USA

Synopsis:
Filmmaker/critic Pare Lorentz was the creative force behind the landmark documentary The Plow That Broke the Plains. The project was underwritten by the United States Resettlement Administration, a New Deal organization. Lorentz’ film accomplished visually what President Roosevelt’s radio speeches had been doing orally: serving as a wake-up call to those Americans unaware of the deprivations of the “Dust Bowl.” The film details the ecological causes for the natural disasters befalling farmers in Oklahoma and Texas. It then illustrates in up-close-and-personal fashion the devastating effect those disasters had on the farmers and their families, who were already reeling from the Depression. Lorentz concludes his film on an upbeat note, showing the efforts made by the Resettlement Administration to improve conditions for the unfortunate farmers, and to make certain that environmental reforms are put into effect to prevent another Dust Bowl. The Plow That Broke the Plains was followed by the Tennessee Valley Authority-sanctioned The River, likewise assembled by Lorentz.Read More »

Synopsis:
Although they are successful fishmongers, Stan convinces Ollie that they should become fishermen too – but making a boat seaworthy is not an easy task.Read More »

Mike Kelley’s Magnum Opus: Day is Done released as a 2 DVD set (169 minutes). Written and directed by Mike Kelley, with original music by Mike Kelley and Scott Benzel, choreography by Kate Foley

Quote:
The first of the projected 365 videos, Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #1 (A Domestic Scene) was shown at the Emi Fontana Gallery in Milan and then in “Apocalypse: Beauty and Horror in Contemporary Art” at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in 2000. The tape was a half-hour melodramatic play mimicking the look of ’50s TV dramas. With the current series I didn’t want people to get so caught up in the individual tapes; rather, I wanted to create an experience akin to channel surfing.Read More »

Quote:
Written and directed by Ken Hughes (the 1967 Casino Royale), Heat Wave employs the regular film noir convention of a man who has run out of rope confessing his story to an unseen presence (the audience). Novelist Mark Kendrick (the film’s requisite American, Alex Nicol, also known for Jacques Tourneur’s Great Day in the Morning) is found by a mysterious figure at the bar where he is drowning his sorrows, and Mark’s ready to spill them out. Cut to Mark wrestling with his typewriter at his lakeside home, looking across the water at an opulent house and the fancy lights on its dock (how Great Gatsby!). Carol Forrest (Hillary Brooke, Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kidd), a rich and glamorous blonde, phones him and asks him to ferry her friends across the lake, and of course, he ends up ferrying himself to his own doom.Read More »

Synopsis:
After killing her treacherous step-father, a girl tries to escape the country with a young vagabond. She dresses as a boy, they hop freight trains, quarrel with a group of hobos, and steal a car in their attempt to escape the police, and reach Canada.Read More »

Quote:
A failed business deal forces James Nevill to blackmail his weak-willed friend into murdering him so that his wife can collect his insurance, but circumstances suddenly change.Read More »

Psychiatrist David Lamont is pressured into “analyzing” the madcap but glamorous niece of a judge. Then crooks on the lam intrude.Read More »

Quote:
“I am filming the outside in order to look inside,” Robert Frank once said about his aesthetics. In Keep Busy his chosen home of Nova Scotia serves for the first time as the “outside” in an examination of the “inside.” The protagonists’ astounding verbal gymnastics and often incomprehensible interactions tend to descend into nonsense, and with the syncopated rhythm of its action and dialogue, this film is reminiscent of the playful and parodying elements of the Beat fantasy Pull My Daisy. The interweaving of documentary and fiction with the syncopated rhythm of its action and dialogue presents an absurd buzz of activity reminiscent of Beckett’s abstract comic grotesque.Read More »

Quote:
The long way around the barn never looked so good. Larry Gottheim composed BARN RUSHES from eight tracking shots tracing the same arc around a barn in different conditions. The fact that nothing changes makes it all the much more apparent that everything does: a meditative approach that Tony Conrad described as “a textbook of atmosphere, camera vision and lighting, as they relate personal concept to purely visual relationships.” The simplicity of the film’s structure echoes the functional design of the barn while simultaneously suggesting a distinctly cinematic equivalent to Claude Monet’s serial views of Rouen Cathedral. – Max GoldbergRead More »