Michael Allder is a producer with the National Film Board and was the producer/director of The Lucky Ones: Allied Airmen and Buchenwald.

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Maybe it was the timing. Los Angeles is still uneasily accessing the fallout from the O.J. Simpson trial. Maybe it was the location. l.a. seems culturally inclined to look to the future with a worldly but sometimes apocalyptic eye but the mood at this year’s International Documentary Association’s Congress was often distinctly pessimistic.

The Congress, which is the second to be staged by the ida, was an ambitious and provocative three-day event, Oct. 25-27, held at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Beverly Hills. The Congress concerns itself both with the philosophy and the practice of documentary filmmaking. It’s a forum for ideas and debate.

At the first panel, encouragingly entitled ‘The British Model,’ the panelists expressed concerns that the Thatcher-Major administrations’ dismemberment of the formerly patrician itv system had led to increased pressure on both the bbc and Channel Four to head down market.

‘Down market’ was the theme taken up by veteran French filmmaker Marcel Ophuls, who railed against studio bosses and tv tycoons whom he accused of trivializing information and ‘brutalizing the sensibilities’ of their audiences.

‘The New Media’ sounded more encouraging. Perhaps there’s more of a future, you might have thought, out there in cyberspace. It seemed that way at first, with the enthusiastic speculation about the apparent potential of the World Wide Web.

One panelist described how feature-length films could be digitally encapsulated into what she snappily termed as ‘quick time.’

Another described the way in which digitized rushes could be zapped around the globe.

But then came the down side.

A Malaysian filmmaker on the panel pointed out that the web-world is the developed world, and even then, a world limited to the cash and credit rich.

Cybersex sells

A pioneer of video publishing opined that the future development and structure of Internet information is ‘up for grabs,’ it being no accident, he argued, that Playboy’s own personal little cyberspace island attracted some of the web’s highest advertising rates.

In other sessions, filmmakers sped their attentive audiences through some astonishing careers. Robert Drew, a former wwii pilot and Life magazine staffer, began by running a film ‘quick-time’ style, entitled 30-15. It compressed 30 years of filmmaking into 15 minutes.

Ophuls was in a characteristically trenchant mood. Having dispensed with attacks on specific studio bosses, one of whom he affectionately characterized as having come snake-wise from the Disney animal kingdom, he moved on to the verite school and, in his view, its ‘bastard’ progeny, tv’s so-called ‘reality’ shows. Arguing that filmmaking is always subjective, and that the presence of a camera always to some degree alters events, he critiqued the concept that verite filmmaking is somehow more ‘real’ than other documentary genre.

Turning finally to his own style of work, he speculated that given many of the pressures of the day, that the documentary doesn’t have much of a future – a comment that must have been on Drew’s mind when commenting on the pessimism of many of the sessions, that it seemed ironic that the more success some people achieved, the more bitter they seemingly became.

There was no bitterness to be seen, however, at ‘Five Voices: Five Visions,’ when five contemporary women filmmakers from around the world discussed the state of non-fiction filmmaking, and their individual work. Here, the tone wasn’t angry so much as personal and confessional.

In a rawly emotional speech, Canada’s Alanis Obomsawin reflected on her early life and how it influenced her as a filmmaker.

Running parallel to the Congress were two other events.

The first, ‘In and Out of the Cold, 1945-1995: 50 Years of Change,’ was a month-long series of public screenings which featured films by Frank Capra, John Ford, Don Siegel, Chris Marker, Mike Rubbo, and Michael Apted, and which included three nfb films, Churchill’s Island (1941), Sad Song of Yellow Skin (1970), and The Lucky Ones: Allied Airmen and Buchenwald (1994).

The second event was an awards ceremony. The six winners were honored without fanfare or suspense (their names were published in advance) at a refreshingly low-key reception at Paramount Studios, and included Terry Zwigoff’s Crumb, David Grubin’s fdr, and Lawrence Johnston’s Eternity.

There were two Canadian nominations: Ms. Conceptions (Ric Bienstock and Linda Frum) and A Brush with Life (Martin Duckworth).