trailer trash

And so the festival season has descended upon us, have you got your tickets? If not, enter into the spirit with these titles.

The hills are alive with the sound of Glastonbury...

Glastonbury is a music documentary or a ‘Rockumentary’ about ….you’ve guessed it, the Glastonbury music festival. Directed by Julien Temple, the film was released to mark the event’s 30th anniversary, and also to fill the void when the festival took a well deserved break back in 2006.

Although the film is conventional in presentation, it doesn’t feature a chronological structure. The result is more like a home video montage than a two hour feature-length film.Temple splices together grainy archival footage with crisp images from recent years. There’s a loose commentary by farmer and festival organiser-extraordinaire Michael Eavis, who discusses the festival’s beginnings of free love to its current status as a heavily sponsored multi-million pound music extravaganza. Eavis’ commentary doesn’t romanticise the festival - instead, he recalls riots, waste, robbery, fence dodgers and…  …lots of excrement. There’s also some fascinating footage of flower-girl Arabella Churchill, granddaughter of Winston, who was a key supporter and organiser of the festival.

Visuals are beautifully combined with the aural, and snippets of performances by Bjork, The Rolling Stones, Velvet Underground and Tangerine Dream create a patchwork quilt of music nostalgia.

The 2009 documentary Dust & Illusions presents a more intellectually rigorous look into the ceremonial festival tradition. 30 years on, the film explores the evolution of the Burning Man Festival, which takes place yearly in The Black Rock Desert, Nevada, USA.

Ritualistic happenings at Burning Man

The film encompasses Burning Man as a movement, culture, and a slice of zeitgeist. Director Olivier Bonin amalgamates footage that spans the past 20 years, offering access to the seminal figures and footage that have cultivated a movement.

Ultimately, both docs give a sense of place and insight into festivals which the mainstream media rarely labels anything more than places of spectacular or self-indulgence awe.

The recent BP drilling disaster has unleashed turbulent commentary about “Peak Oil”, as last week President Obama poignantly labelled the spill the “environment’s 9/11”. Coverage has spiralled even further as BP now admits that there are not the resources or tools to contain a deepwater oil leak. BP’s failure to disclose the truth now poses further questions about its approach to safety in general - ‘big buck’ corporations involved with BP or with similar critical production techniques are now being lined up for heavy scrutiny.

Obama takes an awkward stance on the Oil Crisis

It’s a relief to see that Obama has realised the severity of the spill. Following his attacks on BP’s continued failure to contain the oil blow-out, he has taken the unusual step of calling a special press conference to discuss the ongoing crisis. For those who didn’t manage to catch it, a session was broadcast live from the White House on YouTube, followed by a virtual Q&A session with White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs. For the full interactive experience the White House embedded a Google moderator form into the YouTube channel that enabled the public to vote for their favourite questions. See if  Gibb’s online answers satisfied the digital population here.

It’s fair to say that our over reliance on fossil fuels is driving companies to take unnecessary environmental risks as highlighted by the Gulf oil disaster. Our trust and dependency on the ‘Peak Oil’ industry is examined widely in JTD title PetroApocalypse Now?, a short but scary journalistic investigation into the industry. Filmmaker Andrew Evans highlights oil’s pivotal place in society, a resource more central to the planet’s development than many realise. Evan’s argument that is a drug we have all become regulated by and tolerant to is a hard to ignore. Catch it in full here.

Source offers a peak into how the oil industry has had direct effect upon developing communities. Director Martin Marecek sets out to investigate the site of the world’s first oil well in the Azerbaijan town of Baku – a place eagerly explored by foreign investors, all of whom are hoping to line their pockets with the country’s hidden source of wealth. With much of the population living under the poverty line, the country’s post-Soviet government is promising that oil will turn Azerbaijan into a “proper country”, and a prosperous one at that. But what does this mean for its people? And will “the black stuff” be more of a curse than a blessing for this struggling country? Watch it in full here.

Rabbits aren’t the only ones with 360 degree vision

Today, filmmaking tools are so accessible and easy to use that experimental approaches to storytelling have become hugely prevalent. In the hands of someone with little concern for traditional cinema techniques, even the most mundane of subjects can appear hypnotic. Using such tools to find beauty in the most seemingly bland, seedy or even dangerous parts of our cities is a growing theme.This approach is prevalent in the new multimedia, collaborative umbrella project Highrise, set up by the National Film Board of Canada. A project that aims to blow all traditional definitions of the documentary genre out of the window.

Highrise’s first project is led by filmmaker Katerina Cizek, who has been capturing her urban experiences on a 360° camera. Spending time in Toronto, Cizek has been shooting staff and patients in city hospitals, riding along with police, and working with a group of homeless women.

Fritz Lang’s Metropolis becomes reality?

Cizek’s film is soon to be released as a full feature-length web documentary, but it is only one of many personal views in the Highrise project which also represents web-based excerpts, still photography, video and texts. Keep up to date with the now and future city at the Highrise here.

Ideas of people colliding, living vertically, engulfed in metropolises, are also brought to life epically and experimentally in filmmaker and artist Timo Novotny’s audio visual film Life in Loops. The film pays homage to director Michael Glawogger, by remixing his cult and unique vision of urban sprawl Megacities.

A real treat for the eyes, Life in Loops uses unused footage from Megacities, and is remixed with original work to create a very different mood and tempo from Glawogger’s original. Loops captures the dark corners of city’s straining under the weight of too much humanity in too small a space: Mumbai, Mexico City, Tokyo and New York City. An electronic soundtrack acts as a companion to Novotny’s pulsating visuals, which flip between a sterile airport in Tokyo, an overcrowded train station in the sweltering heat of Mumbai and the harsh reality of homeless children in the Moscow snow.

Watch Life in Loops in full here.