Canadian Brett Story's most recent film, The Prison in Twelve Landscapes (2016), explores the American prison system, as well as the traditional sense of “landscape,” in an unusual way: except for the film's final shot, a drive-by of Attica State Prison nestled in the countryside of west-central New York State, we see no prisoners and no prison buildings—and few spaces we could call landscapes. Story's panoramic film reveals the multitude of ways in which the prison system is hidden in plain sight throughout the United States. In Scott MacDonald's interview with Story, the filmmaker explains the film's unusual approach and structure—as well as the struggle involved in getting the film made. Story's modest budget is the ultimate irony of The Prison in Twelve Landscapes , given the fact that the American prison system is the world's most extensive, and no doubt most expensive, system of incarceration on the planet.

How can we account for the fact that, out of the blue, a short, seemingly simple video can move us so deeply that for a time we cannot not look at it? In the case of Brazilian filmmaker Carlos Adriano’s short video Sem Titulo #1:Dance of Leitfossil (“Untitled #1: Dance of Leitfossil,” 2014) it’s the fact that the considerable pleasure of Adriano’s combination of his reworking of an Astaire-Rogers dance routine with Ana Moura’s popular song, “Desfado,” is only the invitation to this “dance.” Several subtle details make clear that the video is a celebration of Bernardo Vorobow, who until his death in 2009 was the Amos Vogel of Brazil—as well as Adriano’s long-time partner in filmmaking and in life. Sem Titulo #1 is an exhilarating tribute to their 27-year relationship and to the revival of Adriano’s creative passion after a period of mourning.

An interview with Michael Glawogger whose documentary practice takes him where the dirty work of the world is done. In his “Globalization Trilogy,” including the recent Whores’ Glory , he often puts himself in harm’s way to reveal the surreality of what for much of the world is the normal.

An interview with an avant-garde filmmaker who combines a Buddhist sensibility (emphasizing detached contemplation of the world) with sometimes shocking or disgusting subject matter (a sewage plant, autopsy). Paweł Wojtasik is a cine-alchemist whose quest is to turn the disgusting, the horrifying, the taboo into gold, using perception as a means to transcendence.

An overview of the interlinking aesthetic and institutional histories of avant-garde and documentary film in terms of: early experiments; city symphonies; visual poetry and politics; film societies; sound options; the Flaherty Seminar; the personal; contemplating nature.

An interview with Leonard Retel Helmrich, a Dutch––Indonesian documentary filmmaker whose recent work ( The Eye of the Day, The Shape of the Moon ) reflects the increasing impact of Islamic fundamentalism on Indonesian society. He discusses his commitment to the idea of cinema as motion and his innovations in equipment design.

In this interview, director Todd Haynes discusses the influence on his films (notably Superstar , Poison , Dottie Gets Spanked , Far from Heaven , and I'm Not There ) of the avant-garde tradition from Jean Genet to Stan Brakhage to Leslie Thornton to Sally Potter.

ABSTRACT Scott MacDonald talks with filmmaker David Gatten about his multi-film exploration of the life and times of colonial Virginian William Byrd II, Secret History of the Dividing Line, A True Account in Nine Parts , in which Gatten considers the development of print culture, the arrival of digital, and the material nature of cinema.

ABSTRACT Why is nature filmmaking generally absent from histories and theorizations of cinema, and why do films like March of the Penguins receive such grudging attention from serious critics? By exploring ideological dimensions of two formative influences (Jean Painlevéé and the Disney True-Life Adventures), along with a recent National Geographic special on the Sonoran desert and the film Microcosmos , MacDonald demonstrates why nature film should be taken seriously.

Since the late 1980s, veteran independent filmmaker James Benning has been exploring the American West in a series of visually stunning and conceptually sophisticated feature films, largely ignored by American programmers and the American critical establishment. In ““Exploring the New West,”” Benning and Scott MacDonald discuss these films, revealing their often intricate design and the wide variety of ways in which they engage such issues as the environment and racial politics.

A conversation with Peter Kubelka, focusing on Our African Journey ( Unsere Afrikareise , 1966), his short, brilliantlye dited exposéé of colonialism, constructed from sound and image recorded while he was a young filmmaker in the employ of several Austrian businessmen on safari in Africa. Kubelka's revealing stories about the process of shooting the film and his candid discussion of the film's politics bring new light to an avant-garde and documentary classic.

Scott MacDonald: “Hollywood Outsider-Insider:An Interview with Chuck Workman.” Scott MacDonald talks with Chuck Workman, who began his career producing advertisements and trailers for low-budget films, then graduated to trailers for big-budget films ( Star Wars; Paris, Texas... ), and to feature documentaries ( Superstar: The Life and Times of Andy Warhol; The Source ), dramatic features (most recently, A House on a Hill , to be released later this year), and short and feature-length compilation films, including the historical miniretrospectives that enliven the Academy Awards shows, year after year.

After providing a brief introduction to Brakhage's prolific career, MacDonald interviews the legendary avant-garde filmmaker about four pivotal films: Anticipation of the Night (1958), the controversial film that established Brakhage's commitment to a new form of cinematic sight and threw the avant-garde film world into an uproar; the four-part Scenes from Under Childhood (1969-1970), one of Brakhage's most elaborate evocations of how the freedom of a baby's vision is lost as the child is acculturated into language; The Loom (1986), Brakhage's requiem for his remarkable marriage with Jane Collum Brakhage; and Commingled Containers (1997), a film made during the first moments of Brakhage's confrontation with bladder cancer. He died on March 9, 2003.