monahon-Ward

Additional recording by Nico Osborne

Produced with the Earle Brown Music Foundation Charitable Trust, and the @TIMESPANSFestival

For more information, visit: https://zenviolence.com/shadowaxe

When asked, “Where do you get your ideas?” Stephen King sometimes answers, “Utica.”

It’s a good joke1 because every artist knows great ideas don’t just exist out there, waiting to be purchased like batteries or discovered like a patch of land.

Really, ideas are cheap. We all have them all day long.
The coin of the realm is really the concept.

An idea arises spontaneously, just like any other thought. On the other hand, a concept is built deliberately through a series of choices and constraints. The concept ultimately contains many ideas, from the form and structure to the audience(s) being served. The concept is the organizing principle that harnesses an idea and turns it into a work of art.

The conceptualization phase — in doc filmmaking we call this “development,” which is fitting, as we develop an idea into a concept — is the most important part of the filmmaking process.

It’s also the stage where most of us, and most of our films, fail.

Winning films have winning concepts

I really enjoyed this Sonny Bunch interview with Kevin Goetz, author of Audience-ology and How to Score in Hollywood. Goetz is a researcher and data analyst who runs one of the companies that do test screenings. I was intrigued to learn they also do concept testing. It’s Goetz’s contention — and I tend to agree — that 90% of films fail at the concept stage.

Of course, we all test our concepts all the time. We do it every time we answer the question, “What are you working on?” or “What’s your film about?” We test our concepts when we crowdfund, or apply for a grant, or pitch an exec.

But I doubt most of us are any good at actually learning from these experiences, in part because the feedback we get tends to be blunted by social niceties or obscured by an anonymous process, but also because it’s all so emotional we fail to actually collect the data.

In nonfiction, sometimes we want to rush past the conceptualization phase because we think — correctly! — that when dealing with reality, a lot of this will probably get sorted out in production and in the edit. (I’ll come back to this later.) But in a tight market, I think we can all see, more than ever, the importance of a winning concept. If you’ve been pitching lately, you’ll have heard the word “bulletproof” a lot. As in: your pitch has to be literally without flaws. A pretty high bar!!!

I was thinking about all of this at SXSW, where I saw two documentaries — Cookie Queens and #Skyking — that made me mutter jealously to myself, “Damn it to hell, I wish I’d had that idea.” But of course, saying that is no better than wishing I’d gone to the ideas store in Utica. Really, what I was responding to was how each of these films successfully developed their good ideas into brilliant concepts.

Cookie Queens: A good idea, a genius concept

Director is known for serious social issue documentaries. She had the idea to make a film about Girl Scout cookies after her young daughters asked her to make a movie they would actually enjoy watching. This is a key part of a good concept: a sense of the audience and their needs. Alysa wanted to make something family-friendly, a film she would enjoy as much as her daughters. A lot of decisions flow from there: for example, keeping the film character-driven, as opposed to doing an exposé or history lesson on the Girl Scouts organization.

So anyway, a documentary about Girl Scout cookies. It’s a good idea!!! Everyone knows about Girl Scout cookies, for one thing, and kids are cute.

But the concept of Cookie Queens is even better: the film follows four Girl Scouts through “cookie season” — a six-week period where they sell boxes of cookies to support the organization.

Even better: each Scout has to set a specific goal for how many boxes they want to sell during cookie season. The family needs to buy that many boxes, the cost of which they are on the hook for if the Scout fails to reach their goal. So many documentaries — including some of mine, I freely admit! — lack a clear sense of stakes. Not so in Cookie Queens.

With that structure, with these stakes, we’re off. Week 1: how many cookies sold, Week 2: how many cookies sold, etc. You would have to be a pretty cold-hearted person to not root for these adorable children (and their families) once you are inside the logic of this film.

It’s a brilliant concept — I suspect it would test well, and I think it did, based on the long list of funders who supported it — but Alysa and her team also executed it brilliantly, from excellent casting to exuberant score. I’m not at all surprised it won the audience award at SXSW. Roadside Attractions is releasing it into theaters this year, and if there is any justice in this world, it should be a giant hit.

#Skyking: A good idea, a thrilling concept

Also at SXSW, I caught the world premiere of ’s #Skyking. This film is about Richard “Beebo” Russell, a 29-year-old Horizon Air ground agent who stole a plane from Seattle-Tacoma International Airport on August 10, 2018 and takes it for a tragic joyride.

This was a huge, viral news story — or so I learned; I’d personally never heard of this episode. I went to see it based on the strength of the logline, and because Patricia is a friend. I recommend going in with little knowledge if you can, because my experience in that theater was pretty fun!!! It’ll be on Hulu soon, so you can experience it for yourself.

Anyway, the idea: make a film about this viral news event. A good idea — it’s an intriguing story, with a proven audience already invested in trying to understand why Beebo did what he did.

The concept: tell the story as a high-octane action film using air traffic control audio, and alternate these action sequences with Beebo’s backstory shared by the people closest to him and to the events, all of them asking, why did he do this?

It’s a gripping psychological mystery, with great world-building, and exhilarating action sequences that had me screaming. I literally could not believe what I was seeing.

There’s also a “ticking clock” narrative device in #Skyking that rivals anything by Tom Clancy: once the plane is in the air (a few minutes into the film), we learn that Beebo has only a certain amount of fuel, which means the plane can only be in the air for a certain amount of time before it will fall from the sky. I mean… goddamn, that’s good.

#Skyking is not at all like Cookie Queens, but in both cases, the concept is strong in part because there is no question about the stakes, and the timeline of the story is crystal clear. They both have that undeniable narrative propulsion we, the audience, live for. Yes, we want to learn stuff and be challenged and be edified. We also want to be entertained and get lost in a story.

A side note: #Skyking reminded me a lot of this insanely delicious New Yorker story I happened to be reading at the same time, “The Man Who Broke Into Jail.” Both are about totally baffling crimes, and why they were committed. I absolutely loved the way that story unspools, and the psychological mystery is incredibly deep and compelling. This article reads like a movie, so surely someone optioned it already. If that person is reading this: please hire me to direct?!!! I would kill for that story!!!

Documentary conceptualization: yes ,it is challenging!

In both of these films, I’d be curious to know how much of the concept was present in development and how much evolved throughout production and post production. As I mentioned earlier, documentary is tough. Much of the concept can’t just be written on a blank page, as it might be in a novel. Instead it must be shaped by the vagaries of reality: who will give you access, how do real people react with cameras around, what actually happens, etc. This is why “development” can sometimes take years!

Two objections I have myself lodged against the primacy of concept (when I am pointlessly whining, aka my favorite hobby):

“But how can I write a concept when I don’t know will happen???”
+
“But everyone knows in documentary the real writing happens in the edit!!!”

Fair enough, true enough, etc. But I simply don’t know how you’ll get to the point of shooting and editing without a “bulletproof” concept — unless you are lucky enough to to be able to fund your movie yourself. Even in that case, you may find self-funding to be a double-edged sword; I firmly believe not having to test your ideas is its own curse.

Again: Kevin Goetz says 90% of films fails at the concept stage. I think he’s right. It’s like building a house on a faulty foundation, or planting an expensive rose bush in the wrong-ass soil, or pick your favorite analogy.

Finally: obviously even a genius concept can be ruined by poor execution. But that is a topic for another day!

Comings, Goings & News

Finally settling back home, after a few weeks of running around. Most of my crocus bulbs rotted, it’s still cold, but I still believe in, um, the promise of spring?

Audiences are really responding to Manhood — SXSW scheduled an extra “buzz” screening, which sold out like all the other screenings. I went to SXSW for the premiere because I am one of the film’s EPs, alongside verifiable legends like Sheila Nevins (Citizen Four, also Real Sex!!) and World of Wonder’s Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey (The Eyes of Tammy Faye, also RuPaul’s Drag Race!!). Getting to see the film in its final form, with an enthusiastic crowd — that was a dream come true for me. I am biased, but I think what people are responding positively to is how the film is about a surprising topic (penis enlargement) and then it still goes places they are not expecting. The element of surprise is a powerful tool!

I love being surprised; I assume most people do?? I guess I have no idea. A Netflix exec told me (when turning down my pitch for Hail Satan?) “Netflix audiences don’t like to be surprised.” I doubt that’s true, but also, what do I know? Maybe I am unusually interested in being surprised.

My live chat with was rescheduled for Wednesday 1pm ET. I really enjoyed the format I did with Matt Wolf, wherein we discussed both his first film and his most recent, so I’m going to do the same with Gary. So, if you’ve never seen Helvetica (2007), now is a good time to do so.

Some topics I want to discuss with Gary:

• How Helvetica becamse his directorial debut, after running the hugely successful and influential distributor Plexifilm

• How he went from “a documentary about Brian Eno” (a good idea!) to the brilliant concept for Eno: a film that remakes itself anew each time it’s watched

• How he’s mastered the art of audience development, content (and merch) creation, and self distribution, and how his Substack ties into all of that — okay, that’s a very big topic, I promise I’ll narrow it down before Wednesday! 🙂