Peter Davis Movies

Arguably the premiere African female vocalist of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries, Dolly Rathebe justly wrought comparisons to Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday and Dinah Washington. She emerged as a star under the threatening and subjugating shadow of apartheid, which inspired her to begin a crusade for social justice alongside her career in song. In 2004, Rathebe netted the coveted Order of Ikhamanga in Silver for both her social efforts and cultural contributions made through her music. Travels with Dolly constitutes neither a performance film nor a biographical portrait of Rathebe, but instead a filmed record of an event that transpired in 1998, when documentarist Peter Davis took Rathebe to Vancouver for a festival of black African films from the 1950s. ~ Nathan Southern, All Movie Guide

This video addresses the environmental problems still plaguing Europe's Black Sea area. Special coverage is given to the ten-day conference held in 1997 on this subject. More than three hundred scholars, government officials, scientists, and others attended, including the highly concerned representatives of the countries with shores along the Black Sea. One segment also looks at the pollution still pouring into the Black Sea from such tributaries as the Danube and Dniester Rivers. ~ Elizabeth Smith, All Movie Guide

At the beginning of this documentary on early cinematographer Edwin S. Porter (1869-1941), director Charles Musser gives some background on the "nickelodeons" or theaters that charged a nickel as an entrance fee, and their early (presumably cheaper) predecessors. The men who set up the programs at the nickelodeons -- including Porter at times -- arranged film clips and still slides to create about a half-hour's worth of entertainment -- they were the first film editors. By 1907, eager U.S. movie-goers were investing one million nickels per day for these shows. Edwin S. Porter was active between 1886-1915 and he is still well-known for his 1903 Great Train Robbery, the world's first narrative film, all of 12 minutes long. (It should be noted that Porter's filmography after he lost his position as head of production in Thomas Edison's studio in 1908 is not included in this documentary.) Porter worked first with multi-shot sequences as early as 1901 ("The Execution of Czolgosz" on the assassination of President McKinley, using documentary footage and a staged dramatization), running through one (small) spool of film for one sequence, and another for an additional sequence, usually from another angle or of another scene. Instead of an editor at a nickelodeon putting together two film sequences, Porter was doing the sequencing as the cinematographer. Taking this idea one step further, he pioneered "overlapping continuity," as in his landmark 1902 Life of an American Fireman. In this example of the technique, he put cameras inside and outside a burning building, and in his completed film, he first showed a rescue sequence from the inside, followed by the same sequence from the outside. In the 1930s when that film was recut with methods developed by Porter's most well-known immediate successor, David Wark Griffith, the "Fireman" film was shown with alternating interior-exterior views, from the start of the rescue to the end. Director Charles Musser comments on this later style, saying that in Porter's early years, audiences were not yet visually sophisticated enough to understand the technique of multiple, simultaneous perspectives. (At the same time, other critics maintain that Porter himself intercut the scenes.) Another pioneer in a visual medium, Pablo Picasso came of age artistically during the development of these cinematic techniques, and it is curious that his own style of showing multiple, simultaneous viewpoints of a figure in one image parallels the cinematic visions emerging first with Edwin Porter and then with D.W. Griffith. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

Haywire was adapted for television by Ivan Davis and Frank Pierson from the best-selling autobiography of Brooke Hayward. Played herein by Deborah Raffin, Brooke is the daughter of legendary Broadway producer Leland Hayward (Jason Robards) and the brilliant stage and film actress Margaret Sullavan (Lee Remick). The much-married Leland is overindulgent but aloof and casually cruel; the lovely Margaret is an emotionally unstable perfectionist. The residue of this dysfunctional family relationship includes the suicides of Ms. Sullivan and Brooke's sister Bridget (Dianne Hull), and the confinement to a mental institution of Brooke's brother Bill (Hart Bochner). How Brooke herself survives this "haywire" situation provides the meat of this 2-hour film. Brooke's brother William Hayward was the producer of Haywire, which originally aired May 14, 1980. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The title of this documentary was inspired by the mantra recited by those in charge of the Vietnam War: "In order to win the war, we must win the hearts and minds of the people." The failure to achieve this, coupled with the disastrous no-win policies of the higher-ups, is the nucleus of this film, put together by director Peter Davis in the same manner as Marcel Ophuls' The Sorrow and the Pity. Like the Ophuls film, Davis juxtaposes news footage of the Vietnam war with interviews conducted with its observers and participants, interspersing vignettes of the fatuous comments made by the generals and politicians. The film was briefly withdrawn from distribution when Walter Rostow, one-time advisor to President Johnson, insisted that his reputation had been damaged and demanded that the two minutes featuring Rostow on-camera be deleted. More controversy arose when Hearts and Minds won the Best Documentary Oscar, whereupon the Academy issued a statement--read during the awards ceremony by Frank Sinatra--that it did not condone or advocate the volatile statements made by the producers during their acceptance speech. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide