An insightful illumination of author Paul Bowles’ original and lesser-known career as an avant-garde composer, Owsley Brown’s Night Waltz is an elegant and soulful document of discovery. Interviewed in Morocco during the last months of his life, Bowles journeys back to his early years as a contemporary and occasional collaborator of other such iconic figures as Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson and Orson Welles. Bowles’ uncut compositions–performed by the Eos Orchestra–are punctuated with stunning visual essays by filmmakers Nathaniel Dorsky and Rudy Burckhardt. Long after retiring from his more well-known profession, Bowles kept music as a vital part of his life, tapping out fresh rhythms on his Tangier table tops until the end of his days.
Tag: USA
Filmed in Brooklyn, Image in the Snow is an early underground “trance film” in which “a young man led by despair searches a city for salvation” (director Willard Maas’ own description). He takes the Myrtle Avenue el. and finds his “ideal parents” represented as carved stone figures on a tomb in the old part of Mt. Olivet Cemetary. Although not as highly regarded as Geography of the Body or as ostentatious as Narcissus in its own time, Image in the Snow has become the most frequently revived of Willard Maas’ thematic, non-documentary films.
A surreal piece of cinema, mostly comprised of stark religious and homoerotic imagery, accompanied by increasingly dissonant music (starting with ‘The Unanswered Question’, and getting more jarring as the movie progresses.
Dying is a personal, profound and poignant memoir of three people and how they faced their deaths. When it was first broadcast fourty-six years ago it was universally acclaimed. The film focuses on three people with terminal cancer. Filmed over a two year period, the film shows how each human being lives and dies as an individual, with deep personal needs and attitudes. It will sensitize health care professionals and counselors to the human factors that mitigate the anguish of both the patients and those who care for them.
Pier 13 is a remake of the delightful Spencer Tracy-Joan Bennett vehicle Me and My Gal, which itself was a reworking of a 1922 silent picture. Wisecracking cop Danny Dolan (Lloyd Nolan) takes a liking to self-reliant waterfront waitress Sally Kelly (Lynn Bari), and the feeling is definitely mutual. But when Sally begins behaving strangely, Dolan suspects that she’s mixed up with notorious criminal Johnnie Hale.
A man who has worked his whole life to become wealthy is determined to bring his son up with everything he has never had as a youngster. Needless to say the young lad grows up to be a spoiled brat by the time he reaches college age and wreaks havoc on anyone who stands in his way. In the meantime, his father has fallen in love with a beautiful artist who has his best interest at heart. The problem is that the son also develops feelings for her. This film was adapted form the popular Howard Spring novel.
Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore reunite in their first acting performance together since “The Dick Van Dyke Show” (1961-66), the classic comedy series for which both stars earned multiple Emmy Awards. This powerfully bittersweet comedy follows the relationship that develops between nursing home residents Fonsia Dorsey and Weller Martin during a series of gin games in which their ailments, misfortunes and losses are exposed in funny, honest and increasingly heated moments.
Abandoned by their parents, the young children of the Clawson family are put in the care of local authorities. However, rather than being kept together, the siblings are sent to live at different homes. Tenacious Patty Clawson is determined to keep her brothers and sisters together, but the bureaucracy in place makes her quest almost impossible. Aided by social worker Bud Griggs, Patty tries to reunite her family, facing many obstacles along the way.