Arguably Larry Gottheim’s most exuberant experiment in the single-shot, single-roll format (and his first with a soundtrack), HARMONICA trains the camera on a friend improvising a tune in the backseat of a moving car. Held out the window, the harmonica becomes a musical conduit for the wind, while Gottheim’s film transforms before our eyes into a playful meditation on wrangling the natural elements into art.
Tag: USA
Melvin Van Peebles, director of the landmark independent film Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, embraces the new age of digital filmmaking with his picaresque comedy, shot using DV equipment and taking full advantage of its creative possibilities. Van Peebles plays a fanciful version of himself, growing tired of life at home when he’s only ten years old and deciding he’d rather see the world than read about it in books or hear about it from his mother. Melvin runs away from home and hitches a ride from a friendly truck driver, but things take an unexpected turn when gangsters kill the trucker and the boy is tossed into the river with just an inner-tube for company.
DIFFERENT DRUMMER is a short documentary directed by Edward Gray about Jazz great Elvin Jones. In it he talks about his early days with John Coltrane (with whom he’s seen performing in a ’60s film clip) and pianist Bud Powell. He also performs drum solos and an original piece, “Three Card Molly,” with Ryo Kawasaki (guitar), Pat LaBarbera (sax) and David Williams (bass).
Dr. Carol Evans, a physician who recently conspired with her lover Gus to kill her rich husband for his inheritance, finds herself being blackmailed by him for a share of the money. Carol seduces Brian, a young motorcycle-accident patient of hers, in the hope that he’ll help her kill Gus. When Gus is killed in a struggle, Carol coerces him into hiding the body, but finds herself being investigated by Brian’s friend David, an amateur sleuth, who has always believed her to be a murderer.
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Composed entirely of archival material and narrated by actor Pat Hingle, this hour-long film documents the run-up to the Stock Market Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed. Made in the 1970s, the film carefully lays out major historical events, as with the stunning footage of the German Zeppelin Hindenburg bursting into flames over New Jersey in 1937. Powerful images such as this are both literal and metaphoric documents of the tragedies of the age. By relying on the old newsreels alone to depict the events, the filmmakers immerse us in the period in a way that would not have been possible had they interviewed a team of experts.
Daniel Thatcher is an American sergeant serving with a British tank corps in North Africa. He and most of his unit are captured by the Germans, who learn his identity as a man who once tried to assassinate Josef Goebbels, Hitler’s right-hand man. Thatcher’s wife was killed in the concentration camps, and now, after his failed attempt to kill the Nazi leader, Thatcher is a real prize for his captors. But Thatcher prefers not to go back to Germany as a prize, so he leads his fellow tankers in an escape attempt.
I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like envisions an epic quest for transcendence and self-knowledge. Bill Viola describes this work as a “personal investigation of the inner states and connections to animal consciousness we all carry within.” The title is taken from the Rig-Veda, the Sanskrit spiritual text that defines a procession through birth, consciousness, primordial existence, intuition, knowledge, rational thought, and faith, to arrive at a transcendent reality “beyond the laws of physics.” Unfolding in powerful, emblematic images and allegorical passages, Viola articulates a dramatic quest for self-knowledge through an awareness of the Other, embodied here by a shamanistic vision of animal consciousness.
A telling story of an unemployed Vietnam vet in Butte, Montana, whose wife leaves him after seven years when she feels there is no longer communication between them and – more painfully and pointedly – because she is unable to have a child owing to his sterility from exposure to Agent Orange. Told in a gentle style, richly emotional, Bell Diamond was made with non-professionals drawn from the community of Butte.