Watch: Reggae – The Story of Jamaican Music (documentary)

Bunny Wailer, Bob Marley and Peter Tosh (pre-dreadlocks)

All three episodes from the 2002 BBC documentary Reggae: The Story Of Jamaican Music have been kindly uploaded to Youtube, and you can watch them here now. The series, comprised of three hour long episodes, details the beginnings of the genre, from the invention of ska at the end of British rule in Jamaica, right up to the turn of the century.

Watch: This Is Modern Art (documentary)

This Is Modern Art is a series written and presented by the English art critic Matthew Collings for BBC.

The series, originally released in 1999, won several awards including a BAFTA. It became popular both because of its sometimes jokey and sometimes thoughtful explanations of the work and attitude of a new wave of artists that had been publicized in the British mass media, and because of its author’s witty and irreverent, though highly informed, commentary style.

Collings focuses on the current state of modern art, and looks back at Picasso, Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol to see how they changed the definition of art, and reveals the ways modern art attempts to shock the audience.

Collings also investigates whether the once accepted view of art as merely a thing of beauty prevails today, examining the works of various artists.

We’ve embedded all six episodes into one youtube playlist for your viewing pleasure.

Episode 1 – “I am a Genius”, shortlists Picasso, Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol for the “genius” category.
Episode 2 – “Shock! Horror!”, opens with Damien Hirst’s vitrines of cut-up cows and goes on to an in-depth and welcome discussion of Goya.
Episode 3 – “Lovely, Lovely”, examines the idea of beauty: is it still a valid idea in Modern art?
Episode 4 – “Nothing Matters”, is devoted largely to Minimalism, starting with Martin Creed’s roomful of white balloons…
Episode 5 – “Hollow Laughter” is all about Modern art jokes or perhaps jokes used in Modern art.
Episode 6 –  ”The Shock of the Now”, asks: “Could it be indeed that the Modern art ‘we’ have chosen is vacuous or empty?”

Watch: The Murder of Fred Hampton (documentary)

The Murder of Fred Hampton began as a film portrait of Hampton and his leadership of the Illinois Black Panther Party, but half way through filming, Hampton was killed by Chicago police. In an infamous moment in Chicago history and politics, over a dozen armed officers from Illinois State’s Attorney’s Office, in conjunction with the Chicago Police Department and FBI, burst into Hampton’s apartment on December 4, 1969 while its occupants were sleeping, killing Hampton and fellow Panther Mark Clark and brutalizing the remaining occupants including Hampton’s pregnant girlfriend. In ten minutes, 99 rounds were fired by the police during the raid, two of which were point blank shots to Hampton’s head. Filmmakers Mike Gray and Howard Alk arrived a few hours later to shoot film footage of the crime scene that was later used to contradict news reports and police testimony.

The pre-dawn raid was organized to serve a warrant for illegal weapons. Originally the officers claimed self-defense, stating the Panthers fired multiple shots at the officers first. The only shot fired by the Panthers was later determined by a 1970 Federal grand jury to be a reflexive reaction in Clark’s death convulsions after being shot by the raiding team while he was holding a shotgun. The same grand jury concluded that the original investigations by the Chicago Police internal investigation division and the Cook county coroners’ office  were complete shams, with each officer being asked questions which had been previously written up and given to them, along with a set of answers. The 243 page report would go on to say, “Physical evidence, standing alone and unexplained, is sufficient to establish probable cause to charge the officers with a willful violation of these survivors’ civil rights.”

Read more about Fred Hampton’s death here

Read the declassified FBI files on Hampton here

Watch: “Darwin’s Nightmare” (documentary)

Some time in the 1960′s, in the heart of Africa, a new animal was introduced into Lake Victoria as a little scientific experiment. The Nile Perch, a voracious predator, extinguished almost the entire stock of the native fish species. However, the new fish multiplied so fast, that its white fillets are today exported all around the world. Huge hulking ex-Soviet cargo planes come daily to collect the latest catch in exchange for their southbound cargo - Kalashnikovs and ammunitions for the uncounted wars in the dark center of the continent. This booming multinational industry of fish and weapons has created an ungodly globalized alliance on the shores of the world’s biggest tropical lake: an army of local fishermen, World bank agents, homeless children, African ministers, EU-commissioners, Tanzanian prostitutes and Russian pilots.

From the director Hubert Sauper:

The old question, which social and political structure is the best for the world seems to have been answered. Capitalism has won. The ultimate forms for future societies are “consumer democracies”, which are seen as “civilized” and “good”. In a Darwinian sense the “good system” won. It won by either convincing its enemies or eliminating them.

In Darwin’s Nightmare I tried to transform the bizarre success story of a fish and the ephemeral boom around this “fittest” animal into an ironic, frightening allegory for what is called the New World Order. I could make the same kind of movie in Sierra Leone, only the fish would be diamonds, in Honduras, bananas, and in Libya, Nigeria or Angola, crude oil. Most of us I guess, know about the destructive mechanisms of our time, but we cannot fully picture them. We are unable to “get it”, unable to actually believe what we know.

It is, for example, incredible that wherever prime raw material is discovered, the locals die in misery, their sons become soldiers, and their daughters are turned into servants and whores. Hearing and seeing the same stories over and over makes me feel sick. After hundreds of years of slavery and colonisation of Africa, globalisation of african markets is the third and deadliest humiliation for the people of this continent. The arrogance of rich countries towards the third world (that’s three quarters of humanity) is creating immeasurable future dangers for all peoples.

It seems that the individual participants within a deadly system don’t have ugly faces, and for the most part, no bad intentions. These people include you and me. Some of us are “only doing their job” (like flying a jumbo from A to B carrying napalm), some don’t want to know, others simply fight for survival. I tried to film the personalities in this documentary as intimately as possible. Sergey, Dimond, Raphael, Eliza: real people who wonderfully represent the complexity of this system, and for me, the real enigma.

Read more about the film here

Watch: “Party Monster – The Shockumentary”

Party Monster: The Shockumentary is a 1998 documentary film detailing the rise of the club kid phenomenon of the late 80′s and early 90′s in New York City, the life of club kid and party promoter Michael Alig and Alig’s eventual murder (with Robert “Freeze” Riggs) of fellow club kid and drug dealer Angel Melendez. Produced by World of Wonder and based in part on the James St. James book on the murder, Disco Bloodbath, the film combines interview footage from Alig, St. James, scene watchers like Michael Musto and a number of other former club kids with archive footage from various parties and dramatic re-enactments. The book and this film also served as the basis for the 2003 film, Party Monster, starring Macaulay Culkin, Seth Green and Chloë Sevingny.

Cub Kids on Donahue circa 1993.