Last night I watched Girl In The Picture (2022), directed by Skye Borgman, which is a new Netflix true crime documentary. I had heard it was good, and, with a runtime of less than two hours (rather than the six hour-long episode slog too many Netflix documentaries are), I decided to try it. It tells the story of a young woman who is killed in a hit and run, and how her death leads to the discovery of a whole trail of kidnappings, murder, and pedophilia.
It’s all down to one man, the perpetrator Franklin Delano Floyd, but the focus of the film is not on Floyd but his victims, particularly the titular girl in the picture. This is in keeping with the trend of true crime documentaries to take the focus off the criminal and onto the people affected by their crimes; in general, it’s not a trend I have a whole lot of interest in (I like reading/watching this stuff because of the focus on the wrong-doer, it’s like a mental vacation from correct behavior), but here it makes perfect sense and is logical enough because of the rather unusual circumstances of the case.
With the story being told, and the gradual unfolding nature of the facts, it would spoil things for me to say much more. I recommend this if you like the more mysterious end of true crime; though the acts are terrible, the film does not linger on them. Girl in the Picture is not exploitative, but an exercise in doing justice to the memory of someone who never even knew her real name.
Last night I watched Ayahuasca: Vine of the Soul (2010), a documentary on the psychedelic ayahuasca, created from Amazonian vines. I actually watched a few different things on ayahuasca but this was the best. We follow a couple of Torontonians (!) on a trip to Peru to try some in the jungle under the supervision of Guillermo Arévalo, a traditional shaman. Along the way are interviews with ethnobotanist Dennis J. McKenna (brother of writer Terence McKenna) and Dr. Gabor Maté, addiction specialist. Compared to some of the sensationalist garbage out there, this was a reasoned, calm look at a healing substance unlike most anything else available.
I’ve been reading about yage since I was in high school, and have often imagined trying some ayahuasca myself. I have no plans to fly to Peru to do so however, and so the best I could manage would be a well-travelled water bottle filled with brown, swampy liquid. Or so this documentary suggested over ten years ago now. Perhaps nowadays there’s more ways to explore this unique plant concoction?
As you might expect what with documentaries airing about its incredible potential for healing mental and/or spiritual problems, ayahuasca has since become a bit of a popular option for those who can afford to take it, trendy even. The documentary points out that the userbase has been markedly different from such popular psychedelics as LSD; professional people (and increasingly celebrities) are trying ayahuasca, and this has affected how this ‘drug’ is treated by the laws and police of countries in which it’s now found.
Just a week ago, athlete Aaron Rodgers was cleared for ayahuasca use by the NFL. It’s possible that a perfect storm of ayahuasca’s newfound popularity combined with a medical zeitgeist that takes seriously the beneficial possibilities of, for example, ketamine and psilocybin mushrooms in treating depression, anxiety or addiction, will create an environment in which ayahuasca becomes widely available, beyond expensive retreats and clinic appointments. Maybe soon we’ll all have the opportunity to try it.
I was hoping to write something on the career of Paul Cohen, director of Bell Labs short films and something of a legend, I would gather, in the industrial film world. Unfortunately for me, there was a mathematician of the same name about the same time within the same company, which makes finding information about filmmaker Paul Cohen frustrating. Consider too there was a Dutch filmmaker as well, again of the same name and again around the same period. It seemed a bridge too far for my humble research skills.
Just after posting an earlier version of this piece on social media (a few days ago), I happened to be going back through the films on youtube and noticed a comment on “Microworld” made by one Paul H. Cohen nine years ago, reading:
“I’m the guilty party who made that Shatner film in 1980. Though some of the “electronic wizardry” predictions sound naive today, there is some sharp foresight in the narrative as to where the technology was taking us.”
Intrigued, I began searching for a “Paul H. Cohen” and was shocked to discover his obituary in the Westport Journal, dated less than a fortnight previous. He had lived to be 98. From his obit –
“Born in New York City on December 16, 1923, to Samuel and Dora Cohen, he enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps on his 19th birthday in 1942, the earliest that was permitted at the time. He served in the Galapagos and Central America, commanding a radio operations group in order to protect the Panama Canal.
After the war ended, he attended Goddard College in Plainfield, Vt., and then the Sorbonne and La Cinémathèque Française in Paris, where he studied cinematography. He was then employed by the March of Time in Paris.
Upon his return the U.S., Paul was employed by Owen Murphy Productions, the producer of documentaries and commercial films. After several years, he acquired the company upon Mr. Murphy’s retirement. He produced films for such clients as IBM, the USIA, Western Electric, the 1960-61 World’s Fair and the States of New York and New Jersey, and won countless awards from prestigious organizations. He traveled with three presidents — Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon.”
I can’t help but wonder if these other Paul Cohens I mention – the mathematician and the filmmaker – had convinced our man to add an H. to his professional name. As late as 1980, he was still going by his ‘old name’. We are now able to see several of his superb films online in varying degrees of quality. I stumbled onto Cohen’s work while investigating links from a content farm specializing in vintage short instructional films; one was described as “trippy” and that was enough to peak my interest.
Network
This simple description, if anything, vastly undersells this film (whose title is Network and whose date I would estimate at 1971) which is, in fact, one of the trippier films you are ever likely to see. Ostensibly a look at Bell’s communication network, it manifests instead as some kind of terrifying dystopian vision of the future, replete with scary music and dizzying visuals.
This music is by Charles Morrow, who himself had an interesting career, composing all manner of music from corporate (as here), to experimental and even transcendental. In fact, Morrow later supplied music for the notorious Ken Russell film Altered States. But get a load of his style here, and keep in mind this was presumably meant to get people enthused about Bell.
It may surprise you to see the “tele-class” at approximately 10:00 on Network’s runtime; this bears an uncanny resemblance to our own pandemic-era zoom classes and meetings, forecast about fifty years ago with startling accuracy.
Tele-Class
It’s interesting to note that Network is nowhere to be seen in the official AT&T Archives account on youtube, a corporate resource which desperately needs updating (ideally by scanning the negatives of these films at a decent standard) but which admittedly shares an awful lot of very cool videos. Not this one though. It makes me wonder if Cohen (credited with design as well as direction for the film) rubbed people at the company the wrong way with Network’s decidedly dystopian tone.
The Conquest of Light
As dark as Network is, Cohen’s The Conquest of Light is, er, light. It’s available in a beautiful print from the Prelinger Archives and concerns the development of the laser. The visuals in Krystallos (1962) are lower in quality but feature perhaps Cohen’s most beautiful images, alongside the story of the silicon chip’s development. If you watch Krystallos, I recommend not blowing the image up.
Krystallos
Two other films of Cohen’s available films deserve mention: The Incredible Machine, which includes a robot singing “A Bicycle Built for Two” and, yes, this is the same robot that inspired Stanley Kubrick’s HAL in 2001: and Microworld (1980) a rather breathless film on the development of microchip technology hosted by none other than Canadian wunderkind William Shatner.
Cold Brain Storage 