Broadcast on A&E on January 12, 1995, this special is a recording of the presentation of the Algur H. Meadows Award for Excellence in the Arts presented by Southern Methodist University in 1994. The performance, by students at the school and guest artists Bernadette Peters, Chip Zien and Debra Monk, is intercut with interviews with Sondheim, Hal Prince, James Lapine and videotaped testimonials from Angela Lansbury and Jason Alexander. The less said about the student performances, the better, but the professional Sondheim veterans more than deliver, and the whole evening is worth seeing Sondheim himself at the piano accompanying Peters on “Send in the Clowns.”
Year: 2021
A packed house at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan welcomed the 69-year old Stephen Sondheim on March 19, 2000 for a conversation with composer Ned Rorem in the “Ned Rorem Hosts” series.
Four arduous years in the making, Ardak Amirkulov’s 1990 historical epic about the intrigue and turmoil preceding Genghis Khan’s systematic destruction of the lost East Asian civilization of Otrar is a one-of-a-kind experience. Amirkulov’s film, shot in sepia-toned black-and-white, is at once hallucinatory, visually resplendent, and ferociously energetic, packed with eye-catching (and gouging) detail and B-movie fervor, and traversing an endless variety of parched, epic landscapes and ornate palaces.
A man and a woman sit in a room and when the wind blows the window open, the man imagines what would happen if he kills the woman and the following drama blurs the boundaries between reality and fiction.
This animated film paints a vivid portrait of two strangers intimately linked by the shared ceilings, floors and plumbing of their apartments. When an unexpected problem arises, these comfortable connections are compromised. Wendy Tilby uses a painstaking animation process involving painting on glass and stop-action filming.
Smith, the deaf and dumb son of a rural black preacher, refuses to accept the menial labour on offer in the small farming community where he’s grown up. He tries to earn a living in the city, but this ends in assault, and his return home sparks off a cycle of vengeful violence. What Roodt’s film lacks in subtlety, it makes up for in dirty authenticity. A hard-hitting independent venture (the director went on to make Sarafina!), completed and released against the odds in apartheid South Africa.
Goto is an island which, through a series of natural disasters, was cut off from the rest of the world in the late 1800s. Its inhabitants toil in stone quarries and relax in the state-run brothels. There in no art, no science, no prosperity, but everyone is happy to swear allegiance to their sadistic ruler, Goto III. At a public execution, Goto’s wife, Glossia saves the life of a condemned man, Grozo, whom Goto pardons and adopts as his personal fly killer. From the day that Grozo takes up his new office, the island of Goto will never be the same again…