Category Archives: Documentary

Coming to The WORLD Channel’s America Reframed series tonight, Tuesday, January 6: PURGATORIO

Rodrigo Reyes’ meditation on the US/Mexico border debuted at Guadalajara in 2013. It went on to screen at Los Angeles, New Orleans, Ann Arbor, San Diego Latino, Chicago, Documentary Fortnight, and Traverse City, among others.

Reimagining the dangerous, expansive, and heavily politicized border between America and its southern neighbors as the middle, purifying realm in Dante’s allegorical DIVINE COMEDY, Reyes dispenses with explicit rhetoric in this essay film to instead present a series of snapshots of life along this limbo region. To the South, there is poverty, violence, drugs, and crime – a general sense of lawlessness pervades. To the North, there’s a dogged focus on the border, from those who would try to help desperate, thirsty people making the treacherous journey, to their opposing number, who make it their mission to remove any potential aid. Despite this confrontation with such bleakness, the film’s haunting camerawork is able to find beauty where the viewer would least expect.

Coming to PBS’s American Experience tomorrow, Tuesday, January 6: RIPLEY: BELIEVE IT OR NOT

Cathleen O’Connell’s biography of the man behind the popular curiosity empire makes its broadcast debut tomorrow evening.

LeRoy Robert Ripley became one of the wealthiest men during the Great Depression when he transitioned from newspaper sports cartoonist to America’s guide to random factoids, faraway cultures, and curious oddities – or “curi-oddities,” as the man liked to call them. Starting through his newspaper column, his “Believe It or Not!” series of cartoons eventually spanned books, radio shows, film, and even early television – and that was just in his lifetime. After his death in 1949, the franchise continued, spawning a tourist-friendly museum chain on four continents. O’Connell’s watchable but workmanlike profile reveals how an athletic, buck-toothed young man from Santa Rosa CA built an entertainment empire and became an unlikely celebrity. His round the world explorations of remote in the search to uncover exotic subjects for his cartoon strip allowed readers to travel vicariously through his exploits at a time when international travel was a privilege of the very few, while newspaper contests allowed his fans to submit their own peculiar feats for a chance to be immortalized by Ripley in print and gain their pre-Warhol fifteen minutes of fame. O’Connell posits Ripley’s spotlighting of the odd and obscure as a precursor of sorts to YouTube, which seems like an unnecessary stretch, the point being sufficiently made that he found a way to popularize a palatable version of the carnival freak show, essentially, for general audiences via the various mass media available in his time. Most interesting here are excerpts from Ripley’s early forays into radio and television, all the more fascinating in showing how awkward he was at being a showman, despite his success.