the chutry experiment

I like your list. If I was doing a rockumentary, I'd have a tough time not going towards Gimme Shelter or Imagine, but those might be a little on the nose. And any American Family episodes you could show would be brilliant and topical.

"Gimme Shelter" is an interesting choice--I've certainly hought about it. I watched the Maysles Brothers' Salesman tonight, and it uses direct cinema really well. The DVD has some really good extras, too, including an interview with the filmmakers.

I just watched and was quite fascinated by General Idi Amin Dada. You could have great class discussions talking about how he ate the flesh of some of those he tortured to death so their spirits wouldn't haunt him, and then compare that to some of the foreign policy "realist" material written about him at the time.

Now *that* would provoke some interesting reactions. Not sure that I've even heard of that doc, though. I'm assuming it's available here in Atlanta?

It's at Videodrome, which you should really check out if you haven't yet. The subtitle of the documentary is "A Self-Portrait," or something like that, as the types of footage they were allowed to shoot was quite restricted, but his utter insanity comes through quite well.

I think "This is Spinal Tap" might be fun to show, especially if you get the students to watch it (both without and with the DVD commentary) for its successful attempt at a parody of the documentary genre and for the resulting creation of the actual band Spinal Tap. I'm not sure if there were any mockumentaries before Spinal Tap.

The Albert Brooks movie "Real Life" is a great satire of "An American Family." Because so many students will have seen other reality TV shows, I think it could work pretty well.

I actually have the DVD for Spinal Tap out right now, and I've heard the commentary tracks are amazingly meta. At the very least, I'll show clips in class & talk about how the film parodies documentary tropes.

Oh, and Jonathan, I'll go to Videodrome and check out the Idi Amin film. I habitually go to Movies Worth Seeing, so I'll use this as motivation to try Videodrome. Missed your comment before because of the multiple responses to this entry.

I heartily second the suggestion of General Idi Amin Dada. http://pullquote.typepad.com/pullquote/2004/04/general_idi_ami.html

Consider Wiseman's High School in lieu of the infamous Titicut--first-year undergrads would probably relate better to that, and maybe you could pair it with PBS's recent American High School?

Also, I suspect you will find that Thin Blue Line will probably prove as elusive as Titicut--even the video I worked at opposite Morris's offices couldn't get a copy. What about using his Switch ads for Apple and MoveOn to show the appropriation of documentary technique?

Or you could show a Riefenstahl Olympiad--the template for filming sports to this day.

All great suggestions!! There are 1-2 local video stores here in Atlanta that have copies of Thin Blue Line, but as I recall students did have a hard time finding copies of the film this past summer. Maybe I'll do Fog of War instead. I do enjoy teaching TBL, though. Will be hard to take that off the list.

High School's a good call, especially with the PBS doc as a point of comparison. And I used to teach Olympiad at Purdue, and it worked really well. If I could be sure that it was available, I'd teach The River, but, again, availability is a big factor. This is another reason why the course will skew towards the contemporary.

If you're considering Morris and want to avoid the more overtly political, have you thought about Fast, Cheap, and out of Control? It should be fairly available, as I've seen copies floating around out here in the boonies of Carrollton, and it would definitely be a departure not only from politics but from a number of other conventions as well.

Good suggestion. I'm not *that* worried about the docs being political, so I'd have no problem with Fog of War, but Fast, Cheap... is a fun, interesting doc. I might even do two Errol Morris films....