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Film Reviews | Regular Feature (parody or pseudo-documentary style?). Some of the backgrounds match the emotional tenor of the interview; others seem randomly thrown in and some do not match historically. For example, when a Vietnam vet is discussing his war experience, the background shows atomic bomb footage from the 1940s (the same footage that has been over used since it appeared in Kevin Rafferty's Atomic Café (1982). At its best, Mule SkinnerBlues paints a somewhat impoverished , alcoholic wasteland (since the shrimp business went under) where dreamers still dream about fame while remaining so very anchored in their mobile homes. There are some genuine elements that capture our pathetic attempts at self-rationalization and the fragility of human relationships and aspirations. Yet, something seems too hokey in its attempt to document human perseverance. There is a constant stream of alcoholism throughout the film that is presented but not fully explored, and, is somewhat celebrated at the film's end with a music video of Miss Jeanie singing the "D.U. I. Blues." Surely, it is the appropriate musical epitaph, ifnot coda, for Mule SkinnerBlues. The playfulness of the film's construction may, at times, interfere with the potential to paint a richer portrait of the people and landscape in Jacksonville at this particular historical moment. Perhaps, it may also be an attempt to breakaway from the potential alcoholic trailer park stereotypes the film may have inadvertently created? The intentions of the filmmakers to give us a glimpse of "Beanie's World," and the offer to help his friends produce a short horror movie is admirable in spirit, but the pontifications about achieving fame and having talent are a bit repetitive and the overall narrative structure seems a bit forced and contrived. It seems as if the filmmakers knew that this subject matter and this type of storytelling would sell in today's market. Mule Skinner Blue, at times, give us a perspective of people and places (not issues) that do not usually get represented in the cinema; however, it plummets beyond the surface of the personalities and socio-economic environment in which Beanie's world revolves. Jeff Heinle Colby-Sawyer College Jheinle@colby-sawyer.edu Cinema Verite: Defining the Moment The journal Film & History is an appropriate forum in which to review a film about the history ofthe type offilm often used to teach history—the documentary film. In Cinema Verite: Defining the Moment (2000), director Peter Wintonick and his collaborators demonstrate the history of how a small group of filmmakers, with new equipment and ideas, "defined the world as we see it today." With a blending ofpost-World War II social, political and cultural sensibilities (in tune with ordinary people and daily life), the new technologies of movable cameras and synchronized sound, and the emergence oftelevision, these documentary filmmakers rejected the scripts and didacticism of earlier documentaries in order to shoot first and edit afterwards, thus empowering the editor and the audience in a new medium of communication. Cinema Verite honors these documentary filmmakers and their films, as it traces the history of this genre from its beginnings in the 1950s with its links to journalism, its focus on daily life experiences and its ability to capture emotion, to its ironic transformation in The Blair Witch Project and reality TV. In the spirit of cinema verite itself, Wintonick doesn't evaluate, analyze or judge the evolving genre; rather, in a fairly chronological format, his film allows interviews with the pioneering filmmakers and a host of clips from the groundbreaking films to tell the story of the last half century of documentary films. Early in Cinema Verite Karel Reisz explains the new attitude toward documentary filmmaking as "wanting what you've got ratherthan going outto get whatyou want." RichardLeacock wants no lights, no tripods, no questions; his JazzDancer (1954) shows the power of music and movement when the camera is mobile. Bob Drew's experiments with live sound and the camera on his shoulder set the stage for political documentaries Primary (1960). This approach reveals the emotions and intensity of people at work. We see, for example, the camera following —at gun and holster level—a Brink's guard...

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