Wah wah

Cry Baby: The Pedal That Rocks The World from Joey Tosi on Vimeo.

World War II in high definition

I'm currently finished with half of the ten hours that comprise WWII in HD, a tv show made up from color footage from the Second World War around the world. While some of the film material is indeed interesting and the sound work is okay, it's really frightening how cinematic and overly patriotic the footage is presented. Maybe I'm just very wary of overzealous patriotism, but heroic hymns while guns blaze and bombs fall belong in Hollywood movies, not "documentaries".

Also in my view the series singlehandedly dehumanizes the Allies' enemies, giving no face to Germans and Japanese at all, speaking of them (like the soldiers in the field) only as "Nazis" and "Japs". The tone of the narration in no way distances itself from the soldiers' quotes such as (when the bombs strike German towns) "if some civilians and children are torn to pieces, well tough shit for them". Sorry but in the 21st century I do expect more of a documentary than painting history black and white, guys.

World War 2 in High Definition - History.com

The true glory

The True Glory (1945) is a war documentary on the overthrow of Nazi Germany, starting with D-Day and finishing with the capitulation of the German army. It was put together by directors George Kanin and Carol Reed in an effort to cover the invasion from the landing in Normandy to the taking of Berlin from the viewpoint of the common soldier. To this end, a great lot of soldiers were given photo and film cameras to record anything they see fit, with the only condition not to stage any scenes. According to Kanin (as quoted in Studs Terkel's The Good War), the recorded material amounted to ten million feet of shot film in the end.

The phrasing of the film is quite modern, with narration and scenes changing quite randomly around the whole theater of the war. It's not only American and English GIs featured, you have some French resistance fighters, Czech and Russian soldiers, female paramedics, black soldiers and so on. Being basically a still movie (except for some superimposed explosion sounds and a quity cheesy, "dramatic" orchestral score), it seems the directors decided to offset it by cutting quite fast, so you get a feeling that many of the really interesting scenes were left on the cutting room floor. You see an awful lot of soldiers marching, planes refuelled, tanks and boats moving, but the really gritty hand-to-hand combat and the carnage wrecked by artillery and bombing is hardly ever touched upon. Still, it's a great document to the war and in all its length has some fantastic shots in it.

Three parts, all on Google Video, for a total of 85 minutes.

Google Video: The True Glory Part I

Full Battle Rattle

Full Battle Rattle is a 2007 documentary about the National Training Center in the California Mohave Desert which was built to prepare soldiers for the realities in Iraq. It's a full-grown town with 1600 "roleplayers", 250 of them Iraqi-speaking American citizens. The documentary had its premiere on the National Geographic Channel on Monday, January 12th.

Blog Them Out of the Stone Age » Full Battle Rattle (2007)

Dark side of the moon

Dark Side of the Moon is a French mockumentary about the Apollo 11 moon landing which originally aired on April Fool's day 2002 on Arte in 2002. Through clever image montages, fake statements and out-of-context quotings it conveys the image that moon landing was faked and actually recorded in a studio by director Stanley Kubrick under supervision of the CIA. After that, all witnesses are told to have been killed and all proof destroyed. It features interviews with Donald Rumsfeld, Henry Kissinger, Buzz Aldrin and Stanley Kubrick's widow, Christiane Kubrick. The first 25 minutes of the film are available on Youtube.

Dark side of the moon parts 2 and 3

Death of a president

I still remember when i watched the whole film on this video player 2 years ago, the quality is quite bad but the film is very gripping.