Anthology Film Archives Special

This film series focuses on a particular technique that filmmakers and screenwriters have adopted on rare but almost inevitably indelible occasions: drawing the dialogue or onscreen text verbatim from various written documentary materials – transcripts of interviews, cockpit voice recorders, public hearings, or (most often) trials. By incorporating these pre-existing, documentary transcripts into fictionalized or re-staged contexts, these films blur the lines between documentary and dramatization, and call into question the nature of performance and representation.

Films:
1. LETTERS TO DAD (Beth B & Scott B, 1979, 12 min, 16mm-to-digital)
2. MARIA SCHNEIDER, 1983 (Elisabeth Subrin, 2022, 24 min, digital)
3. LANDSCAPE SUICIDE (James Benning, 1986, 92 min, digital)

Film programmer Jed Rapfogel of Anthology Film Archives will give an introduction.

anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings