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Tag: documentary

Corita Kent: The Pop Art Nun
Published March 21, 2025

Corita Kent: The Pop Art Nun

I recently came across this short PBS Artbound documentary from 2021 on artist, educator, and social justice advocate Corita Kent (1918-1986), which is well worth 20 minutes of your time.

I don’t remember when I first came across Sister Corita’s work. It was probably not until I moved to Canada and became more interested in design and applying typography and lettering to art. Certainly, she was not someone I learnt about in school. It’s hard to know whether that is the result of a parochial British education, or more generalized misogyny and prejudice in art history, or a bit both. But, as the documentary makes clear, she remains a source of inspiration for artists, designers, and teachers 40 years after her death.

The ‘Ten Rules’ she helped create with the students of the Immaculate Heart College Art Department seem as relevant today as they must have at the time they were first written:

You can listen to former students, artists, community organizers, and others read and reflect on the Ten Rules here.

(Video via Letterform Archive!)

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Modernism, Inc.
Published July 15, 2024

Modernism, Inc.

Opening in New York this week at IFC Center, Modernism, Inc. is a new documentary about architect Eliot Noyes, a pioneer of modern corporate design during America’s post-war economic boom.

Director Jason Cohn (also co-director of Eames: The Architect and the Painter) recently discussed Noyes and his legacy with Steven Heller for PRINT:

Eliot Noyes started out as a disciple of Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus, which was a specific flavor of Modernism that developed in Europe between the wars. There was a kind of idealism—a social reform aspect—to it. Modern design promised to improve people’s lives in tangible ways by making high-quality goods and housing affordable for everyone. Once Modernism became installed in America after WWII, however, it lost a lot of that idealism. It was adopted by multinational corporations like IBM and it became the preferred architectural style of the super-rich. I don’t think Eliot Noyes was consciously trying to make this happen, but he was probably as central to this evolution as anyone. I try to let viewers make up their own minds about whether Eliot Noyes made the world better or worse as a result of the work he did in corporate design, but I hope they at least think about what might have happened if Modernism maintained the more independent spirit that it had before if became “Modernism, Inc.”

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Published September 13, 2022

Love and Rockets: The Story Behind the Great American Comic

A documentary on the Hernandez Brother’s groundbreaking alternative comic Love & Rockets will launch the new season of KCET’s art and culture series Artbound, streaming on the PBS app October 5, 2022.

Love & Rockets turns 40 this year, and if you have $400 USD burning a hole in your pocket, Fantagraphics are collecting together bound facsimiles of the original fifty issues in a special eight-volume boxed set. (Although I would settle for a slightly more affordable Love and Rockets #24 t-shirt myself!)

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Published February 13, 2020

The Booksellers Official Trailer

Well, this looks like fun!

Antiquarian booksellers are part scholar, part detective and part businessperson, and their personalities and knowledge are as broad as the material they handle. They also play an underappreciated yet essential role in preserving history. THE BOOKSELLERS takes viewers inside their small but fascinating world, populated by an assortment of obsessives, intellects, eccentrics and dreamers.

According to their Facebook page, the film is in theatres next month.

(via Kottke and others)

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Published November 1, 2019

Farewell – etaoin shrdlu

Farewell – etaoin shrdlu is a half-hour documentary about the last day of hot metal typesetting at The New York Times.

The 1978 film by Carl Schlesinger and David Loeb Weiss shows the remarkable nightly production process for a daily newspaper and the changes to come with the transition computers.

The title ‘etaoin shrdlu’ refers the words made by the letters of the first two columns of a type-casting machine keyboard. If I understand this correctly, the phrase was used by operators to create an ‘obvious’ mistake in a line of type to be discarded.

And if this sort of thing is your bag, the video was posted to Vimeo by Linotype: The Film along with number of other archive films about typesetting that are worth checking out.

via PressPad Apps / Open Culture

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Published May 1, 2018

The Collection

The Collection is a short documentary about two friends and their discovery of a unique collection of movie memorabilia, comprised of over 40,000 printer blocks and 20,000 printer plates used to create the original newspaper advertisements for movies released in the US from the silent era through to the 1980s:

(via Coudal)

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Published April 20, 2018

Design Canada

Design Canada, is a new documentary celebrating the ‘golden era’ of Canadian graphic design: 

The film is screening in Canada in the summer 2018, and releasing digitally in the fall. 

(via Coudal)

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Published February 23, 2018

Rams: Teaser Trailer

Filmmaker Gary Hustwit has posted the first teaser trailers for his documentary about designer Dieter Rams on his website. 

The documentary, set to be released later this year, will include in-depth conversations with the designer, and feature original music by pioneering musician and producer Brian Eno. 

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Published March 16, 2017

Design Canada Documentary

Greg Durrell of Canadian design firm Hulse&Durrell, and Jessica Edwards and Gary Hustwit of Film First are putting together a documentary about Canadian graphic design:

The project is currently on Kickstarter. There are a couple of weeks to go and they are still a few thousand dollars shy of their goal. Please help out if you can. 

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Published February 8, 2017

Fade to Black

Hilton Als on James Baldwin, movies, and Raoul Peck’s documentary I Am Not Your Negro, for The New Yorker:

One has the sense, in the sections of “I Am Not Your Negro” that are devoted to Baldwin’s relationship to film, that Peck is stepping in to make the film that Baldwin couldn’t make. From the beginning of his career, Baldwin longed to make movies. In the introduction to his 1955 landmark collection, “Notes of a Native Son,” he wrote, “About my interests: I don’t know if I have any, unless the morbid desire to own a sixteen-millimeter camera and make experimental movies can be so classified.” To my knowledge, Baldwin never satisfied that desire (morbid, perhaps, because he knew of the herculean effort that goes into getting any movie made), but he never stopped yearning to be a filmmaker. Like a number of other significant twentieth-century authors—James Agee, Truman Capote, Susan Sontag, and his friend Norman Mailer—he knew that the page was not enough in the modern world; cinema was a powerful medium with many more “readers.” What would his life as an artist have been like, and what would American cinema be like now, had it opened itself up to him?

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Published October 6, 2016

Gimme Danger

A Jim Jarmusch documentary about Iggy Pop and The Stooges? YES.

Gimme Danger is scheduled for a limited release on October 28th.

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Published August 25, 2016

The Last Punchcutter

last punchcutter

One for the letterpress obsessives and tool aficionados, The Last Punchcutter is a beautiful, wordless film capturing Giuseppe Brachino — who was the head of the engraving department of the Nebiolo Company from Turin — hand-cut a punch for metal type:

(via Coudal)

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