Biography of the legendary musician Huddie Leadbetter “Leadbelly” that deals with the problems he had in his youth due to racial segregation including his time and prison and his efforts to conquer a position in the world of music.
Tag: 1970s
A poet-astronaut is shot through an area of space called the Chronosynclastic Infundibulum. He is duplicated into infinite copies of himself, each of whom finds himself in a bizarre situations on a different world. (These scenarios are all derived from the novels and short stories from Kurt Vonnegut Jr., including Cat’s Cradle, Welcome to the Monkey House, Harrison Bergeron, and Happy Birthday, Wanda June).
Non-narrated treatment of the activities carried out in an abattoir. An unlikely subject for a documentary, but the filmmaker captures the strength and terrible beauty in the daily preparation for slaughter. The sound track echoes with hard metallic knives being ground, tested and sharpened. No beast is actually shown being killed but the slaughter is mirrored in the blood-red faces of the men and the scenes of water flushing away the blood to a river – thus water purges but never really cleans the walls of the slaughter house. A powerful film – almost abstract at times. Perhaps even more effective because of what it leaves unsaid and unshown.
Pixillation was one of the first collaborations between Lillian Schwartz and Ken Knowlton during their stint at Bell Labs using Knowlton’s self written computer animation language EXPLOR. Made in 1970 this 4 minute film crams in a spectacular amount of visual information, cutting from geometric sequences reminiscent of Cellular Automata to analogue sequences of organic forms – immersions of liquids and oils so favoured by the West Coast light show fanatacists around the same time.
Marie Chapdelaine leaves her rural Quebec village and travels to Montreal to find her estranged lumberjack father who disappeared seven years ago. She meets Armand St-Amour, a former friend of her father and the owner of a country-and-western bar called the Rodeo Club. Armand takes the opportunity to exploit the naive and innocent young girl and tells her that if she works for him as a topless singer he will put her in touch with her father’s mistress who will know where he is.
A committee is selected to investigate the first day of broadcasting of a television channel that, for the first time in the United States, broadcasts its programming without any type of censorship. Through advertisements, self-produced programs and other content, we will immerse ourselves in the television of the future, although it will not be to everyone’s taste.
This documentary is a portrait of Point St. Charles, one of Montreal’s notoriously bleak neighbourhoods. Many of the residents are English-speaking and of Irish origin; many of them are also on welfare. Considered to be one of the toughest districts in all of Canada, Point St. Charles is poor in terms of community facilities, but still full of rich contrasts and high spirits – that is, most of the time.