Letter to the Editor
Alan Berliner VS 2019 88 min.
Award-winning documentary filmmaker Alan Berliner collected more than 10,000 clipped and carefully cataloged photographs from The New York Times. Based on these photos, the director tells the history of his city, his own story and that of his impressive archive. A playful film essay in which a news junkie pays tribute to a time when news reports had not yet been devalued into fleeting snapshots of time.
DOCVILLE 2022
Fond of Footage
In his funny and concerned voice-over, Berliner addresses the news consumer in the distant future, for whom the newspaper is probably an unfamiliar concept. He browses through his collection of photos that he cut from The New York Times for forty years and then archived through an ingenious system. The thousands of images are a monument to a medium that, according to Berliner, is threatened from all sides, including by the digital revolution and world leaders who call journalists the enemy of the people. "When I started collecting the photos, the word 'fake' was reserved for fur coats and art forgeries." The value of news reports and journalistic photos now seems so devalued that a farewell is necessary.
Credits
Director
Alan Berliner
Editing
Alan Berliner
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