Author: Doc Studies

FOLLOWING SEAN, 
Ralph Arlyck, 2005, 87 min.

FOLLOWED BY: Q&A with director Ralph Arlyck.

— In 1969, a precocious 4-year-old named Sean sat barefoot on a couch in San Francisco and talked about smoking pot, living with speed freaks, and watching cops bust heads. Ralph Arlyck made a short film of it all. Now, 30 years later, he returns to find Sean, his free-spirit parents, and to track the course of their lives — and his own — since those halcyon but noisy days. Things never turn out the way you think. Continue reading “MAYSLES CINEMA — Sunday, December 9 at 7.30 pm” →

JONAS MEKAS, founder of Anthology Film Archives and non-fiction filmmaker — ‘This Side of Paradise’, (1999).

From The Guardian –
Jonas Mekas:  ‘the godfather of avant-garde cinema’, talks to Sean O’Hagan about working with Andy Warhol, Salvador Dali and Jackie Kennedy.

Jonas Mekas, who will be 90 on Christmas Eve, has an intense memory of sitting on his father’s bed, aged six, singing a strange little song about daily life in the village in which he grew up in Lithuania. Continue reading “JONAS MEKAS” →

Winner of the Golden Lion award at the 2011 Venice Biennale, Christian Marclay’s The Clock is a cinematic tour de force that unfolds on the screen in real time through thousands of film excerpts that form a 24-hour montage. Appropriated from the last 100 years of cinema’s rich history, the film clips chronicle the hours and minutes of the 24-hour period, often by displaying a watch or clock. The Clock incorporates scenes of everything from car chases and board rooms to emergency wards, bank heists, trysts, and high-noon shootouts. Continue reading “Christian Marclay—The Clock — MOMA” →

THE CENTRAL PARK FIVE, 2012, 119 min.
Directed by: Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, & David McMahon.

In 1989, five black and Latino teenagers were arrested for “the crime of the century”—the brutal attack and rape of a white, female jogger in Central Park. Breathlessly covered by the media, their trials took place against a backdrop of a decaying New York beset by violence and racial tension. In the rush to judgment, the truth was lost, and the youths were unjustly convicted, spending years in prison for a crime they didn’t commit. Continue reading “IFC CENTER — The Central Park Five” →

Critic Jim Hoberman on Julia Loktev’s new feature THE LONELIEST PLANET —

“The Russian-born filmmaker isn’t exactly a disciple of Sergei Eisenstein, but her approach is suggestive of an assertion Eisenstein made in his first published article “Montage of Attractions.” He was writing on theater but soon applied his ideas to cinema: The medium’s “basic materials” are found in the spectator and arise “from our guiding of the spectator into a desired direction (or a desired mood).” Accordingly, the audience is subjected to a calculated series of surprises or jolts. Continue reading “Sergei Eisenstein and Julia Loktev” →

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 1 at 7:30 PM.

“The Cinema Novo movement emphasized social equality in Brazilian and Latin American cinema in the 1960’s and 70’s. Saturday evening we will present three important works from this period: two short pieces by cinema legend Glauber Rocha (Maranhao 66 and a clip from his television series Abertura), and Joaquim Pedro de Andrade’s essential document of the era Cinema Novo, produced for German Television in 1967. Continue reading “Brazil’s Cinema Novo — Union Docs” →