52docs / 12 - Everything you know is wrong

Our previous film got me back in the saddle: shared delight in a dark room full of strangers, a couple of friends to argue with afterwards, beautiful human stories beamed onto a big screen filled with images and ideas which then hung around for days. It was like old times.

In this ever evolving mixtape it’s time to cue up a classic that was a new discovery for me.

We’ve all got movie cameras in our pockets now so it’s hard to convey just how exciting the arrival of affordable digital cameras was back in the late 90s, but our next film is exactly why. The tape you recorded on was cheap, the camera was light enough to take just about anywhere, and you could get away with filming stuff because it didn’t really look like you were filming.

To call The Cruise a portrait of a New York City tour guide would be to almost criminally undersell it. But it is elegantly simple: a filmmaker, an incredibly compelling subject, and a small camera, mostly on a bus. That’s pretty much it. Watch the trailer if you have to, but I’d recommend you skip that and dive into the whole thing. I loved it.

Also check out an extremely thorough history and appraisal of the film by Robert Greene (whose talent seems to know no bounds - I saw him discussing his editing of Pavements in a Q&A after a screening last week).

I watched it on Kanopy in the US, but it looks like you can rent it from YouTube etc.

Enjoy!