Authors — Daniel Christian
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The Long Goodbye
As filmmakers who love the word “serendipity” and pursue situations that allow them the freedom to respond to it, Bill and Turner Ross finally found the window to make Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets—fittingly enough—thanks to a strike of serendipitous scheduling. A delay in the production of friend Benh Zeitlin’s Wendy, for which the Ross brothers had planned a making-of documentary (the excellent, as-of-now unreleasable Second Star to the Right and Straight on ’Til Morning), finally gave them the chance to make Bloody Nose—a film full of images that had long gestated in their individual, albeit synergistic, brains. Such serendipity permeated […]
by Daniel Christian on Jul 7, 2020 -
Southern Subjects
No shortage of talented musicians have appeared before Les Blank’s camera, their porch-strum music often laid over savory shots of local cuisine. Like the wind-blown grass Blank always finds time to include, the films undulate between revelry and reflection, while intangible rhythms of life are contoured by a musicality that exists not only in melody, but also in editing and observation. The richest take place in Cajun country Louisiana and rural Texas, where, between home cooking and the push-pull sounds of an accordion, Blank’s subjects unassumingly philosophize about the best ways to get through life and all its thorns. If […]
by Daniel Christian on Dec 10, 2019 -
Charleen Swansea, 1932-2018
I read about Charleen Swansea’s death nearly four months after she passed, and it was somewhat of a surprise that the news had taken so long to reach me. After she died in August 2018, I noticed few, if any, attempts at eulogizing her filmic legacy or reevaluating the complexities that made her one of the great documentary subjects. A sort of Southern Renaissance woman, Swansea became a compelling character in the films of Ross McElwee, to whom she was a mentor and former teacher. Starting with Charleen in 1977 and up through Bright Leaves in 2003, she was a […]
by Daniel Christian on Mar 14, 2019 -
“False Optimism is as Destructive as Pessimism”: Travis Wilkerson on His Essay Film About Racism, Family Legacy and the American South, Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?
Travis Wilkerson’s Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun? — set to hit home video on September 18 — is the director’s latest essayistic foray into the political landscape of America. Often focused on buried histories of social movements, here Wilkerson hones in on race and its legacy within his own family and the American South. It is a film about complicity, about being born into and perpetuating power, about the fabric of the American South and the way its own buried history is not just emblematic of the region’s sordid past but of the entire country’s. As in his groundbreaking […]
by Daniel Christian on Sep 19, 2018
