The Road to Dracula. Dir. David J. Skal. Perf. Carla Laemmle, Bela Lugosi Jr.. DVD. Universal, 1999.

The Road to Dracula is a short documentary film on the creation of Dracula (1931). It describes the origins and creation of the film, its ensuing success, and its enduring cultural impact. It describes some of the aspects of Dracula (1931) that made it popular at the time, such as the appeal of Lugosi as the Count.

The Road to Dracula describes the evolution of the vampire from earlier folkloric and literary incarnations to the first Dracula in Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula, which became the quintessential vampire novel, despite not being the first. It moves on to discuss Dracula’s first appearances in theater and film, most notably in Dracula’s Death (an unauthorized Hungarian film that was not an adaptation of Stoker’s novel but was Dracula’s first screen appearance), Nosferatu (1922, an unauthorized German adaptation of Stoker’s novel), the stage play Dracula (1924, an authorized adaptation of Stoker’s novel), and the film Dracula (1931, an authorized adaptation of Stoker’s novel based largely off the play).

The documentary discusses how Bela Lugosi’s incarnation of Dracula in the film Dracula became the definitive Dracula that has endured in popular culture to the present day. It also compares Lugosi’s Dracula to the other incarnations, both newer and older. For example, Lugosi’s suave Dracula contrasts greatly with Max Shreck’s hideously rat-like Count Orlok. Various personages speculate as to what aspects of the film Dracula contributed to its enormous success. Some mention that the use of sound impressed audiences, as Dracula was one of the first Universal horror films with sound. The film also benefited from Karl Freund’s (of The Last Laugh and Metropolis) camerawork. Others attribute Dracula’s success to the charisma of Lugosi’s Dracula, with his powerful stage presence and uniquely deliberate delivery. Still others emphasize the commingling of eroticism and vampirism in the film. Lugosi’s preying on young women is intentioned to incite both fear and arousal in the audience simultaneously. This aspect of the film differentiates it from earlier film Draculas and likely contributed to its success. Universal’s advertising campaign for Dracula that, while focusing on its horror elements, also exploited the film’s underlying sexual content, is thought to have been effective in promoting the film as well.

Gunckel, Colin. "“Gangs Gone Wild”: Low-Budget Gang Documentaries." The Velvet Light Trap 60(2007): 37-46.

This article discusses gangs and how they are portrayed in the public media through exploitation documentary. It questions whether the way they are being shown is the best way to do so because it glamorizes the gang lifestyle to the public, possibly corrupting the youth’s view of gangs. This article analyses the trend of gang based documentaries and the effect it has on the film industry. Specifically The World Most Dangerous Gang, a documentary on La Mara Salvatrucha portrays the gang in a poor light for the public eye. It uses a sensationalistic and exploitative method turning it into more entertainment than a serious documentary should be. Then it discusses different types of films made for release direct to DVD. These raw documentaries are cheap and easy exploitations to create. Film series such as Bumfights and Girls Gone Wild are cited as examples of the genre of exploitation documentary.

This article relates to The Warriors in that it exploits the gang genre, in a manner that glamorizes the gang lifestyle. It creates allure to the violent life led by gang members. With all the glamour, it could possible cause viewers of the film to get overly excited by the film and act irrationally. This violence might extend into real-life and cause serious injury or death, as occured in the days following The Warriors's public release. The gang exploitation film genre has been designed in such a way using rap soundtracks and flashy images of gang members that it would appeal to viewers similarly to how it has been argued that The Warriors appeals violence to its viewers.

Vez solnitsa : Sunless = Sans soleil / = Sunless (1982)
A juxtaposition of philosophical narration and visual montage, presented in the form of a woman's voice, reading and commenting upon the letters she receives from "Sandor Krasna," a freelance cameraman who travels the world, particularly focussing on those "two extreme poles of survival," Western Africa and Japan. His reflections concern filming, time, memory, history, ritual, and civilization.

 from the website -
The 55 minute documentary film while replete with humorous anecdotes is one of the most serious and disturbing assessments of the rampant use of this inexpensive and highly addicting drug.
CRACKHEADS GONE WILD is a new and contemporary version of “Scared Straight” an earlier documentary on juvenile crime and the negative road to prison that youth can expect with continued criminal involvement.
The documentary shows the destructive nature of Crack Cocaine through the eyes of actual users who have experienced the devastation of addiction, and how the users cover the racial, ethnic and socio-economic spectrum of our society.
 

May 28, 2006
No Free Samples for Documentaries: Seeking Film Clips With the Fair-Use Doctrine
By ELAINE DUTKA

THE film producer Alicia Sams viewed "Wanderlust," a documentary about American road movies, as a way of introducing a new generation to Bonnie and Clyde, Thelma and Louise, and other giants of the genre. Films like "Five Easy Pieces," "Easy Rider" and "The Grapes of Wrath," she was convinced, offered a window into the American character.

The 90-minute documentary, to be broadcast Monday night on the Independent Film Channel, was also a window into the frustrations of making a clip-intensive film dependent on copyright clearance, which has become hugely expensive in the past decade. Initial quotations for the necessary sequences came to more than $450,000, which would have raised by half the cost of the IFC film, directed by the Oscar-nominated team of Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini ("American Splendor").

"Paramount wanted $20,000 for 119 seconds of 'Paper Moon,' " Ms. Sams said. "The studios are so afraid of exploitation that they set boundaries no one will cross. Even after the prices were cut, we were $150,000 in the hole."

Unwilling to pay those fees, IFC's general manager, Evan Shapiro, helped Ms. Sams pursue another, more aggressive, tack, which may point the way for documentarians who want to tap movie iconography without paying studio prices. Its strategy involved some negotiating hardball, backed up by a willingness to fall back on the tricky legal doctrine known as fair use.

Mr. Shapiro called in a Los Angeles entertainment lawyer, Michael C. Donaldson, who drilled him on copyright law. Under the 165-year-old fair-use doctrine, Mr. Shapiro was told, filmmakers, news gatherers, critics and educators can access material at no cost if they add something to it (like a voice-over), don't undermine its value or use more than needed to make a point. Free speech trumps private property when a project is in the public interest, a term broadly defined.

"Fair use is the lubricant that allows creativity and copyright law to coexist," said Mr. Donaldson, a former president of the International Documentary Association.

...

Black Label bicycle club

(i think it is a documentary - but it is unclear)

 see also myspace page for the film - http://www.myspace.com/bikemovie 

 

see also the myspace page for this film

http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=54430439

PETER SUTHERLAND : FILM
a documentary about NYC bike messengers

This article focuses on sharks and how Americans’ views on sharks have evolved since around the 1970s. Author Stephen Papson writes about how the use of documentary films on Discovery Channel’s “Shark Week 90” has shaped the terror-filled relationship between humans and sharks. Papson also acknowledges Jaws as the first movie to “elevate the shark to celebrity status.”

As Papson states, it is easy to be mislead by the manner in which sharks were represented in early films due to the fact that many moviegoers’ first shark encounters occurred while watching one of those films. In Jaws, Steven Spielberg uses an oversized replica of a great white shark in conjunction with various “Hitchcockian devices” with which to involve the audience in the film while simultaneously maintaining a certain sense of reality so as to not lose the viewers.

However, 1971 marked the first significant contribution in film pertaining to sharks, particularly the great white shark -- Peter Gimbel and James Lipscomb’s documentary “Blue Water, White Death.” Many early films that involved sharks, including Gimbel and Lipscomb’s film, regarded sharks as evil man-eating machines. It was Spielberg’s Jaws that first cast sharks in a different light. The shark in Jaws was given “personality and internationality” which in turn led to the international media coverage of new shark encounters (including Time Magazine’s June 23, 1975 cover page). The opening scene, in which the audience experiences the action from the shark’s perspective, draws on humans’ primal fear of being attacked and eaten by a shark.

As one can see, Americans have been educated on the nature of sharks primarily through documentary film, but movies like Jaws helped in attaining global coverage of shark activity that eventually led to the production of “Shark Week 90,” giving Americans a trustworthy source of information on sharks.