Documentary Educational Resources - Subject / Visual Arts & Media / Filmmaking / All Films

Experimental Curator

Fri, 28 Jul 2023 10:09:38 GMT

Experimental Curator
Buy Now: $320.00

Experimental Curator: The Sally Dixon Story is a documentary that delves into the life of experimental film curator Sally Dixon. Her story began in the 1960's when she received a small hand-held movie camera from her father-in-law and started making films, that she later called "Film Poems." Sally is known as a trailblazer in the "film as art" movement and created the film program at The Carnegie Museum of Art in 1970. She founded the program with the purpose of "promoting a greater understanding and appreciation of film as an art form and the filmmaker as an artist." It was one of the first museum-based film programs in the country.

This one hour biographic documentary reflects Sally’s life as a woman in a man’s art world. The film beautifully weaves in archival footage of Sally as her love of film first emerged as she captured her first images on Super 8 as well as archival footage of her collaborations with artists in Pittsburgh, and finally St. Paul. The documentary threads in contemporary footage of Sally, her family and her friends as they reflect on her enormous impact.

“She understood it very early and she promoted it, bringing attention to different poetic, non-narrative forms of cinema.”
– Jonas Mekas

Selected Screenings & Awards

Honorable Mention, Experimental Forum, USA 2023

Winner for Best Female Filmmaker, Lindsey Film Festival, USA 2023

Winner for Best Feature Documentary Film, BostonDoc, USA, 2022

World Festival Premiere, Ann Arbor Film Festival, USA, 2022

Athens International Film Festival, USA 2022

Hot Springs International Women’s Film Festival, USA 2022

Berlin International Art Film Festival, Germany, 2022

Cinefem 10, Uruguay, 2022

Stockholm City Film Festival, Sweden, 2022

The Women’s Festival, USA 2022

University Film and Video Association Conference, USA, 2022

Minneapolis/Saint Paul International Film Festival, USA 2022

Toronto International Women Film Festival, Canada, 2021

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Forsaken Fragments

Thu, 14 Feb 2019 12:58:00 GMT

Forsaken Fragments
Buy Now: $340.00

This collection of short films and “uncompleted” fragments made by renowned filmmaker Robert Gardner spans his life and career, and reflects his interests, from ethnography to the art world. Though presented as a set, the pieces stand on their own as riveting cinematic experiences, offering insight into Gardner’s personality and curiosity.

Among the works on the DVD are finished pieces broadcast on local television, such as Gardner’s “non-commercials,” focusing on ordinary life and created as a challenge to broadcast audiences. Other works are unfinished fragments, cherished by Gardner for capturing a tone or a moment. Yet other pieces are constructed from footage gathered while working on other films. These include Supplicating Women and Life Keeps On Passing, which were filmed in Benares while making Forest of Bliss, and The Old Lady, which was filmed while working with the Marshall family in Namibia.

The DVD comes packaged with a full-color 28-page booklet and extra features including selectable director's commentary tracks and an audio recording from Gardner's in-person appearance when an earlier incarnation of Forsaken Fragments screened at the Harvard Film Archive in Cambridge MA in October, 2010.

“Because of Gardner's wide range of fascinations, the sequence of 'fragments' creates considerable cinematic surprise. Several reveal dimensions of Gardner's filmmaking that even some familiar with his career might not be aware of; others reference Gardner's better-known films or offer additional insight into earlier work. Altogether, this is an engaging compilation that exceeds the implications of its title; each film is less a fragment than a cine-haiku; and if these pieces were 'forsaken' during the busy-ness of Gardner's production career and his years of teaching at Harvard, they are not forsaken now."

– Scott MacDonald, Hamilton University

Includes the following films:

The Old Lady, aka A Human Document (4 min, 1958)
In 1957, Gardner visited the Kalahari with John Marshall to help film The Hunters. This short, observing an elderly !Kung woman, was made by Gardner alone while there.

Tide (6 min, 1966)
In the late 1960’s, Gardner visited the tidal flats of Nova Scotia where he filmed this short piece. The film follows an elderly farmer as he directs his horse and carriage across the beach, eventually stopping to fish a weir.

The Photographer (3 min, 1966/2007)
While traveling in Nova Scotia in 1966, Gardner and still photographer Len Gittleman found an old view camera which proved the inspiration for this short homage to the silent film era.

Salt (3 min, 1966)
While traveling northeastern Ethiopia in 1968, Gardner rode with a caravan of Afar camel herders plying the salt trade between the highlands and the salt flats of the Dallol Depression, which he called a “wondrous environment of unbearable heat and intense color.”

Creatures of Pain (5 min, 1968)
Gardner visited Nigeria in 1968, hoping to make a film about sheepherders. Civil war intervened, and he was only able to film this short piece about the “sharo” ritual in a small village near Kano.

Three Non-commercials: Policeman, Lobsterman, Farmer (4 min, 1973)
In the 1970’s, Gardner was involved in the programming of WCVB, an ABC affiliate TV station in Boston. He took this opportunity to make what he called “non-commercials” – short vignettes of people in their ordinary lives – to be shown between programs.

Anthem (2 min, 1973)
In the days of Gardner’s involvement with Boston Broadcasters, Inc and Channel 5, TV stations stopped transmitting for the night – sometime in the early morning. Traditionally stations “signed off” with a clip of the American flag waving as the national anthem played. Bob asked filmmaker Richard Rogers to make a more interesting variation on this theme. Channel 5 declined to use it.

Healing (9 min, 1978)
This film arose from a trip to Ladakh, India, as Gardner searched for a shaman. There, he encountered this tradition of Buddhist healing, which involved trance and music.

Supplicating Women (3 min, 1985)
While shooting in Benares for Forest of Bliss, Gardner stumbled upon a temple frequently visited by women who suffered from ailments including love sickness and familial problems. This fragment details their pleading for healing.

Life Keeps on Passing (4 min, 1985)
Also filmed while on location for Forest of Bliss, this short was Gardner’s attempt to see and hear what local poets had to say about their surroundings. This beautiful short recounts some of their thoughts.

Hauling Sharks (10 min, 1988)
Upon returning to Ethiopia in 1988, Gardner visited the coastal Danakil. There he filmed communities who had developed an environmentally suitable way of netting sharks far out at sea, which they exported to southern Arabian states.

It Could Be Good, It Could Be Bad (6 min, 1997)
In 1997, Gardner joined his friend Robert Fulton to shoot aerial photography in the Southern Chilean Andes. Microphones were rigged to record their conversations as they flew among these extraordinary formations.

Deus Ex Boltanski (11 min, 2010)
In 2010, Gardner and photographer Michael Hutcherson travelled to Paris to make a film about French artist Christian Boltanski as he installed a piece entitled PERSONNES within the immense confines of the Grand Palais.

Still Journey On (20 min, 2010)
In his last years, Gardner worked at intervals constructing a film intended to weave together threads of thought and meaning that ran through his life and films. He took the title from “Keep Right On Till the End of the Road” a song by the Scottish singer, Harry Lauder – a favorite song of Robert’s father, who would play it on the record player every year as the family left the island in Maine where they spent much of the summer. Still Journey On remains a fragment.

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Richard Leacock & Valerie Lalonde: The Paris Years 1989-2009

Tue, 28 Aug 2018 08:59:00 GMT

Richard Leacock & Valerie Lalonde: The Paris Years 1989-2009
Buy Now: $675.00

Richard Leacock was one of the few genuine pioneers in the field of documentary filmmaking and one of its greatest innovators — along with Al Maysles, D.A. Pennebaker and Robert Drew, he helped to create the shining interval that came to be known as cinema-verité. He made his first movie at the age of 14, and he never stopped filming until his death in 2011 at the age of 89. In Leacock's hands, the camera became an astonishingly sensitive instrument. A lot has been made of his work as a cameraman on Robert Flaherty's Louisiana Story, but his greatest influence was the ceaselessly changing world itself and the equipment he used to record and interpret certain of its events.

The films in this DVD collection were made after Leacock retired from teaching at MIT and moved to Paris, where he met his great love and creative collaborator Valerie Lalonde. The then-new Video-8 cameras delivered them from the enormous costs of shooting on film, and with unlimited time, the energizing power of love and the new lightweight equipment allowed them a freedom to film what had always interested them most — life itself, in all its beauty, charm and poignancy. This freedom is felt in every frame of every title in this collection, which spans the final period in Leacock's creative life. — Kent Jones

This 5-DVD set includes 11 films:

Les Oeufs à la Coque de Richard Leacock (91 min, 1991)

Inspired by both new love and Gulliver's Travels, Les Oeufs à la Coque (aka Richard Leacock's Soft-Boiled Eggs), is a ravishingly beautiful, important film about nothing in particular, a love song dedicated to France, French women in general and one Frenchwoman in particular, and a montage portrait of quotidian life in a country at peace.

A Musical Adventure in Siberia with Sarah Caldwell (56 min 2003)

In 1996, the First Lady of opera, Sarah Caldwell, invited her old friend and collaborator Richard Leacock to join her in Yektarinaberg, a previously closed Siberian industrial city, where she was preparing for the first-ever performance of a symphonic drama by Sergei Prokofiev of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin.

Mambo Madness (32 min, 1995)

The legendary 1960s supermodel Veruschka, aka Vera von Lehndorff, sets in motion a search for a long-lost all-female Communist Mambo band led by a blonde-haired, blue-eyed East German in this literally fabulous fantasy documentary conceived by Hans-Peter Litscher, the Swiss playwright, historian and polymath, and filmed by Leacock and Lalonde in Austria, Russia, France and Cuba.

Gott Sei Dank: A Visit with Helga Feddersen (30 min, 1993)

Years after the great-granddaughter of Richard Wagner introduced Leacock to Feddersen, the German comic actress and theatrical impresario, he and Lalonde visited her home in Hamburg while she was recuperating from a cancer surgery and filmed her talking about her life and times, her illness, and the beauty of forgiveness.

Kren - Parking (3 min, 1992)

A very short portrait of a work of art called Parking by the award-winning Slovak artist Matej Kren. Parking is made of mobile mirrors that reflect and invite reflection with confounding yet hypnotic visuals.

Les Vacances de Monsieur Leacock (20 min, 1992)

A lighthearted, charming visual diary of a cross-country road trip Leacock and Lalonde took across America, Les Vacances was made as a series of vignettes in places as diverse as Monument Valley, the ghostly mountaintop mining town Climax, Colorado, and Los Angeles.

A Celebration of St. Silas (25 min, 1993)

An offshoot of a separate collaboration about vicars for the BBC, this film follows the Anglican vicar who most delighted Leacock and Lalonde, as he prepares for and celebrates the heavenly birthday Mass of St. Silas, who brought the news that circumcision was not a prerequisite for entry to Heaven.

The Killings of Cariola (35 min, 1992)

Fascinated with process of rehearsal, Leacock and Lalonde watched and filmed as London's Cherub Company prepared a production of The Duchess of Malfi by Shakespeare's contemporary, John Webster.

Hooray! We're 50! (30 min, 1993)

A moving snapshot of Leacock's 50th reunion with the Harvard class of 1943, shot primarily by Lalonde and edited by Leacock (who majored in physics there), Hooray! We're 50! is a joyful look at the return from both war and life of an accomplished cast of graduates.

A Hole in the Sea (Le Trou dans la Mer) (30 min, 1994)

Shortly before the opening of the "Chunnel" linking England and France, Leacock and Lalonde were commissioned to film at both ends of the underwater project. They produced a light-hearted portrait of the effects of the massive project on life and the local landscapes, both physical and psychological.

Au Revoir, Marie Laure: Portrait of a Gallery at Work (42 min, 2006)

When she died in 1970, Marie Laure de Noailles left behind a legacy as a patron of the arts, muse of the surrealists and one of the great salonistes of Paris. Marie Laure's antiquaire Pierre Passebon invited her old friend Lalonde to film in the Galerie du Passage in Paris during the last week of an exhibition of Marie Laure's artworks and other possessions. The result was this sensitive meditation on art, friendship, permanence and transience.

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