In 1975, I was invited to “make any film I wanted as long as it was shot in Minneapolis.” David Hancock, a filmmaker friend in Vermont, who coincidentally grew up in Minneapolis, had just asked me to film him. He had been recently diagnosed with terminal cancer in his early thirties and wanted me to document the craziness of his dying days, as he was buffeted from chemotherapy to New Age cures recommended by friends. I didn’t have the stomach to follow much of David’s last days. Meanwhile, Steve Ascher and I teamed up to go to Minneapolis. We wanted to ask strangers what in their lives they would like to have filmed. For me, it was almost like an act of expiation. -Ed Pincus

Life and Other Anxieties (Ed Pincus & Steven Ascher 1978).mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 28 min
Size: 	1.31 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	768x576 
Aspect ratio:  	4:3
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https://nitro.download/view/7A24771AFCFB11D/Life_and_Other_Anxieties_(Ed_Pincus_&_Steven_Ascher_1978).mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

	
Life and Other Anxieties.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 29 min
Size: 	3.26 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1920x1080 
Aspect ratio:  	16:9
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
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Audio
#1:  	2.0ch AAC LC @ 253 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/78B78CF1DFAAC15/Life_and_Other_Anxieties.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post Ed Pincus & Steven Ascher – Life and Other Anxieties (1978) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

200 minutes of cinema-verite on the life of documentarist Ed Pincus and his immediate family from 1971 to 1976.

Director of Black Natchez, Ed Pincus now lives with his wife Jane in Vermont and owns a flower farm. He recently returned to filmmaking for a documentary about Katrina, and thinks about new projects.

Article from the New York Times in 1982
ED PINCUS MAKES ‘DIARIES’ OF HIS OWN LIFE
By VINCENT CANBY

”DIARIES,” which opens today in the Agee Room at the Bleecker Street Cinema, is Ed Pincus’s filmed record of his own life and times from 1971 through 1976. It’s a nearly 3 1/2-hour memoir about Ed, his wife Jane, their two children, Sami and Ben, their dog Tapper, some of the women Ed had affairs with, several colleagues, as well as Ed’s travels to and from Vermont, California, Arizona and New York City.

Though it’s long, it’s surprisingly easy to endure. It’s entertaining, but it’s also troubling both for esthetic and for moral reasons, which may be the same things.

The concept of the film belongs very much to the movie-mad 1960’s and early 1970’s, the time of Jean-Luc Godard, who forever changed the look and sound of cinema, and the time when newly portable camera and sound equipment made possible the cinema verite revolution. Truth, which had been eluding mankind for several millenia, was now at hand, or so many young film makers believed. All one had to do was to go out and point a camera at it.

Some fascinating films came out of that era – films by Albert and David Maysles, Frederick Wiseman, D.A. Pennebaker, Jonas and Adolfas Mekas and Richard Leacock. Mr. Leacock, a film-teaching colleague of Mr. Pincus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, appears in ”Diaries” from time to time.

The most poignant film of that time was – and remains – Jim McBride’s brilliant 1967 satire, ”David Holzman’s Diary,” a hilarious mock-cinema-verite fiction about a solemn young film maker who, rather like Ed Pincus, decides to find the truth of his life by filming it in minute detail.

Actually I’m not at all sure that Mr. Pincus, a Boston-based maker of documentaries (”Black Natchez,” ”One Step Away”) who has taught at M.I.T. and Harvard, was looking for truth more than he was simply interested in recording some of the looks and sounds of his time. Whatever his goal, ”Diaries” inevitably reveals a lot more and a lot less than meets the eye and the ear. (Though ”Diaries” covers some of the same events explored in ”Life and Other Anxieties,” an earlier film made by Mr. Pincus and Steven Ascher, the new film is not a repetition.)

It’s difficult to understand why anyone would want to make a movie of his own life, unless one were a film maker in search of a subject. It’s not the same thing as writing about one’s life. The camera is not a pen or even a typewriter. Unlike writing, filming has nothing to do with repose and reflection, except when the filmed material is subsequently shaped in the editing room.

The camera takes over any space it inhabits in much the same way that a stranger does. It destroys all privacy. At the beginning of ”Diaries,” Jane Pincus grumbles that she feels as if she should be acting and she doesn’t like the idea. The camera may record everything but it understands nothing. It’s a mechanical extension of the person holding it, whom it transforms into an alien. The camera can go beneath the skin only to the extent that the person being photographed welcomes it or becomes oblivious to its presense.

On the surface, ”Diaries” is five years in the history of the Pincus family, during which Ed and Jane raise their children, attend funerals and weddings, break up briefly, watch anti-Vietnam demonstrations and the rise and fall of former President Richard M. Nixon, and talk. Ed, Jane and their friends talk endlessly. They don’t talk about Vietnam much, at least when the camera is on them. They talk mostly about themselves, about their relationships and their feelings. When Ed admits to having an affair, it’s Jane who suffers the guilt, which seems to be one of the burdens of their enlightened age.

The talk is not great, but it sounds absolutely accurate and painfully authentic. Says Ann, one of Ed’s lovers, long after their affair is over, ”Like I think in our present lives any interaction we have is heavier for me than for you.” One listens to this and cringes. Is there any hope for a middle class that talks such nonsense?

Among other things, ”Diaries” is about a group of comparatively affluent, well-educated Americans attempting to think and, instead, becoming fatally entangled in their own jargon.

Ed, we learn, is afraid of his feelings, which may be why he puts a camera between himself and his life. Making a movie thus becomes a substitute for dealing coherently with the world around him. Jane, who spends a lot of her time working out the hostility she feels toward Ed, his girl friends and the film itself, discovers in the course of ”Diaries” that she frequently sneezes to avoid – I think the phrase would be – verbalizing a need.

In that Ed, Jane and their friends often sound much more foolish than they probably are, ”Diaries” does not tell the truth. As a docuementary, it records only the superficial evidence of their lives. It takes fiction, something like John Sayles’s ”The Return of the Secaucus Seven,” to get the truth. For reasons of his own, Mr. Pincus shows us very little of Ed, Jane and their friends being aware of the world around them, or even making their livings, which is what most of us spend most of our lives doing.

It’s no accident that the film’s most riveting moments have nothing to do with wobbly self-analysis but with the chance appearance of Dennis Sweeney, the young civil rights activist Ed met and worked with in the 1960’s. Mr. Sweeney comes to see Ed and Jane in Boston to discus his problem: he’s receiving threatening messages through his teeth.

Ed and Jane try to talk rationally to Dennis, They suggest that he seek what’s euphemistically called ”help.” Later they learn that Deenis is blaming them for those messages and is threatening them and their children. Not long afterward, they hear that Dennis Sweeney has murdered former Representative Allard Lowenstein.

These brief sequences illuminate the film. They are real drama. They have the effect of shutting off, if only temporarily, the obsessive self-absorption that is otherwise built into this kind of movie making. According to ”Diaries,” Ed and Jane remain largely unaffected by Vietnam, Watergate, the cost of living and almost everything else relating to real life.

Having said that, however, I should add that ”Diaries” is also a fascinating, technically expert recollection of the not-so-far-off 70’s. It’s not only about the generation once labeled ”me”; it’s a demonstration of it. Me, Me, Me! DIARIES, documentary directed by Ed Pincus; edited by Mr. Pincus, Moe Shore and Ann Schaetzel. Running time: 200 minutes. This film is not rated. At the Agee Room, Bleecker Street Cinema, 144 Bleecker Street.

2.30GB | 3:20:10 | 640×480 | avi

https://nitro.download/view/B74FB1B325977E0/DIARIES.avi

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post Ed Pincus – Diaries (1982) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

When seminal documentarian Ed Pincus, considered the father of first person non-fiction film, is diagnosed with a terminal illness, he and collaborator Lucia Small team up to make one last film, much to the chagrin of Jane, Ed’s wife of 50 years. Told from two filmmakers’ points of view, ONE CUT, ONE LIFE challenges the form of first person documentary. Ed and Lucia’s unique approach to filming offers a vulnerability and intimacy rarely seen in non- fiction, questioning whether some things might be too private to be made public. The film is an intense, raw, and sometimes humorous exploration of the human condition which invites the viewer to contemplate for themselves what is important, not only at the end of life, but also during.

Filmmakers Lucia Small and Ed Pincus have long discussed the idea of experimenting with first person documentary form – making a film told from two points of view, each one filming the other. When Lucia loses two of her closest friends to sudden, violent deaths, and one year later learns that Ed, her former collaborator, has just been diagnosed with a terminal illness – she and Ed know this might be their last opportunity to work together.
Jane, Ed’s wife of 50 years, is against the idea. She wants privacy. Sympathetic to Jane’s concerns, Lucia shares a reluctance to deal publicly with the loss of friends. As the “father of first person documentary”, Ed is torn too. He understands the implications of such a project. Yet filming offers a much needed creative outlet and distraction from his potential fate. When sudden loss is at your doorstep, you have no choice but to absorb the shock. What should Lucia and Ed do? The choice is not simple, but it is clear. Ed’s diagnosis gives the former collaborators an opportunity to come together, heal from past wounds, and embrace and examine life in the face of death through a medium they know best — filmmaking.
The film opens in the middle of Ed’s dilemma of whether or not to have a risky bone marrow transplant — the one possibility for a cure. If the operation is not successful, it could accelerate his death. But if he waits, his chances of success could get worse. Can Ed hedge his bets and buy more time to have a normal spring and summer? As Lucia struggles with trying to make the film and be present for Ed, she grapples with the loss of her two friends — Susan Woolf, a visual artist murdered by an ex lover, and Lucia’s roommate, Karen Schmeer, an esteemed editor, who was killed by a hit and run driver fleeing a crime scene in Manhattan. As the story unfolds, the two filmmakers must reconcile Jane’s on-again, off-again resistance to the film with their own determination to finish.
Both filmmakers are aware of the more disturbing and squeamish aspects inherent in this kind of film. One of the roles of the artist is to examine the comfortable assumptions about limits, propriety and good taste, and perhaps to overthrow them. It is that aspect of nonfiction work, when both the audience and filmmaker wonder why the filmmaker is not turning off the camera but instead chooses to keep it rolling, that underlines this film.
Set against the bucolic Vermont landscape and frenetic New York cityscape, ONE CUT, ONE LIFE interweaves current day footage with past footage of their 12-year collaboration, early film work, and old movies. It is more a story about life and cinema than a story about death. Ed and Lucia’s unique approach to filming offers a vulnerability and intimacy rarely seen in non-fiction film, even within the genre of first person documentary. It is an intense, raw, and sometimes humorous exploration of the human condition which invites the viewer to contemplate for themselves what is important, not only at the end of life, but also during.

https://nitro.download/view/F95D7AA5936A88E/One_cut_one_life.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:none

The post Ed Pincus & Lucia Small – One Cut, One Life (2014) first appeared on Cinema of the World.