"Korea Dreambus" Pilgrimage and Documentary Film

Recently I started playing one of the NYTimes free games, called Connections. The goal is to separate a field of 16 words into four categories. In other words, the player must make the connection between these seemingly disparate words, and oftentimes, other possible connections can obscure the one true connection designed into the game. What a feeling of satisfaction when those four blocks bounce and are drawn together in a line of color announcing the category I've just completed. I admit I have a hard time with this game, which I find more challenging than the Mini Crossword or Wordle. I think this is because making connections is really unique to each person, so trying to see someone else's connection between words, which themselves are symbols for ideas that may not be internalized the same for every person, can be challenging. Not to mention the fact that words can have different meanings and even different parts of speech! (Side note: I harbor a deep suspicion that AI is...

When I was in film school (mid-90s) I took a documentary class in which we learned about the history of documentary film - which at least in the early stages, was the history of film in general. One of the films we studied was " Man with a Movie Camera ," an experimental documentary directed by Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov in 1929.  Despite the fact that he was making a movie for the Soviet propaganda machine, he made a movie for himself, satisfying his own curiosity about connections in the world, the beauty, the expressiveness of movement, and the day to day life of the common man (aka the proletariat).  I was deeply impressed by the power of the medium in Vertov's hands, the innovative use of shadow and light, movement and stillness, the moments of the every day used to highlight a grander idea, larger than one person or one moment. He used experimental (for the time) techniques such as jump cuts, filming at fast and slow speeds, multiple exposures, stop motion, freez...