Canadian director and writer Dean DeBlois has a film oeuvre that reveals two passions: one, for bringing fantastical creatures to life via animation (Lilo & Stitch, 2002 and How to Train Your Dragon, 2010) and two, for the music of Icelandic band Sigur Rós, fronted by Jon Thor Birgisson (a.k.a. Jonsi), who DeBlois also featured in the acoustic short film Go Quiet (2010). Sandwiched between Stitch and Dragon is Heima (2007), a film that has DeBlois chronicling a series of homecoming concerts performed by Sigur Rós for free across Iceland. As is appropriate for a documentary about a band who ..read more

The Woodstock Festival held in 1969 over three days in August would not be fated as a short and mostly sweet gathering around music and instead bears the historical weight of a sprawling and chaotic youth bacchanal that defines how we think about the sixties. But how well do we remember Woodstock itself? Thanks to a 1994 director’s cut of the original 1970 film called Woodstock: 3 Days of Peace & Music (that director being Michael Wadleigh), we are treated to almost four hours of sound and visuals that is nothing if not transportive. The Docn’ crew task ourselves with the good, the bad, th ..read more

This very special episode of Docn' has three big firsts - it's our first episode without co-host Carolyn on the microphone (boo), our first episode featuring a guest (yay) and our first discussion of a movie currently out in theaters (ambivalent noise). We are joined by Managing Director of the Texas Archive of the Moving Image (or "TAMI") Elizabeth Hansen to talk about The Velvet Underground, the first music documentary from established and beloved director Todd Haynes. We discuss how and maybe why this music film is just so damn visual, about film archives in general and Elizabeth's work wit ..read more

Only Yesterday - 2007 Directed by Samantha Peters Spotify Playlist The Carpenters were a sister and brother duo from California (by way of Connecticut) first associated - often with derision - with the gauzy and sentimental music of the early seventies that began to out-populate the squall of psychedelic and urgent rock that defined the end of the sixties.  But after the death of Karen Carpenter at just thirty-two due to complications related to an eating disorder, even the band’s most innocent songs are now retroactively cut with melancholy.  As this BBC documentary also reveals, Ka ..read more

1991 The Year Punk Broke Directed by Dave Markey Spotify Playlist For our second episode, our roc’ doc’ watchers leave sunny seventies California and traverse across a decade and over intercontinental borders to witness the workings of a huge European festival tour featuring Sonic Youth, Nirvana, Dinosaur Jr., Gumball, and Babes in Toyland. The film is 1991: The Year Punk Broke, a collection of concerts and other assorted happenings captured on 8mm by Dave Markey and released one year later after Nirvana had effectively conquered the hearts and minds of a generation impassioned with apathy. Th ..read more

Welcome to Docn’, a new podcast of rock doc’ straight talk from old friends Andrew Basile, Carolyn Cunningham, and Adam Schragin.  For this first round of rockumentary discussion (or second, as the first attempt to record was destroyed by what we can only assume was an Act of God and/or a preemptive strike from the Henley camp), our trio inexplicably begin with 2013’s History of the Eagles, a more than three-hour exploration into the many ups, downs, and sideways stories that constitute the career and post-career of the inescapable country-rock California band that so defined the seventie ..read more