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Welcome to my website!

This is an invitation for you the viewer to begin a cinematic journey with me. We will explore the films I have directed and co-directed. We will consider how films are made, what lessons I have learned, and what tips I can offer. We will visit the work of other filmmakers and artists—and we will discuss the very nature of filmmaking itself.

Along the way I will share an occasional personal story, among them my twenty years living on a boat in Sausalito, California.

With good fortune, these words and pictures will provide a pathway to future films that I hope to make, and films that you the visitor will make and you as a viewer will watch with a careful and clear-eyed appreciation.

You are invited to participate, to send comments and offer suggestions about topics to cover and subjects dear to your hearts. All are welcome. No one is excluded.

And now the journey begins!

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My YouTube Channel

It’s finally up. My YouTube channel, Documentary by Christopher, is alive and well. It’s happening.

On my YouTube channel you will find many of the films featured on our website along with new films from myself and perhaps along the way, a few films from guest filmmakers.

I encourage all your comments and thoughts on the films. I reply to as many comments as possible, as we consider questions both practical and philosophical, political and personal—and together, we enter the place where all of our concerns meet, the endless, boundless, world of motion pictures.

Here is the list of the very first films I put up on my channel:

And this is the entire four-film series The Valley and the Lake. Check out the films and leave a comment. Thank you!

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Bomb Stamps

In 1992 I was in my neighborhood Post Office in San Francisco. As I stood in line, I saw a poster that announced a series of US stamps that would mark the 50th commemoration of World War II. The stamps would be issued ten each year between 1992 and 1995 that depicted wartime events from 1941 to 1945. Only stamps for 1942 were shown on the poster.

Based on my experience co-directing and co-producing the film, Dark Circle, with Judy Irving and Ruth Landy, a film about the connection between nuclear power and nuclear weapons, I began to wonder how the end of World War II would be depicted.

According to many histories and opinions, World War II ended with the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Histories and opinions are divided as well among those who feel the bombs were necessary or not, among those who feel the United States had committed an immoral act and those who believed the bombings were a justified act of warfare that saved lives both Japanese and American.

My question was more simple. How would I depict the end of World War II?

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Remembering Nagasaki

A separate award-winning web-site, Remembering Nagasaki, designed by Alison Sant, established and maintained by San Francisco’s Exploratorium Museum, is devoted to the international photographic exhibition, book and film entitled, Nagasaki Journey.

As the Nagasaki Journey exhibit took shape between 1992 and 1995, Rupert Jenkins contacted the San Francisco Exploratorium, founded by Robert Oppenheimer’s brother, Frank, to see if the Exploratorium wanted to be involved with our exhibition.

This approach was entirely in the hands of Rupert Jenkins, editor of the Nagasaki Journey book and Exhibition Consultant. Rupert in turn began working with Alison Sant then on staff at the Exploratorium.

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Shimon Attie, Berlin

Shimon Attie, by Timothy Greenfield Sanders

Between Dreams and History tells the story of the artist Shimon Attie as he creates his first work of public art in America. Prior to that installation, Attie, who studied art at San Francisco State College, created works of art in Europe dedicated to the idea of how to make memory visible in the present.
 
Attie’s breakthrough was his installation in Berlin, The Writing on the Wall. Attie researched photographs of Jews and Jewish businesses that existed in Berlin before their destruction by the rise of Nazi Germany. Attie then projected these images onto the actual buildings where the photographs were taken. Attie then photographed the resulting overlay of images.
 
The installation consists of the performance aspect of the actual projections, which required several hours to complete at night in extremely cold temperatures and the finished photographs that exist as prints and in Attie’s book, Sites Unseen.

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