Father James Harold Flye is best known as the life-long friend and mentor of writer James Agee. In this touching portrait of James Flye, the man to whom the Letters of James Agee to Father Flye were written, Academy Award-nominated documentary filmmaker Ross Spears gives us a record of several visits with Father Flye spanning a ten-year period and culminating with the occasion of Father Flye’s 100th birthday.
Tag: 1990s
Mel Tormé hosts this retrospective of the most prolific period of Frank Sinatra’s career from the beginning to mid-60s. Told through interviews with colleagues and entertainment experts along with clips from live performances, film and TV.
St. Petersburg, early 20th century. The handsome and secretive Johann specializes in shooting erotic pictures depicting the floggings of bare-bottomed women. With the help of his assistants, the photographic creations gradually penetrate the peaceful households of two upper-class Russian families.
Gustavo is a young Havana Communist who believes in the revolution; he hopes for a scholarship to study aeronautical engineering in Prague. But his faith in the new Cuba is tested: his father, a psychiatrist, can make four times as much playing piano at a hotel for foreigners; his sweetheart, Yolanda, wants a career as a dancer and longs for the riches of Miami; his younger brother Bobby simply wants to play rock music, and as a result is in constant trouble with the authorities. When Bobby takes a shocking step of revolt and Gustavo is refused service at a foreigners-only bar, the contradictions in his resolve to become a “new man” push him to the breaking point.
In Pieter Bruegel’s painting, “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,” the fall of the god, Icarus, passes unnoticed on earth. The farmers continue to work the land and the boats sail on. As William Carlos Williams later wrote in his poem of the same name, “a once mighty god becomes a little splash quite unnoticed.” In Chris Sullivan’s version, Icarus becomes Ray, an aging priest whose congregation is dwindling as fast as his sanity. As Ray’s condition deteriorates, society fails to notice or care.
While working on a documentary, Michel Negroponte encounters a homeless woman in Central Park who claims to be Robert Ryan’s daughter. What more, the woman, Maggie, says she’s the god Jupiter’s wife and periodically receives radio transmissions from him. Intrigued, Negroponte abandons his old project and starts interviewing Maggie. The result, after two years, is a film that attempts to separate fact from fiction and reconstruct the fascinating real life of this endearingly eccentric woman.
Former music-video director Michael H. Shamberg debut film is an experimental drama about a woman who comes to terms with painful childhood memories. Orlando is an expatriate American sports journalist living in Paris. She is also slowly recovering from childhood sexual abuse from her father and an incestuous relationship with her late brother. As she wanders the streets on a rainy evening, she sullenly ruminates over her memories. Both Kristin Scott Thomas and Christina Ricci play small parts in this film, while legendary filmmaker Chris Marker provides computer graphics.
Yuriko works at home all day as a tape transcriber, while her husband, Takashi, works as a school teacher. Yuriko’s behavior grows stranger and more distant and she starts spending all day “patrolling” the neighborhood. Takashi follows her one afternoon and begins to suspect that she may be suffering from schizophrenia.