Article: 'Fantasia' and Racism Reparations in Old Cartoons

While I was reading the Amazon page of Disney's Fantasia on DVD, I was surprised to find many excoriating user reviews. Apparently, the original 1940 cut of Fantasia had a small sequence where a 'white' centaur is groomed and waited on by a subordinate 'black' centaur. 

Fig. 1: The offending centaur. Image from YouTube.

From 1969 onwards, Disney removed the centaur from all commercially-available editions of the film - including the VHS version that I saw as a child. A progressive triumph over racism, right?

Well, the Amazon reviews were actually condemning the DVD of Fantasia because of the centaur's absence:

'Please be careful when buying this DVD. The package says it's 'uncut', but it really isn't. Disney felt they needed to censor some scenes because they might offend some black people. I'm a black person, and I'm more offended by Disney lying to me than the scenes. I hope someday in the future Disney will think I'm mature enough to own a real uncut version.'

I guess it's a positive thing that Disney is ashamed of the unscrupulous content of its older films. However, this censorship is an example of the worst way to deal with a problem: Don't mention it, and deny that it ever existed. As Amazon user T. WRABEK says: 'History does not benefit from censorship and political correctness. It was what it was, and whitewashing it changes nothing and shuts down an opportunity to open discussion.'

I'd be very impressed if Disney ever decides to release the 1940 cut to the public as-is. I think that a huge media corporation admitting its chequered past would be something to be admired. Plus, I'll bet that any number of college students majoring in African-American studies, social studies, media studies, anthropology and film history would relish the ability to use the original unaltered cut of Fantasia as a Primary Source in their papers.

I can sympathise with Disney's censorship decision inasmuch as Fantasia is an animated feature for children. However, Fantasia isn't the only Disney film to feature racist overtones. Remember Peter Pan's idiotic, monosyllabic 'Indians'? Those still exist on the DVD version.

Oh geez...

Aladdin and Mulan get a lot of flak for stereotyping Arabian and Chinese people. The Jungle Book's orangutan characters have been criticized as stereotyping black people, as has Dumbo's jive-talking crows - of which one is named Jim Crow. All of these films are commercially available in their original forms.

If I ever have children, I don't think I'd have any compunction with showing them these films that I once enjoyed. I'd probably think twice about Peter Pan, but I think that any kid who understands the significance of the Jim Crow laws is probably too old for Dumbo to influence their racial prejudices. If I harbor any kind of seething racial hatred, it probably wasn't sparked by a childhood viewing of The Jungle Book.

What about other things that could be considered inappropriate for young eyes? Pinocchio has children smoking giant cigars, and another of Fantasia's segments has a drunken Bacchus stumbling around guzzling red wine. I don't personally feel that children are so impressionable as to be corrupted by such imagery, but I'm not quite sure what Disney's moral stance is.

As long as he's not black, it's okay.

Maybe removing a few seconds from Fantasia is simply easier to do than cutting entire scenes from Peter Pan. If this is the case, then is Disney's policy 'we'll be politically correct as long as it's not too difficult'? If Fantasia is indeed censored for reasons of moral principle, then why doesn't Disney apply the same principle to its other classics?

Disney's ultimate censorship move is flat-out refusing to release their infamously racist 1946 film Song of the South - which has been mostly unseen since its final cinematic re-release in 1986. Disney seems to be trying to sweep this one deep under the rug, but Song of the South has ironically achieved high notoriety for being 'the censored one'. 

Maybe Disney could release Song of the South discreetly, without marketing it to kids. Or they could give it a higher rating. There are many petitions calling for its release, some of which have thousands of signatures. Forget Fantasia; this is potentially the Primary Source Holy Grail. I personally want to see it - if only out of a contrarian, teenage-ish curiosity to see what they don't want me to see.

Song of the South won an Academy Award for its oft-covered song Zip-A-Dee-Do-Dah. Nobody forgets that the movie exists; they just know that there is a classic childrens' song out there that has been disembodied from a film that they are not allowed to see. 

The song even plays on the Disneyland 'Splash Mountain' ride and exists on many Disney compilation albums. I guess they just avoid any Song of the South connotations by nixing any of the film's imagery on the album covers and liner notes.

The Walt Disney Company denies the existence of this man. Image from YouTube.

Going back to Fantasia: Racism aspects aside, the removal of the black centaur footage created a domino effect that harmed other elements of the film. An anonymous Amazon reviewer writes:

'Circa 1969, the seemingly racist shots of a black centaurette (similar to Our Gang's 'Buckwheat') attending on the white centaurettes were cut from the film, resulting in a 'jump' in the music. Subsequent releases to video have used optical tricks to remove the appearance of black centaurs, so that the original music track scans properly...In this 'restored' version, these optical edits are still glaringly obvious - e.g. an optical zoom to avoid the black centaurette shows you the film grain up close, and in another shot a green bush magically slides across the ground by itself!'

A new soundtrack was recorded to accommodate the film's new run-time, and a much-beloved narration by the reportedly dulcet-toned Deems Taylor was replaced by a new one from a guy with a much more irritating voice.

Films are like carefully made machines with many gears that interlock in cooperation. This bumbling mess sounds like a trying-to-make-it-better-but-only-making-it-worse comedy sketch: Oops, I dropped a glass of wine onto the rug while cleaning! Oops, I knocked over a lamp while scrubbing the rug! Oops, I stepped on the lightbulb shards!

Disney isn't the only animation studio to have made racist cartoons. What about the old Warner Brothers cartoons? With lecherous French stereotype Pepé le Pew and Cucaracha-singing Mexican stereotype Speedy Gonzales? Those are widely available on DVD.

Well, the Warner Brothers Looney Tunes Golden Collection DVDs address this problem with the most perfectly-worded disclaimer I've ever seen:

'The cartoons you are about to see are products of their time. They may depict some of the ethnic and racial prejudices that were commonplace in American society. These depictions were false then and are still false today. While the following does not represent the WB view of society, these cartoons are being presented as they were originally created, because to do otherwise would be the same as to claim these prejudices never existed.'

Speedy does it right.

Fantasia was a product of its time, and it always will be. Retroactively changing it to claim otherwise makes no sense. I wouldn't care if Disney had deleted Fantasia's controversial scene prior to its 1940 release; but once a film comes out, it belongs to culture. It's 'out there', and people will remember it in its intact form.

Maybe Disney could release Song of the South and an uncut Fantasia on DVD and preface them with a similar disclaimer to the Looney Tunes one. Or they could include short cartoons where Mickey and Donald explain the questionable material in kids' terms. Disney films aren't averse to depicting difficult truths - just about all of them have a scene in which one (or both) of the main characters' parents tragically die.

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Further Reading

For more of my 'articles', you can see my posts entitled 'Four Directions of Bond' and 'The Hobbit and the Phantom Menace Effect'.

For more about animation, you can see my posts about Sita Sings The Blues and Princess Mononoke.

Screengrabs: Fantasia, Peter Pan and Song of the South were produced by Walt Disney Pictures. The Speedy Gonzales short Gonzales' Tamales was produced by Warner Bros.. The UK Looney Tunes Golden Collection DVD was distributed by Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.

© Nicholas Gonzalez Brown and 'NickGBrown On Films', 2012-14. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this weblog's author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Nicholas Gonzalez Brown and NickGBrown On Films with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Review: X-Men: First Class

When I was about ten years old, I saw the first X-Men movie at a friend's house. Soon after, I acquired a soon to be well-worn VHS copy of the film. In May 2003 I went to the cinema to catch the sequel, which I thought was even better.

In 2006, hack-for-hire Brett Ratner (Red Dragon, Rush Hour 3) replaced regular X-director Bryan Singer to make the widely-reviled X-Men 3. Three years later, the property produced the laughable X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

By the time X-Men: First Class (2011, trailer) came out, the series was tied in a two-good, two-bad score for me. Nevertheless, I was looking forward to this one. A '60s-set iteration featuring a young Professor X played by James McAvoy and a young Magneto played by Michael Fassbender sounded promising to me.

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In 1962, the CIA recruits 'mutation expert' Charles (Professor X) Xavier to help them foil a dastardly plot by mutant villain Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon).

On the way, Xavier meets and teams up with Erik (Magneto) Lehnsherr, who is also hunting down Shaw for his Nazi war crimes.

My Take

These first two X-Men movies remind me of Terminator 2 in that they are dazzling special-effects action movies, but they also have clever ideas and solid characterization.

On one side of the series' central conflict is authoritative psychic Xavier (Patrick Stewart), who wants mutants to coexist with humankind. On the other side is metal-manipulating concentration camp survivor Lehnsherr (Ian McKellen), who hates humanity and wishes to eliminate it in favor of mutant-kind.

There's also a classic, Star Wars-y dynamic between straight-arrow Cyclops (James Marsden), roguish Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), and their mutual love interest Jean Grey (Famke Janssen).

In X-Men: First Class our merry band of mutants is comprised of wooden, model-looking people who lack any distinction beyond their assorted computer-generated superpowers.

And here, sporting the lovely CGI wings by Industrial Light and Magic, is Zoë 'daughter of Lenny' Kravitz.

Most comic-book movies like Superman: The Movie seem to be based on straightforward wish-fulfilment. X-Men 1 and 2 do indulge in super-powered fantasy, but they also use the idea of a newly-evolved mutant race as an allegory to comment on racist and homosexual bigotry.

The first X-Men movie opens with a congressional debate between Senator Robert Kelly (Bruce Davison) and telekinetic mutant Dr. Jean Grey, during which the two discuss whether or not to pass the 'Mutant Registration Act':

(Kelly:) 'Are mutants dangerous?'

'I'm afraid that's an unfair question, Senator Kelly. After all, the wrong person behind the wheel of a car can be dangerous.'

'Well, we do licence people to drive.'

'Yes, but not to live. Senator, it is a fact that mutants who have come forward and revealed themselves publicly have been met with fear, hostility, even violence.'

For a blockbuster film, this is pretty intelligent and interesting dialogue. In First Class, the bigoted mutants' and humans' crass outbursts punch you in the face with their bluntness: 'Where do I find the more evolved people?' 'Just let us normal people go.'

Magneto spends several scenes lurking around in a black turtleneck and uttering portentous lines like 'I've been a lab rat. I know one when I see one.' This guy will grow up to be Ian McKellen. How about some class?

When CIA official Oliver Platt introduces Xavier to scientist Hank McCoy (Nicholas Hoult), Xavier psychically recognizes McCoy as a fellow mutant and exclaims: 'How wonderful. Another mutant, already here. Why didn't you say?'

'Say what?' asks Platt.

'Because you don't know. [Looks directly at Hank] I am so, so terribly sorry.'

So instead of gracefully extricating himself from the social gaffe of outing a guy who is obviously secretive about being a mutant, he just gaffes even harder. This is meant to be the man who will become Patrick Stewart; how 'bout some tact?

'I see you also have sadomasochistic fantasies and an Oedipal complex. Oops, did I say that out loud? I am so, so terribly sorry.'

Has there ever been a good prequel? The Godfather Part II doesn't count because it takes place mostly after the first one. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Casino Royale don't count because the Jones and Bond films are all self-contained episodes.

Otherwise, there's refuse like Hannibal Rising and the Star Wars prequels. I know I'm in the minority, but I also felt that Prometheus and the Hobbit films were pretty weak.

One of the big draws of the Star Wars prequels was the promise of seeing the dissolution of the friendship between Obi-Wan Kenobi and a proto-Darth Vader. Likewise, X-Men: First Class was supposed to be about Magneto and Professor X becoming friends, then enemies.

Like the Star Wars prequels, First Class forgets to include the friendship part. It's as if the writers are coasting on the fact that the audience already knows Xavier and Lehnsherr are old friends because Patrick Stewart mentioned it in a previous movie.

Well, here in First Class Lehnsherr is a creepy psychopath from the get-go, and his relationship with Xavier is marked by their contentious arguing. I guess the downfall of a friendship is the exciting, emotional part to dramatize; but the drama doesn't exist if there is no friendship to 'fall' from. Having each character address the other as 'friend' doesn't solve this problem.

'I shall call you 'friend', seeing as we are friends now.'

There are also countless in-jokes that refer to previous X-Men films. Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) tells a college-aged Xavier that the title 'Professor' suits him. At one point, Xavier says 'Next thing you know, I'll be going bald.' A CIA guy named Stryker irrelevantly mentions his son William, who will one day become the villain of X-Men 2.

I can understand a sequel making references to previous instalments, but a prequel doing the same thing makes no chronological sense. If this film is meant to be the 'first' one, then I feel it should spend less time making exclusive in-jokes and more time being accessible to series newcomers. 

The end of First Class is a desperate scramble to tie up loose ends. Mystique hooks up with Magneto out of nowhere - or, because we know they are together in the 'later' earlier films. In the final minutes of the movie Xavier sustains a bullet wound to his spine. In case the audience didn't pick up on the fact that this spinal injury explains Xavier's paraplegia, the movie has Xavier yell 'I can't feel my legs!' three times.

Prequels like this feel so slavishly beholden to the original films. Either tie up loose ends neatly, or don't bother at all. If Xavier is still able to walk at the end of this prequel, I'd assume that he had some kind of accident in the 30 year interval between this film and the first X-Men.

I got this weird exploitation vibe from First Class. I don't mean that it was a blood-drenched, limbs-flying '70s-type schlock flick, but I did get the sense that director/writer Matthew Vaughn was consciously pushing the boundaries of the PG-13 rating (or the UK-equivalent 12A rating, which I assume was the English director's template.) First Class is crammed with as much rating-permitted violence and titillation as possible, assumedly to appeal to 12-year-old boys.

Vaughn has Magneto viciously murder several hired goons, but he maintains his rating by keeping the violence bloodless.

12A movies are famously allowed one F-bomb each, and First Class clearly planned its opportunity.

12A doesn't allow out-and-out nudity, but Vaughn does the next best thing by having his female characters wear as little as possible. Mystique's natural, non-shapeshifted appearance is essentially Jennifer Lawrence naked. Shaw's right-hand goon Emma Frost (January Jones) doesn't say or do much, but she does live up to Frost's reputation of being one of the most scantily-clad female characters in comics history.

CIA agent Moira MacTaggert's (Rose Byrne) improvised plan to infiltrate a secretive nightclub consists of tearing her clothes off and sneaking in behind a train of strippers.

'Quick, take my blouse and skirt. This is the only way.'

Then there's the questionable accuracy of the film's 1962 setting, which critic Erik Lundegaard explains well in his First Class review:

'How did [Charles] know 'groovy' would be such a hip word three years later? Can he also see into the future? Is that why his hair is longish before the Beatles even recorded 'Love Me Do'?...1962 is not 1964 is not 1974 is not today, but the movie gloms them all together and we wind up with a cultural and historical hodgepodge.

'Shaw in 1962 looks like a 1974 swinger. London is swinging even though it didn't begin to swing until, what, 1965?...I know. It's a blockbuster. It's a superhero film. But I can't leave this aspect alone.'

In terms of our pop-culture images of each decade, the Sixties didn't even begin to look like the hippy-dippy, capital-S Sixties until around '65. 1962 looked closer to our pop-culture image of the Fifties.

If the filmmakers wanted to be period-accurate, all they had to do was study the first few seasons of Mad Men. If the filmmakers wanted First Class to feature a medley of fashions from all different decades, then why not set it in...I don't know, the present?

'Have either of you seen my iPod?'

Magneto's musical cue is this distorted, Queens of the Stone Age-esque heavy rock guitar tune that I found distractingly period-inaccurate. Why not use timeless orchestral score like the first two movies? I guess Vaughn stuck it in because guitar riffs are another item on the checklist of awesome things 12 year-old boys like.

Writing about First Class makes me feel like a teacher who is disappointed in a stellar student's passable work. First Class is your average dumb Hollywood blockbuster, but I feel let down because I know that the series has been, and is, capable of so much more. 

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In 2013, X-Men spinoff The Wolverine left me disgruntled yet again. Bryan Singer's 2014 franchise return X Men: Days of Future Past also disappointed me. I understood why as soon as I spied First Class writers Vaughn and Jane Goldman in the credits.

X-Men: Apocalypse is now in production, with Singer directing again and X-Men 2 writers Michael Dougherty and Dan Harris penning the script. Call me a zealot, but I hold out hope that this one will be good.

Further Reading

For more Matthew Vaughn derision, you can see my post about Kick-Ass.

Screengrabs: X-Men: First Class was produced by Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation and Bad Hat Harry Productions, in association with Marvel Entertainment, Dune Entertainment, Ingenious Media, Big Screen Productions, Ingenious Film Partners and Dune Entertainment III. The UK DVD was distributed by Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment LLC.

© Nicholas Gonzalez Brown and 'NickGBrown On Films', 2012-14. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this weblog's author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Nicholas Gonzalez Brown and NickGBrown On Films with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Review: Side by Side

Photochemical filmmaking vs. digital filmmaking sounded like a cut-and-dried contest to me. Just shoot a sequence in both, project the two next to each other and decide which one looks better, right?

Wrong. As I've learned in the diplomatically-titled documentary Side by Side (2012, trailer), the film vs. digital debate is massively multifarious.

'The documentary we're doing is called Side by Side', says our host Keanu Reeves. 'It's a documentary about the science, art and impact of digital cinema. A hundred years of photochemical filmmaking right now has reached a threshold tipping-point...This intersection of time is historic. Is it the end of film? Where are we today?'

In Side by Side, Reeves and director Christopher Kenneally collect the opinions of a mighty roster that includes filmmaking veterans Martin Scorsese, James Cameron, David Fincher, Steven Soderbergh, Danny Boyle, Christopher Nolan, David Lynch and George Lucas, as well as up-and-comers such as Lena Dunham and Greta Gerwig.

My Take

Whenever I see interviews with and hear DVD commentaries from filmmakers, the filmmakers almost invariably project coolly rational personas. One of the satisfactions I got from Side by Side was seeing stoic filmmakers such as Soderbergh and Lucas become passionately animated about their arguments. If their press interviews about their individual films sound like reminiscences of harmless flings, then their rants here about their shooting formats sound like bitter recollections of protracted, tempestuous marriages.

When Reeves asks the extravagantly coiffed David Lynch 'Are you done with film?' Lynch responds: 'Don't hold me to it, Keanu...but I think I am.' Then Lynch's face slowly assumes an expression of unfathomable melancholy.

The thousand-yard stare of a man in pain.

Steven Soderbergh even uses a similar rocky-marriage analogy to mine: 'When I saw the RED [digital camera], I really felt I should call film on the phone and say 'I've met someone.'

On the one end of the argument are ardent celluloid acolytes such as Christopher Nolan and his longtime DP (director of photography) Wally Pfister, who believe that film is the gold standard and that digital is but a pale, dumbed-down imitation: 'It's really sad right now to see cameras recording imagery in an inferior way starting to take over film. I'm not gonna trade my oil paints for a set of crayons.' (Pfister)

On the other end of the argument are dogged digital disciples like Soderbergh and Danny Boyle, who believe that film is an elderly and unyielding crone of a format; and that digital is a youthful, liberating alternative.

Boyle says: 'You could shoot illegally, and surreptitiously, without people knowing, you could do unconventional things...' Boyle's longtime DP Anthony Dod Mantle adds: 'I got this weird moment of immediacy, of lightness and immediacy...I suddenly saw these moves, these possible movements that I didn't know in my cinema.' 

There are also oddball opinions from people like Martin Scorsese, who at one point views the whole 'which looks better?' argument as moot because 'The real auteur, ultimately, of a picture, is the projectionist. Sound can be loud or low, you could see the head of the actor, or not, 'cause he can frame you out, 'cause he's busy.'

The film/digital battle affects just about every job in the industry and every step of the filmmaking process. For instance, a production that shoots on photochemical film must send their day's reels to a laboratory to get processed and developed. The production will receive their footage from the lab the next day, when the filmmakers will screen these 'dailies'.

On a digital production, the shots can be played back instantly on a monitor right there on the set. As Reeves describes in his narration: 'They are no longer dailies; they are 'immediate-lies'.

Cinematographer Sandi Sissel (Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Master and Commander) laments that 'There was a joy, for many many years, for us to be the genies on set. That's why we love dailies. We all go, we'd act, we'd light...and the next morning we'd come back from the lab and we went 'Wow, look what we got!' It was magic.'

'The director of photography was a magician.' DP Donald McAlpine (Moulin Rouge!, The (2005) Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe) follows. 'He was the only one who actually knew what was going to be on the screen next day, and this gave you a lot of authority and power.'

However, digital apologist David Fincher counters: 'I don't like the betrayal of dailies...[cinematographers] love the voodoo of it. They love when the director says to them 'Down that corner, are we gonna be able to see that, or is that gonna melt away?' and they get to go 'just wait 'til tomorrow, it's gonna be amazing.' And I've had those experiences, I've sat in dailies and I've gone 'Wow'. But there was an equal amount of times that you'd look at it and say 'What the fuck?'

The one-yard stare of a man unimpressed.

Like any good debate, Side by Side has no 'winner', only a huge spectrum of differing opinions.

On the subject of filming, film-cameras shoot in increments due to the ten-minute duration of each 'magazine' of film. A production shooting on film has a lot of down-time between shots because the (expensive) magazines must be changed so frequently.

Digital cameras, on the other hand, record onto a hard drive which can hold over 40 minutes of footage. This allows less time wasted for magazine-changes, and more time for longer shots and improvisation.

Christopher Nolan appreciates the down-time of film: 'It's very tough for me to say that I need to be able to shoot a 45-minute take and not reload the cameras, because the truth is, the crew [and] the actors can only concentrate for so long, and then you need a three-minute break, during which time you reload.'

DP Reed Morano (Kill Your Darlings) is more nervous about film shoots: 'When you're running a film camera on set, everyone seems to take things a little more seriously, when they hear the film running, when they hear the money running through the camera.'

John Malkovich, who comes from the long-enduring institution of theater, unexpectedly prefers the newfangled digital technology: 'As fast as you can get back to your position, you can go again..I just always felt there was way too much waiting. Because movies, for me, there's always a momentum problem. I grew up in the theater, and that's how I was trained, and a lot of the time in movies I feel like, 'Can we go?''

There's also the issue of storage, which is a disadvantageous side-effect of digital's constantly-upgrading nature. 'I have archival tape formats for music videos and commercials that I did in the 1980s, and there's no machines that can play them.' Fincher concedes. 'When you box those up to be stored, you have to put a reader in with the thing.'

Even if software obsolescence isn't an issue, digital still isn't great for storage, as DP Geoff Boyle (Mutant Chronicles, Dark Country) elucidates: 'Nobody takes archiving seriously. They go 'Oh, I'll save it on hard drive.' And they'll put the hard drive on the shelf, and a year later you'll load it and it goes tk-tk-tk, because they stick. If you don't fire them up all the time, they stick. If you do fire them up all the time, they wear out and go tk-tk-tk.'

Film, on the other hand, 'is unique, because film is a capture medium and a storage medium. So if you really want to go back, and if you've stored them under the right conditions, a hundred years later, all you have to do is shine a light through it and you'll be able to see it. It will never be format-obsolete.' (Kodak Chief Technology Officer Gary Einhaus)

However, digital development pioneer George Lucas rebuts that 'All of everything in the whole world is stored digitally. So, yeah, there's problems with it. But they're going to solve those problems. I'll guarantee that. There's too much digital information out there not to figure out a foolproof way to store it forever.'

It's nice to hear about George Lucas's efforts in helping to create good films in recent years.

Personally, I find the arguments in favor of digital to be more compelling. It just seems much more versatile, cost-effective and inclusive. In fact, the argument to me seems to boil down to inclusive vs. exclusive - digital is friendlier but perhaps lazier, and film is snootier but maybe more venerable. 

My inclination towards digital probably isn't helped by the fact that Christopher Nolan - Side by Side's greatest film advocate - has the stoic English brogue, slicked-back hair and cold eyes of a classic villain.

No, Mr. Reeves, I expect you to die.

If I was a filmmaker, I imagine I'd definitely use digital...and yet, I recently went to a screening of Pulp Fiction and was impressed by the texture, warmth and feel of the film print.

But if you were to ask Steven Soderbergh, he'd say 'It's depressing. It's not sharp, it doesn't have any snap, it's shaking, it's dirty, I hate it.'

And on and on the debate goes.

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Further Reading

For more documentaries, you can see my post about Marwencol.

For more documentaries about filmmaking, see my post about Corman's World.

Screengrabs: Side by Side was produced by Company Films. The UK DVD was distributed by Axiom Films.

© Nicholas Gonzalez Brown and 'NickGBrown On Films', 2012-14. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this weblog's author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Nicholas Gonzalez Brown and NickGBrown On Films with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.