Reality 101

Hulloooo!? Did you miss me? During the past semester, I temporarily left both my QuickVids gig and a big chunk of my day job in order to teach the Introduction to Documentary class in the Film Studies Program here at UC Berkeley. Sixty intellectually rambunctious students...five hours a week for 15 weeks...125 years of cinema! We watched our brains out and argued endlessly about the evolving definitions, modes, functions, and ethics of documentary film. I even managed to sneak in a big slug of library instruction in the process. It was one of the most satisfying things I've done in my long career at the university. If you're interested in taking a peek at the course syllabus, it's posted at http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/syllabus30.htm. And if you're interested in taking a look at three of the excellent videos I used to provide historical context to my lectures, check out the following.

Nanook Revisited. $149 (VHS or DVD). 1994. 55 min. Films for the Humanities and Sciences (www.films.com)

Robert Flaherty's 1922 film Nanook of the North is generally considered to be the first feature-length motion picture to focus on the drama of real lives being lived. In Nanook, Flaherty famously chronicled the struggles for survival of an Inuit (Eskimo) family in Canada's Hudson Bay region. In Nanook Revisited, French documentarian Claude Massot journeys back to Inukjiak, the site of Flaherty's filming, to investigate the present-day life of the Inuit community there.. Recent years have seen a fair amount of Flaherty bashing among film and cultural studies scholars. Critics point to the fact that a good deal of Nanook was staged or re-created to fit Flaherty's unremittingly romantic notions of his subjects, and to please audiences. Nanook Revisited discusses these documentary liberties at length. But the filmmakers also reveal surprising things about the present-day Inuit reception of the film as a tenuous and precious glimpse of their cultural past.

History Through a Lens, 1894-1919. $149 (VHS or DVD). 1997. 55 min. Films for the Humanities and Sciences (www.films.com)

For early film audiences, filmed images of the real world were equally as entrancing as fictional narratives, particularly if the images were of exotic lands and peoples, dramatic political and cultural events, and natural and manmade catastrophes. If capturing "reality" on film often involved restaging events or other outright fakeries, so be it, spectacle-hungry audiences seldom seemed to notice or care. History Through the Lens (part one of the excellent Canadian Broadcasting Corporation series Dawn of the Eye) traces the evolution of motion picture news, from the earliest "actualities" of the Lumiere Brothers, to the development of newsreels as a midway and vaudeville attraction, to the rise of powerful movie news organizations such as Gaumont and Pathé. Also worth watching is the second installment of the series, Eyes of the World, 1919-1945, which covers the history of the enormously influential March of Time newsreel.

Grierson. $195 (VHS or DVD). 1973. 58 min. National Film Board of Canada (http://www2.nfb.ca)

It is not too much of an exaggeration to say that John Grierson singlehandedly invented the film form we think of as "documentary." In 1926, Grierson coined the term itself in a New York Sun review of Robert Flaherty's film Moana. In the 1930s, as director of the film units of several British governmental agencies, he defined many of the cinematic conventions and philosophical underpinnings that have informed documentary filmmaking ever since, including an insistence that the highest calling of cinema is to find the drama of the nearby and everyday--the "drama of the doorstep." Roger Blais' bio-doc, is an excellent introduction to Grierson's often tumultuous life and groundbreaking work, with some emphasis on his involvement with the National Film Board of Canada in the late 30s.

Never Seen Such Hard Times

I never seen such a real hard times before
I never seen such a real hard times before
The wolf keeps walkin' all 'round my door

--Ida Cox, Hard Times Blues, 1939

I've always had a thing for the visual culture of the Great Depression. It was an era that offered up an uncommon number of indelible images. The moving image record of those years took wildly disparate forms. Throughout the Depression, Hollywood worked overtime churning out fantasies, melodramas and sundry other celluloid diversions for the shell-shocked public. Between these features, newsreels provided a look at goings-on of the "real world" outside of the theater, carefully edited and attenuated for maximum entertainment value, of course. And while Hollywood was busy assuring audiences "We're in the Money," other types of stories were being crafted far outside of the studios. Largely under the aegis of New Deal agencies, the American documentary came of age during the 30's as a means of chronicling the Depression and building popular support for government programs aimed at finding a way out. The videos below offer a broad sampling of unforgettable scenes and stories from the depths of those hard times.

Our Daily Bread and Other Films of the Great Depression. $26.99 (DVD) 194 min. Most home video distributors.

One gray day in late 1935, a brash young journalist named Pare Lorentz walked into the office of Rex Tugwell, director of the USDA's Resettlement Administration. Lorentz had a unique pitch to make. If the Feds were serious about publicizing the plight of the beleaguered farmers of the Dust Bowl and the Mississippi Valley, motion pictures were the way to do it. Tugwell bought the scheme. The films that resulted, The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) and The River (1937) are defining examples of 1930's documentary style that still retain their poetry and power today. Along with these landmark films, this sterling DVD collection contains an abundance of other treasures, including Joris Iven's paean to Roosevelt's Rural Electrification Administration, Power and the Land (1940), and H.P. McClure's glimpse into a collective farming community (The New Frontier, 1934). My favorite piece in the collection, however, is King Vidor's independently produced fictional feature "Our Daily Bread" (1934), the story of a young, impoverished couple who become the inadvertent founders of a cooperative farm populated by other victims of the Crash. Although the film contains its share of melodramatic hokum, the concluding sequence documenting the collaborative construction of a vital irrigation canal is one of the most memorable in movie history.

Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? $22.49 (DVD) 1975. 194 min. Most home video distributors.

For a pure, unadulterated blast of Depression-era moving images, this DVD is unbeatable. Brother Can You Spare a Dime is a non-narrated, primary source pastiche that bobs and weaves precariously between loosely related newsreel and documentary footage and clips from Hollywood films of the period. For over three hours we're taken on a whirlwind excursion, from breadlines to Hoovervilles, from the premiere of Gone with the Wind to Max Schmelling's knockout of Joe Lewis. FDR rubs shoulders with Jimmy Stewart's Mr. Smith, J. Edgar Hoover plays tommy gun tag with Jimmy Cagney, and Huey Long harangues Gary Cooper's Longfellow Deeds. One comes away from the experience both visually sated and a bit dizzy.

Surviving the Dust Bowl. $19.98. 1998. 57 min. PBS (pbs.org)

Of all the catastrophes befalling 1930s America, none were more dramatic than the decade-long ecological disasters befalling the Great Plains. Pare Lorentz's 1936 documentary classic Plow That Broke the Plains (discussed above) dealt with the causes and outcomes of those disasters from a grandly rhetorical, almost mythical perspective. Lorentz's film largely focuses on the land, rather than the people who worked and suffered on it. Surviving the Dust Bowl takes a different route. Through the use of harrowing historical footage and first-hand accounts of the events, it offers a highly personal story of the Dust Bowl families that toughed it out in the face of tribulations of near-biblical proportion.

Video Lagniappe

NOUN: Chiefly Southern Louisiana & Mississippi 1. An extra or unexpected gift or benefit.

Everyone loves a little lagniappe now and then. Maybe that's one of the reasons we adore DVDs as much as we do. Besides their eye-popping picture quality and ease of use, those shiny discs offer unprecedented amounts of leftover digital space just waiting to be crammed with all manner of video lagniappe. Unfortunately, not all extras are created equal. The seemingly obligatory rush to fill the digital vacuum has produced many prime examples of what a computer programmer friend of mine calls "shovelware." In the case of DVDs, that's shovelsfull of anything that happens to be lying around loose in the publicity department or on the cutting room floor. On the other hand, some DVD lagniappe is marvelous, indeed--as engaging as the feature itself. Below are examples of post-credits add-ons that are alone worth the price of the ticket.

(Works cited below are available from most home video distributions)

Chaplin Collection: The Gold Rush, The Great Dictator. Modern Times, and Limelight. $29.95 each. Warner Home Video

Along with offering beautiful, crisp prints of four Chaplin essentials, each of the titles in this collection comes with an additional disc filled with wonderful goodies. The Great Dictator, for example, includes an excellent 52 minute documentary by film scholar Kevin Brownlow, "The Tramp and the Dictator." Brownlow's film takes a look at the biographical relationships between Hitler and Chaplin, and discusses the political and social contexts in which The Great Dictator was made. Equally fascinating are the appended 25 minutes worth of clips from a long-lost color home movie taken by Chaplin's brother Sydney on the set. Other supplements in this series worth mentioning are a sing-along version of Chaplin's divinely nonsensical cabaret song from Modern Times ("Seniora Pilasina, voulez-vous le taximeter?"), and an amazing 10 minute 1967 Cuban documentary about Cuban campasinos watching Modern Times as their first-ever movie.

Sleeping Beauty (Special Edition). $25.99. Walt Disney Pictures.

As one might expect from an institution as wrapped up in its own corporate history and myths as Disney, many of Disney's animated classics on DVD come bearing bountiful tales and assorted visual gimcracks related to the making of the movie. Sleeping Beauty, for instance, offers a second disc with sing-alongs and games; several interesting featurettes about the art and artists involved; and a fascinating but much-too-short piece on the digital restoration of the film. The real bonus on this supplementary disc, however, is the inclusion of Disney's beautiful1959 film Grand Canyon (winner of the 1959 Academy Award for Best Live Short Subject), which is currently unavailable elsewhere on tape or DVD. Disney's Snow White disc is similarly stuffed with extras--so many, in fact, that there's a special "Guided Tour" hosted by Roy Disney and Angela Lansberry to help navigate around and between them all.

Criterion Collection. (www.criterionco.com/) (around $39.95 per title)

Cineastes everywhere owe a huge debt to Criterion for continuing to bring out absolutely luscious digital transfers of important international cinema works. Along with these glorious images, the majority of DVDs in the Criterion Collection contain extras well worth watching. Luis Bunuel's Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, Vittorio De Sica's Umberto D, Ingmar Bergman's Cries and Whispers, Jean Cocteau's Blood of a Poet, and Fellini's 8 1/2 all contain excellent and edifying feature-length documentaries about the directors and their work. While I'm not a big fan of text extras on DVDs, the long, print essay on the films of Douglas Sirk by Rainer Fassbinder that accompanies All That Heaven Allows, is a knockout. And for the lower-of-brow among us, there's always Criterion's release of Robocop, which includes all of the over-the-top violent scenes axed to avoid the X rating.

Screening Science

I blame it all on Pete Loomer, my eleventh grade World Lit teacher. Until I set foot in his classroom, my heart was squarely set on a distinguished life in science (chalk it up to that Gilbert chemistry set I received for my ninth birthday). Then--wham!--Loomer introduced me to F. Scott, Ernest, Ezra, Gertrude, and company. Suddenly, my visions of a future filled with lab coats and Erlenmeyer flasks were replaced by a single-minded craving for berets and absinthe and la vie littéraire. Despite my wholesale leap into a mad, continuing love affair with the arts and humanities, I've secretly never let go of my earlier fascination with scientists and with the process of scientific inquiry. The videos discussed below have provided some of my favorite recent encounters with both.

Einstein Revealed.
$19.95. 1996. 120 min. PBS (www.shoppbs.org)

Asked to conjure up the personification of "scientific genius," most of us would unhesitatingly think of a little man with a nimbus of anarchic white hair, scrubby moustache, and perpetually rumpled clothes. Even for those of us who find it difficult to grasp the most rudimentary explanations of his revolutionary theories, Albert Einstein remains an almost otherworldly cultural icon and hero. Once you get past the awe, however, it's clear that Einstein, like most icons, had his share of human shortcomings and follies, too. Einstein Revealed manages to both explain the significance and legacy of Einstein's work, and to provide insights into a life in which emotions and human relationships were largely overshadowed by a consuming "desire to glimpse the order that lies hidden in nature."

Double Helix (aka Life Story).
$149.95 VHS; $179.95 DVD. 1987. 108 min. Films for the Humanities and Sciences (www.films.com)

Early on in Double Helix, Tim Pigott-Smith (playing biophysicist Francis Crick) says, "What's the point of science if it's not fun?" And great fun science turns out to be in this entertaining and equally informing dramatization of the early 1950's race to find the structure of DNA. In the hands of screenwriter William Nicholson, this is a tale filled with suspense, jealousy, and intrigue (and a goodly amount of humor). A large part of the fun is in watching skillful players chew the scientific scenery: Jeff Goldblum as glory-seeking, skirt-chasing wunderkind Dr. James Watson; Tim Piggott-Smith as amiable slacker Francis Crick (35 and still no Ph.D.!); and Juliet Stenson, as the brooding "Dark Lady of DNA," Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray diffraction studies contributed to Watson and Crick's monumental discovery.

A Naturalist in the Rainforest.
$250. 1995. 54 min. Bullfrog Films (www.bullfrogfilms.com)

Some notable scientists, like Einstein, focus their attention on expansive universes, grand teleologies. Others, like naturalist Joseph Skutch, ply their science in smaller, if no less fascinating worlds. For over sixty years, Skutch's laboratories were the rainforests of Central America; the subject of his quiet observations were the exotic birds that live in their tropical treetops, from Rufus-Tailed Hummingbird, to the mythical Quetzal. Naturalist in the Rainforest is a loving, magnificently photographed tribute to Skutch and his pioneering ornithological work in one of the earth's "last homes of mystery."

Untangling the Mind: The Legacy of Dr. Heinz Lehmann.
$295. 2000. 54 min. Filmakers Library (www.filmakers.com)

When young psychiatrist Dr. Heinz Lehmann took his first job at the Verdun Hospital for the Incurably Insane in Montreal, he encountered nightmarish scenes straight of Hieronymus Bosch. Patients were simply being stockpiled in the grossly understaffed asylum. "Therapy" consisted primarily of brutal physical interventions, including lobotomy and shock treatment. Over the next several decades, Lehmann would experiment intensively with more humane therapeutic approaches. Then, in the early 50's, a revolution. Working with a psychotropic drug discovered by happenstance in France, Lehman began treating mental illness as a condition with biological as well as psychological etiologies and "cures." Untangling the Mind chronicles Lehmann's crucial role in pushing psychiatry more firmly into the realm of science, and discusses the current research being conducted by his scientific heirs.

Guilty Pleasures

Those of you who have followed this column and its urbane, 600 word divagations concerning media and life for some time have probably formed an image of its author as a hip, consummately classy kind of guy (at least in my dreams you have). Fact is, as much as I'd like to perpetuate the notion that I spend my free time deconstructing Bergman films over organic Free Trade espressos sipped in terminally cool cafes, I'm as pathetically hooked on transfatty food and high cholesterol pop culture as the next guy and gal. Let's face it, sometimes nothing will do like a Dorrito, and sometimes Wild Strawberries simply must take a back seat to Extreme Makeover. Promise not to blow my cover, and I'll share some of my more egregious cultural lapses with you below.

Blast 'Em!
$19.98 (VHS). 1992. 103 min. Most home video distributors.

Who of you out there has never sneaked a guilty peek at those lurid photos while waiting in the checkout line? Princess Caroline captured au natural on her yacht. Oprah caught downing a quadruple Ben and Jerry's? J.Lo and Ben snapped while carousing at some sleazy downtown boit? How do you think those deliciously sleazy shots made it into People, The Enquirer and The Star? Through the rapacious labors of Nikon-wielding barracudas like Victor Malafronte, that's how. Blast 'Em! follows young Malafronte and his fellow paparazzi as they stalk the rich and famous in New York and Hollywood in perpetual search of the elusive money shot.

America's Weirdest Homes.
$49.95 (4 vols. VHS). 1999. 60 min. each tape. Most home video distributors.

Perhaps it was my childhood exposure to LA's architectural anarchism and general land's end strangeness, but I seem to have inherited an unflagging love of what architects fondly call "vernacular" style. You know the stuff I'm talking about: fast food joints built in the shape of hot dogs, motels constructed to look like teepees or airplanes. America's Weirdest Homes ventures into even stranger architectural and artistic waters by taking us on a fieldtrip to various hand-crafted, oddball Xanadus and Shangri-las across North America. For those of us who find joy in these types of whacked-out artistic and architectural visions and obsessions, it's a grand tour indeed!

Pumping Iron.
19.98 (DVD only). 1976. 85 min. Most home video distributors.

Triceps and deltoids and pecs…oh my! OK, I admit it: I find it rather hard to dislike Arnold Schwarzenegger (unless, of course, he becomes my next governor). In this, his introduction to media stardom, Ah-nold reveals both disarming charm and puckish humor along with one of the most awesomely anomalous physiognomies to ever grace the benches of Gold's Gym. Pumping Iron follows Herr Schwarzenegger and his beefy competition (including the sweetly hapless Lou Ferrigno, later of The Incredible Hulk TV series fame) as they pummel, compress, twist, and generally torture their anatomies into strange topographies in preparation for the 1975 Mr. Olympia contest.

Pulp Cinema.
$24.99 (DVD only). 2001. 99 min. Most home video distributors.

As long as I'm airing my aesthetic vices, I might as well confess another: I've always been almost as fond of movie trailers as the movies themselves. Make that the coming attractions of 1940's and 50's film noir and pulp melodrama, and I'm in celluloid heaven. Those swooping, overblown Bernard Herriman scores! That Hollywood hocum ("Who Is That Man? He Makes Crime a Career and Ladies a Hobby!). That forest of exclamations! ("MGM Presents a Startling and Daring New Method of Storytelling!!! A Milestone in Movie Making!!!). While sitting through 99 minutes of trailers is rather like eating a whole bag of the abovementioned Dorritos at one sitting, once you start watching, it's hard to press pause.

The View From Mid-Century

Having recently completed Peter Ackroyd's magnificent London: A Biography, I've been thinking a lot lately about history closer to home. A stroll with Ackroyd around Londinium's Roman walls got me to pondering both the incredible youth of our own country, and the American propensity for historical near-sightedness. Is it our national callowness and our continuing infatuation with "progress" and novelty that cause us to consider the week-before-last ancient history? Do we blame the media for reducing whole eras to catchphrases, icons, myths, and nostalgia? Perhaps no decade has been subjected to historical forgetfulness and trivialization more than the 1950's, a profoundly complex and turbulent period that now lives in the popular imagination as little more than a sanitized vision of poodle skirts and sock hops. Fortunately, there are notable documentaries and primary source videos such as those below to help bring post-war America back into sharper focus.

Ordinary Americans: The Red Scare.
$79.95. 1999. 35 min. Close Up Foundation (www.closeup.org)

While Ordinary Americans is by no means the most dramatic or slick video about McCarthyism, there's something particularly winning about its level-headed, economical discussion of Cold War domestic politics. Against this background, the filmmakers present an anthology of compelling, first-person testimonies concerning the harrowing effects of McCarthy-era political witch hunts on diverse lives and careers. Those craving further tales of 50's political paranoia and demagoguery should also check out Atomic Cafe (1982. 88 min. $19.94 video; $24.95 DVD; FACETS [www.facets.org]), Jayne Loader's hysterical montage of 50's civil defense films, anti-Communist propaganda, and mind-boggling governmental disinformation. Legacy of the Hollywood Blacklist (1987. 52 min. $99.95 video. FACETS) still stands as the most moving chronicle of Hollywood blacklisting. And for a slug of unforgettable political Grand Guinol, nothing beats Point of Order, Emile de Antonio's riveting compilation of footage from the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings (1964. 97 min. $29.95. FACETS).

Rock and Roll Invaders.
$225.00 1998. 96 min. Filmwest Associates (www.filmwest.com)

You think PlayStation and MTV are the ultimate corrupters of youth? Think again! For pure, kick-out-the-jambs subversion, take a look at what happened when the white, middle class kids of America first discovered rock n' roll! Rock and Roll Invaders offers a fascinating, well-crafted look at the evolution of early rock from its gritty R&B and country music roots, as well as a discussion of rock's enormous impact on the lives of mid-century teens. More specifically, Invaders focuses on the motley, jive-talkin' band of post-war AM radio personalities (later to be know as disc jockeys) who wantonly opened the door for the devil to shake, rattle, and roll his stuff over the airwaves.

Heavy Petting.
$19.98. 1988. 75 min. FACETS (www.facets.org)

Ah Happy Days! When sex was shameful, clandestine, totally perplexing, and (at least in retrospect) frequently hilarious. Heavy Petting intermixes a wealth of wonderfully goofy clips from 1950's and 60's sex ed films with bemused, lubricious recollections from the likes of David Byrne, Abbie Hoffman, Sandra Bernhard, and Allen Ginsberg about what went on in dark in the 50's (or didn't). Spaulding Gray's theory about the possibly perverse reasons for the 1950's popularity of Davy Crockett coonskin caps is alone worth the price of admission.

Walt Disney Treasures: Disneyland USA.
DVD $27.99. 1988. 75 min. amazon.com and other distributors.

I can't totally deny nostalgia, can I? Disneyland USA contains four episodes from the long-running Disney TV show, including the 1954 premiere show ("The Disneyland Story"), and coverage of the July 17, 1955 opening of Disneyland. For insights into 1950's American popular culture and America's touchingly cockeyed view of its past and future, what could be more edifying than visiting Walt's surreal "place of hopes and dreams, facts and fantasy."

Screening Intimacies

Documentary films, like their feature film cousins, have always reflected and responded to the times as much as influencing them. Not surprisingly, in an age of television-as-confessional, journalism-as-entertainment, and progressively blurring boundaries between public and private life, documentary filmmaking has increasingly mirrored our cultural obsession with publicly offering or watching personal revelation and testimony. Unlike earlier documentary styles such as cinema verité, which attempted to capture film subjects "truthfully" with minimal directorial intervention, the first-person narrative documentaries of the past several decades feature the voice and experiences of the filmmaker as the subject. The worst examples of this style of filmmaking tend to lapse into unabashed narcissism; the best, such as those below, have the power to elevate highly personal history and vision into the realm of the universal.

When Billy Broke His Head..and Other Tales of Wonder.
$199.00. 1994. 57 min. Fanlight Productions (www.fanlight.com)

Early in this story, first-time filmmaker Billy Golfus lies to us by contending, "This ain't exactly your inspirational cripple story." Inspirational it is. In a former life, Billy was a popular, riding-high Minneapolis DJ. Then one day, cruising without a helmet, Billy and his motor scooter had an unfortunate little encounter with a speeding car… In a narrative that veers from hilarious to heart-breaking, Golfus recounts his "search for intelligent life after brain damage." Billy's most wondrous tales, however, have to do with a road trip around the US that introduces him to other disabled individuals and disability activists, and awakens him to the fact that for the 43 million Americans, disability is as much a political and cultural issue as a physical one.

Nobody's Business.
$29.95. 1996. 60 min. FACETS (www.facets.org)

No one has a way with families quite like Alan Berliner. In this middle installment of the Berliner family trilogy (also including Intimate Stranger [1999], and Family Album [1991]-both also available from FACETS, $29.95) the filmmaker puts his impossibly curmudgeonly, pathologically defensive father on the hot seat in a touchingly dogged attempt to make peace with the old man in the process of piecing together the family's geneology. Berliner has a rather brilliant way of stitching together found footage, family documents, home movies, and interviews into highly personal scrapbooks that manage to reveal in uncanny ways the elusive and shifting emotional core of family relationships.

Bookwars.
$139.00 (institutions). 78 min. Transit Media. P.O. Box 1084 Harriman, NY 10926; 1-800-343-5540]

They have monikers like Damon Runyon characters: The Kid, Polish Joe, Map Al. They haunt the mean streets, plying their addictive wares to innocent passers-by, always hungry to buy and sell more. They're in it for the money, for the thrill, for dark reasons of the heart. They're…the ragtag curbside booksellers of New York City! In what is definitely one of my all time favorite docs, Jason Rosette, former street hawker of Göethe, Camus, and Heidegger, takes us on an unforgettable and often hilarious tour of the gritty, hardboiled bibliographic underbelly of Lower Manhattan.

First Person Plural.
$265.00 (college and university); $150 (K-12 and public libraries). 56 min. NAATA (www.naatanet.org)

In the wake of the Korean War, tens of thousands of South Korean children, including the filmmaker, were adopted by white American families. From age nine, Deann Borshay grew up with a new name, a new home, a new blond and blue-eyed brother and sister, and ghostly, fading memories of a previous life a world away. First Person Plural chronicles Borshay's early adulthood discovery that her birth mother, brother and sisters are still living in Korea, and traces her moving quest to redefine her notions of family, personal and cultural identity, and memory.

Culture Heroes and Heroines

I've always been an inveterate hero worshipper. This proclivity, which probably began with an early infatuation with Fess Parker's coonskin cap, has continued rather embarrassingly unabated into middle age. The only generalizations I seem to be able to make about the motley objects of my past and present veneration are, a) none has made a name by throwing, swinging, dribbling, sprinting, or jumping, b) many have led lives of Byronic intensity and dissipation, and, c) the majority have had a biopic or documentary made about them. Regular followers of QuickVids have probably discerned my sneaky tendency to push personal icons. Here, I'm making no bones about it. The stellar personalities featured in the works below rise to the very top of my list of all time heroes and heroines.

Jackson Pollock: Love and Death on Long Island.
$19.95 (VHS), $29.95 (DVD). 1999. 46 min. FACETS and other distributors.

I should have written down the precise date and time that I first encountered Pollock's astounding Autumn Rhythm at the NY Metropolitan Museum of Art--it was a soul-rocking encounter. Beyond the canvas, part of Pollock's allure has always rested in the mythologies surrounding his precipitous rise and fall as the superstar of post-war modernism. Like Ed Harris' recent biopic, this BBC documentary focuses more on Pollock's long tragic leap into the void than on his revolutionary art. The clips from Hans Namuth's 1950 film of the artist at work-a wonder of power and choreography-are, however, more than enough to keep lovers of Pollock's art enraptured and enlightened.

I come from a long line of hardcore unionists, a family in which the name Eugene Debs was spoken with awe and reverence. Throughout the late 19th and early 20th Century, Debs stood tirelessly and often perilously on the frontlines of struggles for the betterment of the industrial working class. It has always seemed tragic to me that this knight of labor has been largely consigned to the obscure back pages of US political and economic history. While this video overview of Debs' life and times certainly isn't the definitive word, and while it isn't going to win any awards for technical polish, it's a decent, emotionally satisfying introduction to the lifework of this American hero.

I have a funky, well-loved suitcase full of jazz heroes. Groovin' high near the top of my play list is Charles Mingus, he of the mercurial, ferociously swinging double bass. In this recent tribute, filmmaker Don McGlynn has produced a portrait of an immensely creative, hugely complex, and often troubled genius whose music stretched and shattered the boundaries of genre, style, and form. Had McGlynn simply edited together the spectacular concert footage included in his film, I would have been happy.

No, my heroes in this particular video chronicle are not the author (or the Blooms or Daedaluses). As much as I love them all, my greatest admiration in this tale goes to the redoubtable three women responsible for bringing Joyce's literary revolution into the light of print: Jane Heap and Margaret Anderson who serialized the book in their Little Review and stood fast against ensuing calumny, censorship, and prosecution; and my darling, Sylvia Beach, patron saint and den mother of Left Bank literati, who ushered Ulysses into publication on the Continent from her cozy battle post at Shakespeare and Company bookstore.

Poetry Off the Page

Smash the Grecian urn and impale
Keats' shopworn nightingale
What we got, hear, is a
new
word
order
Poetry performed and
poems without borders
These ain't your front parlor poetics
studied and well-bred
Speak first, take no prisoners
Damn the iambics
full speed ahead
off the page & onto the stage
It's an open mike free-fall, an oral fixation
with lines chanted, rapped, and roared
More truthful rage than beauty
less artifice than heat
dust off your lyres, cats,
we be hitting
the streets.

Poetry In Motion.
$19.95 VHS and DVD. 1982. 90 min. FACETS and other distributors.

Ronn Mann's wonderfully raucous, consistently engaging film is perhaps the earliest (and clearly my favorite) filmed celebration of poetry as a high-energy performance art. Dubbed "the Woodstock of Poetry" by American Film magazine, Poetry in Motion features a wild array of poetic personalities and styles, from beat elders (Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Amiri Baraka, et al.), to post-beat bards (Ed Sanders, Ann Waldman), to later-comers and unclassifiables, such as Tom Waites and Jim Carroll. Interspersed between howls, raps, and rants, the poets offer their diverse takes on the forms and functions of poetry. And popping up periodically, like some boozy muse, is Charles Bukowski, who both excoriates poetry for its lack of "guts and moxie," and taunts it to produce "practitioners who can bring it alive." Well, here they are.

Slamnation.
$39.95. 1998. 91 min. FACETS and other distributors.

Legend has it that ex-construction worker Mark Smith started poetry slams (a kind of few-holds-barred competition among poet/performers, with judges drawn from the audience) at Chicago's Green Mill jazz club in the mid-1980's. Since their first appearance on the scene, slams have become something of a full-blown cultural phenomenon, found roaring regularly on college campuses, at rock festivals, in dive bars, and in sundry other suitably hip hang-outs. Slamnation chronicles the 1996 national slam competitions held in Portland. We're given a cinema verité ringside seat as four-member regional teams furiously (and often hilariously) battle it out on stage, as if versification were a blood sport.

Straight Up Rappin'.
$295. 1992. 29 min. Filmakers Library (www.filmakers.com)

A good part of the recent resurgence of interest in spoken word art forms is undoubtedly due to the influence of rap. Straight Up Rappin' provides an interesting if rather genteel focus on rap as social communication--an outlet for earnest young people trying to express the anger and disaffection of life on the urban mean streets. For a considerably rawer (and ultimately more honest) look at hip-hop as a complex cultural construct and life-style, and rap as a big business, intrepid libraries may also want to check out Rhyme and Reason ($14.99. 1997. 92 min. Ingram and other distributors)

Have You Heard the Word?
$295. 1994. 57 min. The Cinema Guild (www.cinemaguild.com)

A segment of TV Ontario's Imprint program hosted by affable reggae poet Clifton Joseph, Have You Heard the Word is both a glancing look at the evolution of spoken word art forms, and a cool sampler of current performed word grooves, stars (mostly Canadian), and venues. As might be expected from TV magazine fare, the sound bites tend to come fast and furious ("Poetry is like the new drug!"), but it's a generally fun and often informative ride. Along with the cool new crop of word hipsters, Allen Ginsberg provides a kind of sagacious, bardic ballast at various points in the proceedings. His desultory discourse on the roots of spoken word art (Aboriginal song sticks! Sappho! medieval minstralry! African griot! Ezra Pound! Bessie Smith! Bebop! Keroauc!) is not to be missed.

Crusaders

Some three decades ago, comrade J. Lennon observed: "You say you want a revolution? We all want to change the world." And at the time, I earnestly did. I wore the uniform, carried the placards, and shouted the slogans. Then, somehow, life intervened. The Big Chill quickly cooled my revolutionary ardor; worrying about jobs and rent took precedent over manning the barricades. While I'm long past marching or thinking I can save the world, I've never lost my respect for tireless crusaders, like the remarkable individuals profiled below, who have staunchly kept the faith.

Yuri Kochiayama: Passion for Justice.
$125.00 (public libraries); $250 (academic libraries). 1993. 57 min. National Asian American Telecommunications Assn.

If activism has an elder (anti-)statesperson, she's certainly Yuri Kochiyama. For over forty years, Kochiyama has carried the standard for a rather astounding array of cross-cultural progressive causes. Passion for Justice chronicles Yuri's life and growing political commitment, from her internment during World War II, to her involvement in movements ranging from civil rights to nuclear disarmament; from prison reform, to struggles for Japanese American reparations. Spending time with this small, frail-looking woman as she recounts her friendship with Malcolm X, and as she talks to young people about social justice and commitment is an extraordinarily moving experience.

Out of the Past: The Struggle for Gay and Lesbian Rights in America.
$24.98. 1998. 65 min. FACETS and other distributors.

Early in Out of the Past, one of the academics interviewed observes that "History is one of the places we find ourselves." For gay and lesbian communities, historical obscurity has been a painful fact of life for centuries. Director Jeff Dupre effectively lifts this history out of the shadows by focussing on the experiences of Salt Lake City teenager Kelli Peterson and her battles with school and state administrators to establish a Gay-Straight Alliance student club. Kelli's story is used to frame a fascinating look at forgotten or unknown pre-Stonewall champions of gay rights, including Henry Gerber, Frank Kameny and Barbara Gittings, and civil rights pioneer Bayard Rustin.

Charles Garry: Street Fighter in the Courtroom.
$69.95. 2000. 58 min. AIMS Multimedia

The roster of San Francisco attorney Charles Garry's clients in the 1960's and 70's reads like a roll call of the Dissident Hall of Fame: Berkeley student demonstrators (against HUAC, against the draft), the Black Panthers, The Chicago 7. The son of refugees from the Armenian holocaust, Garry grew up poor and with an intimate understanding of what it means to be persecuted and marginalized in American society. This understanding together an unflagging delight in fighting the good fight were largely to shape Garry's philosophy, client list, and courtroom tactics over the course of a colorful forty year career. An unassuming, plain-talking guy, Garry was, in fact, a juggernaut in the courtroom, with a genius for both turning his cases into political theater, and winning against steep odds.

Freedom Never Dies: The Legacy of Harry T. Moore.
$275. 2000. 85 min. UC Center for Media & Independent Learning

The Civil Rights Movement is full of unwritten histories and hidden heroes. Perhaps none of these heroes has been more egregiously overlooked than Harry T. Moore. Moore was a distinguished Florida educator, a vanguard organizer for the NAACP in the state in the 1950's, and an indefatigable crusader against racial inequality and brutality. Freedom Never Dies tells the compelling story of Moore's unceasing and often recklessly brave battles with racist law and governmental agencies, with the Klan, and, ironically, with the NAACP itself. As this video makes clear, the bomb that killed Moore on Christmas day 1951 could do little to erase his amazing legacy.

Visual Lives

We all have our cultural epiphanies and life changing encounters with the arts. For me, one of the most soul-rocking revelations happened in the frowzy back room of a hometown second-hand bookstore. There, in the yellowing pages of 1940's and 50's Life Magazines, I was first introduced to the works of Alfred Eisenstaedt, W. Eugene Smith, Margaret Bourke-White, and other pioneers of photographic journalism. Here were images imbued with an astonishing narrative power and with an emotional and moral weight that extended far beyond the frame. Long before I became addicted to the movies, I was hopeless hooked on these defining moments in black and white. Among the images that have moved me the most are ones captured by the heroes-behind-the-lens documented in the videos below.

Strand: Under the Dark Cloth.
$29.95. 1990. 81 min. Kino (www.kino.com).

Early 20th Century photography took the majority of its aesthetic cues from European classical and romantic artistic traditions. Paul Strand was one of the earliest to abandon this pictorial safe harbor for vastly more exhilarating visual territory. Strand's stunning abstract photographs of Wall Street stand as seminal documents of early photographic modernism (just as his early foray into filmmaking, Manhatta, is perhaps the first American avant-garde film). Under the Cloth provides a portrait of a brilliant and enormously complex artist, a man who steadfastly devoted his camera to social change and the causes of humanity, but remained almost pathologically shy of human attachments.

Walker Evans America.
$19.95. 1999. 57 min. WMHT (PBS) (www.wmht.org/)

Like his contemporary Paul Strand, Walker Evans produced a body of work that was to have enormous impact on both the focus and look of modern photography. After an early fling with the modernist muse, Evans pursued a style of realism and a directness of approach to his subject matter that were revolutionary in their time. Think about the Great Depression and the plight of the rural poor, and it's almost impossible not to conjure up one of Evans' haunting, iconic images. Perhaps no other photographer has revealed a greater love for the everyday details of American life and the American landscape, or a greater genius for documenting them.

Dorothea Lange: A Visual Life.
$39.95. 1995. 50 min. FACETS (www.facets.org/) and other distributors.

I briefly toyed with devoting this column to videos about my favorite women photographers. Sadly, there is precious little out there that fits the bill. What we do have (besides a few works on Imogene Cunningham) is Meg Partridge's tribute to one of my absolute faves, Dorothea Lange. Along with Walker Evans, Lange's commissioned work for various New Deal agricultural agencies in the 30's virtually defined the look of photographic realism, and established photography as a powerful agent for social justice. Although Partridge's video falls short of being great filmmaking, Dorothea's voice-over commentary and the slide show of her devastating, Steinbeckian images of migrant farmers are enough to make this essential viewing.

W. Eugene Smith: Photography Made Difficult.
$39.95 (VHS); $24.99 (DVD). 1989. 89 min. FACETS (www.facets.org/) and other distributors.

No wonder the producers of this video made the somewhat misguided decision to use an actor to dramatize Gene Smith's life-it's the stuff of great movies. Smith was an intense, often reckless genius who both invented the art of the photographic essay and embodied the image of the photographer as fearless, unblinking social crusader. Smith's ground zero coverage of WWII Pacific campaigns, and his groundbreaking post war photoessays for Life Magazine (including 1971 coverage of the horrifying effects of toxic poisoning in Minimata, Japan) are testaments to a lifelong search for "imminent truth behind appearances."

Raise High the Roof Beam

In the best of times, I relish my tri-monthly opportunity to decorate this little 600-word corner of American Libraries with prose. I get to select and watch cool stuff; to offer up my critical two-centsworth; and to promote the collection and use of quality videos in libraries. Unfortunately, these are far from the best of times. How to get past the fearsome images that have recently consumed our lives? An answer came to me this morning while watching a group of construction workers raising the roof beams on a new campus building: In the face of destruction and chaos, focus on the architect's orderly art, on the craft and wonder of building. The following videos offer profiles of some of this century's most visionary architects and their enduring works.

Frank Gehry: Bilbao and Before.
$199.00 1998. 57 min. Insight Media (http://insight-media.com).

Depending on your viewing perspective and the time of day, it looks variously like a fantastic flower unfurling, a titanium-clad galleon floating down the Nervión River, or the giddy, ribbon-strewn aftermath of kid's birthday party. Frank Gehry's museum for the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain stands as one of the most astonishingly idiosyncratic and internationally acclaimed works of Twentieth Century architecture. In this Canadian Broadcasting profile, Gehry discusses his Canadian boyhood (and continuing love of hockey), his early forays into vernacular architecture and furniture building, and his rather astoundingly late entry into the architectural big time. Getting to look at shots of Bilbao at sunset is alone worth the price of admission.

Philip Johnson: Diary of an Eccentric Architect.
$45.00 1996 55min. Facets (www.facets.org) and other distributors.

Together with his mentor, Mies Van der Rohe, Philip Johnson was largely responsible for spreading the post-war gospel of "international style"--architecture that staunchly eschewed structural ornamentation in favor of sleekness, copious use of glass and other sheer materials. Johnson's own house in Connecticut (the 1949 "Glass House") is perhaps the most famous residential example of the style. In this video, Johnson--a strange and curmudgeonly 90-year-old--leads the viewer on an often hilarious tour of his spectacular, transparent abode. The centerpiece of Johnson's video "diary" is the construction of a new architectural folly on his property, based on a sculptural form by artist Frank Stella. It's a wonderful, organically shaped, dubiously-functioned hideaway that must make Mies spin in his foursquare grave.

Louis Kahn: An Offering to Architecture. $39.95. 1992. 58 min. Facets (www.facets.org) and other distributors.

Like many of his contemporaries, Louis Kahn's post-war work fell heavily under the sway of post-Bauhaus modernism. But unlike Philip Johnson, who continued to build variations on boxy, glass-curtained high-rises, Kahn transformed his modernism into something completely different. In projects such as the Salk Institute (La Jolla, California) and the Kimball Museum (Fort Worth), Kahn moved away from the cool, refined abstraction of international style, toward a new, pared-down classicism. The results, as revealed in this video, were buildings of almost overwhelming authority, dignity, and presence on the landscape.

First Person Singular: I.M. Pei.
$14.95. 1997. 90 min. PBS (www.pbs.org)

Perhaps best known for his controversial, pyramidal entrance to the Louvre, I.M. Pei has been turning out graceful, innovative, and enormously influential buildings across the globe for nearly sixty years, including the Bank of China in Hong Kong, the Meyerson Symphony in Dallas, and the Miho Museum in Kyoto. In this leisurely-paced video biography, Pei's life, work, and architectural philosophy are highlighted. There's something positively delicious about seeing the elegant 78 year old Pei getting down with Jan Wenner and other rockers in developing Cleveland's Rock and Roll Museum.

Arts on the Edge

If I had access to a Wayback Machine, my first destinations would likely be various scenes of modernist infamy. For starters, I'd set my reverse chronometer to February 17, 1913--the opening of the Armory Show of modern art in New York--for a chance to watch the unsuspecting crowds gasp and goggle over Marcel Duchamp's fractured, descending nude and assorted other travesties. Then--whoosh--I'd be off to Paris, May 29, 1913, to gleefully witness the flying chairs and furious catcalls greeting the premiere of Stravinsky, Nijinsky & Co.'s Rite of Spring. Alas! There is no way back, and I'm stuck in the post-post modern world with an avant garde that has largely been washed away, ignored, or quickly approriated by mainstream culture. The following videos--chronicles of icon-defacing culture heros--give me some small consolation at least.

The Secret of Marcel Duchamp.
$29.95 1997. 50 min. FACETS (www.facets.com) and other distibutors.

The 20th Century was rife with art provocateurs and tricksters, but none, perhaps, have been as influencial (or inegmatic) as Marcel Duchamp. Among his other considerable legacies was the radical notion of the "ready-made--the elevation of homely everyday objects to the status of art simplely through the act of finding and signing them. From the end of the first War to the early twenties, Duchamp played his pranks, dropped his bombs; then he quit…but not quite. The Secret of Marcel Duchamp provides a fascinating look at Duchamp's career and his mysterious final work, kept secret until after his death.

Cage/Cunningham.
$19.95 1991. 95 min. FACETS (www.facets.com) and other distibutors.

The fifty year collaboration between composer/poet/artist John Cage and dancer/choreographer Merce Cunningham was by all measures extraordinary. Extraordinary because of it's long duration and the number of groundbreaking works it produced; extraordinary because it involved of a veritable pantheon of other visionary artists, from Jasper Johns and Robert Rauchenberg to

Signals Through the Flames.
$29.95 1985. 97 min. Mystic Fire Video (www.mysticfire.com/) and other distibutors.

For Antonin Artaud, theater's angel and madman, the appropriate function of theater was to serve as a form of immediate emotional and spiritual catharsis, with the participants "like victims burnt at the stake, signalling through the flames." In the late 1940's Julian Beck and Judith Malina founded a visionary theater group--The Living Theater--that for the next forty years would take Artaud's words directly to heart. This documentary history by Sheldon Rochlin and Maxine Harris follows Beck, Malina and company in their international theatrical wanderings, and catches them in the act of tossing off theory, standing on the battlements of various social movements, and signalling their singular passions from the stage.

Invocation.
$295. 1987. 53 min. Women Make Movies (www.wmm.com/)

Fifty years ago, independent filmmaking meant something considerably different than it does today: it meant experimenting with film as an uncompromisingly artistic and poetic medium, rather than dealing with it as purely entertainment or commercial artifact; it meant taking considerable risks with content, form, and audience. In the decade following World War II, Maya Deren was the doyen of the cinematic avant garde, a profound influence on several generations of experimental filmmakers to follow. Invocation traces her early work with imagist/surrealist film, and discusses the later intense foray into the spiritual and aesthetic aspects of Haitian voudoun ritual that resulted in her most well-know print and film works, Divine Horsemen.

Videos in the Hood

True Believers in Cyberdom are fond of talking about "virtual communities" and "online neighborhoods". Chat over the wires as we will, the real drama and interaction of daily life will continue to take place, not online, but over the fences and on the streets of brick-and-mortar neighborhoods. The social and emotional complexity of neighborhoods--their connections with home and belonging--exert a powerful lifelong hold on most of us. Yet, like their residents, neighborhoods inevitably transform over time: they age (sometimes gracefully, often not); they change character and shape; they experience depression, illness, and, occasionally, revitalization. The videos below allow us to walk the streets, meet the inhabitants, and listen to the stories of four neighborhoods in transition.

The Miracle of Intervale Avenue.
$39.95 1987. 65 min. Ergo Media (www.jewishvideo.com) and other distributors.

Welcome to the South Bronx, a multi-ethnic neighborhood with the shattered look of urban apocalypse about it. Yet amid the darkness, rubble, and casualties of poverty and crime, there are flickering lights: Mushman the baker, David the sign painter, and feisty Mrs. Miroff the seamstress--elderly survivors of a long-gone Jewish community who have made a kind of provisional peace with their African American and Puerto Rican neighbors. We're introduced to other memorable die-hards as well, including a young Jewish cop raised on the streets he now patrols, and a dedicated, philosophical social worker--ordinary folks in the 'hood doing their best to bring their community back from the abyss.

Ghosts Along the Freeway.
$79.00. 1991. 10 min. FACETS (www.facets.org) and other distributors.

As a kid growing up in 1960's Los Angeles, I used to play on the freeway. For a dirt-hungry 10-year-old, new freeway construction provided the ultimate playground; for my parents and their neighbors, the freeway represented disaster, the ruin of a closely-knit community. Ghosts along the Freeway offers a short, pointed look at a similar set of post-War urban travesties carried out in the name of progress: the destruction of Rondo Avenue, the flourishing heart of the African American community of St. Paul, MN, and Lowry Hill, an elegant haute bourgeois enclave in Minneapolis.

Chinatown (Neighborhoods: The Hidden Cities of San Francisco).
$19.95. 1991. 56 min. KQED (www.kqed.org).

Part of an excellent series that includes installments on San Francisco's Castro, Fillmore, and Mission Districts, Chinatown offers a poetic, informative 150-year social and cultural history of a "village within a village." Behind the ersatz pagodas, the trinket shops and restaurants of this perennially popular tourist destination, lies a thriving community, remarkable for its cohesiveness, self-sufficiency, and resiliency in the face of virulent prejudice, natural disasters, and changing times. Director Felicia Lowe traces the growth and gradual transformation of this neighborhood, from it's Gold Rush beginnings to its present day position as a port of entry for a new generation of Asian immigrants.

Building the American Dream: Levittown, NY.
$350. 1994. 60 min. Cinema Guild (www.cinemaguild.com)

For thousands of GIs and their families desperate for housing after World War II, Abraham Levit and his two sons were godsends: Abe gave them a shot at the American Dream for a little under seven grand, no down payment. Levit wasn't the first or only developer to exploit the idea of mass producing affordable homes in the 'burbs, he was simply the most ambitious and visionary. Levit's driving vision-Levittown--sprang up almost over night on the loamy plains of rural Long Island. As present and past Levittowners attest in this video, however, the development was always more than simply a tract of ticky-tacky boxes-it was a full-tilt sociological phenomenon, a new way of life on the margins of the big city.

Home Movies

When I retire sometime in the next decade, I intend to set up regular residence in UC Berkeley's Bancroft Library. I can't imagine a more satisfying way to spend my leisure time than mining the Bancroft's rich, seemingly bottomless collection of manuscripts. I'm a sucker for diaries, in particular. Perusing those intriguing chronicles of past times and lives, one can't help lament the steady demise of the diarist's art in this century. What comparable means of charting the mysteries of personal and family history are offered by this harried electronic age of ours? The answer might well be, home movies. As the works below make amply clear, viewed in the correct light, there's amazing power and poignancy to be found in life's small moments lovingingly and artlessly captured on film.

Moving Memories.
$14.95. 1993. 31 min. FACETS (www.facets.org) and other distributors.

The experience of watching Moving Memories is similar to suddenly coming upon evidence of a heretofore lost and totally obscured civilization. Editor Robert Nakamura has assembled an anthology of fascinating inside views of various West Coast Japanese immigrant communities in the 1920's and 30's, captured by an array talented amateur moviemakers. In watching these clips, one must inevitably ponder the profoundly tragic fate of many of the filmmakers and their smiling children a decade or two later, as wartime internment ripped apart homes and lives. This fate is movingly revealed in another excellent video, Something Strong Within ($19.95. 1994. 40 min. FACETS [www.facets.org] and other distributors), a compilation of surreptitiously shot home movies documenting daily life in various internment camps.

Sun, Moon & Feather.
$250. 1989. 30 min. Cinema Guild (www.cinemaguild.com)

In this winningly goofy video--a kind of hybred home movie--Brooklyn-born Native American sisters Lisa, Gloria and Muriel camp, cavort, and riff around memories of their childhood during the 1930s and '40s. They croon old popular songs (Indian Love Call!), play act, and recount stories about their alcoholic father and his "snake oil" carnival act (complete with ersatz tribal dances and fake fox hunts). Woven throughout these tales like documentary ballast are snipets from family movies taken over a 30 year span, including fleeting glimpses of the three little girls who would grow up to tell their engaging family tales.

Family Album.
$29.95. 1999. 60 min. FACETS (www.facets.org) and other distributors.

Filmmaker Alan Berliner has performed a riveting bit of cinematic slight-of-hand. By cleaverly editing together home movies found at yard sales and flea markets with a sound montage of family interviews and rememberances, Berliner has created a surprisingly dramatic journey from craddle to grave, with the pageant of American culture 1920-1950 as a backdrop. There's a rhythm, universality, and melancholy beauty to these disparate, time-worn images and half-spoken phrases that is at once hypnotic and haunting.

Treasures from American Film Archives. DVD (4 vol.)
$69.99. 1999. 642 mins. Amazon.com and other distributors.

Produced under the auspicies of the National Film Preservation Foundation, this recently-released collection of early films represents a major contribution to the study of American film. The contribution lies in the focus of the collection as much as in the superb restoration of the works presented. Rather than representing expectable historical offerings from early Hollywood, the 50 treasures in this trove (contributed by notable film archives throughout the US) are largely "orphan" films from the first 35 years of film history--works neglected by the movie mainstream, including industrial films and documentaries, and early experimental films. And--yes--there are home movies, including those of Julius Marx (aka Groucho) covorting for the camera with his young daughters like any silly doting dad.

Feasting the Eye

November 2000

The history of movies is full of glorious food. From the custard pie mayhem of Mabel Normand, to Charlie Chaplin dolefully eating boiled boot in the Yukon; from the bawdy culinary revels of Albert Finney's Tom Jones, to the sensuously magical repasts of Like Water For Chocolate. This historical relationship between food and film shouldn't be particularly surprising, given the universally strong visual and emotional appeal of both. Feature films have not been alone in their repeated return to the pleasures and foibles of the table; the gathering, preparation, and consumption of food have been the focus of a fair number of tasty documentary works, as well. A few of my recent favorites are served up below. Bon Appetite!

Pink's Famous Chili Dogs.
$150.00. 1998. 20 min. University of California Center for Media and Independent Learning. www-cmil.unex.berkeley.edu/

This is a documentary that did something to me that few if any films have ever done before: it actually made me fleetingly nostalgic for my L.A. roots. In 1939 Paul Pink opened a little corner dog stand in Hollywood (dogs a dime; drinks, a nickel). Nearly sixty years later the stand, looking exactly as it did in the depths of the Depression, has become a L.A. legend, the hangout of several hungry generations of locals and Hollywood glitterati. In a city that nonchalantly "buries its landmarks," Pink's stands out as a delicious survivor and a monument to Paul Pink's integrity and good sense.

Yum, Yum, Yum!
$49.95 (Public Libraries); $99.00 (Universities). 1990. 51 min. Flower Films. www.lesblank.com

Crawfish and gumbo and crabs, oh my! I made the horrible mistake of savoring Les Blank's tantalizing treatise on the joys of cajun cooking close to lunchtime. By the end of the reel, I was 'bout ready to kill for a plate of shrimp etouffeé or a bowl of red beans and rice. With a rocking zydeco soundtrack pushing it on, Yum, Yum, Yum! forages for eats, lore, and general bon ton in familiar Blank territory--the Louisiana bayous and backwoods (with a quick stop in New Orleans to sample Paul Prudhomme's haute cajun cuisine). All I've got to say is, it's a good thing that aroma technology hasn't yet been perfected…I'd have never finished this review!

Animal Appetites.
$ 125. 1991. 20 min. National Asian American Telecommunications Assn. www.naatanet.org/shopnaata/index.html

Want a quick revelation? Watch Animal Appetites right after watching Yum, Yum, Yum! In the latter, there's lots of fond talk about the cajun penchant for eating whatever hops, crawls, or slithers--strange wiggly stuff from swamps and paddies. The former video chronicles the arrest of two immigrant Cambodians in 1988 in Long Beach, California for killing and cooking a dog--a common culinary affair in certain Southeast Asian cultures. In telling the story, Animal Appetites takes a humorous but barbed look at cultural relativism and at the furor over an issue that had more to do with xenophobia and racism than gastronomic tastes and prejudices.

Anatomy of a Spring Roll.
$295. 1995. 56 min. Filmakers Library. www.filmakers.com

Proust nibbled madeleines to transport his senses back to temps perdue. Filmmaker Paul Kwan crunches springrolls. In a visual and narrative style that is alternately funny and melancholy, poetic and hiply glib, Vietnamese-born Kwan uses the the acts of cooking and dining as both metaphors for history and memory, and as a means of coping with the disjunctures between life in his native and adopted homes. At the beginning of his story, Kwan says "food is everyone's first language." In this wonderful cinematic stirfry, he shows us both the simplicity and emotional complexity of this universal tongue.

Prime Time Follies

August 2000

It's a good thing they keep me buried deep in these back pages, for I am about to expound the ultimate professional heresy: We are living in post-literate times. As much as we revere and advance the glories of the printed word, the bald truth is that over the past half century, the most influential histories, stories, images, and cultural lessons have been shaped and handed to us by other media-movies and, particularly, TV.

The tragedy and danger in all of this has nothing to do with the rude ascendancy of one medium over another, or the competition between media for the hearts and minds of global citizenry. The danger lies in the generally distorted mirror held up to society by TV, in the undemocratic consolidation of control over which images and stories are cast, and in the ineluctable hitching of content to commerce. What's to be done? Cultivate sharp viewing eyes and critical minds. Understand the methods and motives that animate prime time. The following videos are eye-openers and powerful ammunition in this good fight.

Inventing Television News: 19461959.
$149. 1997. 47 min. Films for the Humanities and Sciences

This third installment of the six-part series "Dawn of the Eye" looks at the history and evolution of broadcast news in both the United States and Canada. The real star of this story is Edward R. Murrow and his single-handed invention of both modern radio journalism and its early TV successors. Listening to Murrow's poetic, deeply committed approach to reporting world events, one can't help but mourn the nightly news' subsequent precipitous fall from grace. For a fuller sense of Murrow's inimitable style, viewers are referred to The Best of See It Now (120 min., $149.95, Ambrose Video

Race Against Prime Time.
$195. 1985. 58 min. California Newsreel

Using local and national TV news coverage of a 1980 riot in Miami's predominantly African-American Liberty City section as a laboratory, Race Against Prime Time examines the profoundly disturbing ways in which news programs report and shape current events along racial and class lines. Through footage from three Miami network affiliates, we are shown how the drama factor and the economics of news production influence what is reported, how the news selectively determines (or creates) expert witnesses and community spokespeople, and how the context and history of events are neglected in favor of "money shots" and sound bites.

The Killing Screen.
$195; $125 public libraries. 1994. 37 min. Media Education Foundation

What lives in a box and commits six to eight acts of mayhem and murder per hour, witnessed by millions of people worldwide an average of six to seven hours a day? You know the answer, of course. George Gerbner, dean emeritus of the Annenberg School of Communication, offers an insightful deconstruction of TV violence and its consequences, punctuated by a montage of prime time's "expertly choreographed brutality." Gerber ends his talk with a discussion of what is needed to foster responsible citizenship in the new, perilous media environment.

Women as Seen by Television.
11 min. Letting Go Foundation. Inquire for price at Lgs@napplisci.com or 503-635-7511.

Filmmaker Jean Sass gets right to the point by providing a panoply of often grimly humorous examples of TV's reduction of half the world's population to stereotypes and ciphers. Sex, servility, and victimhood. . . and that's just the ads. This short video would be an excellent discussion-opener for middle or high school classes. For a more indepth and academic treatment of the images of women in advertising, Jean Kilbourne's Killing Us Softly III ($295, $195 to high schools, Media Education Foundation, 2000) is highly recommended.

Curmudgeons

Well, it finally happened last month--I hit the mid-century mark. In honor of reaching this milestone, I indulged myself in a birthday gift: the right to enjoy a full-tilt, month-long existential crisis. Three weeks into this spiritual conniption, I think I've finally figured out what I want to be when I grow up: I want to be a sharp-minded, world-wise old coot, a crusty but endearing expert at suffering no fools and making no bones-in short, a card-carrying curmudgeon. The real trick, of course, is to slip into this cranky role with wit, intelligence, and style. Fortunately for me--for us all--there are myriad curmudgeonly masters to learn from, some of the most inspiring and amusing of whom have been caught in all their irascible glory on the following videos.

Tell the Truth and Run: George Seldes and the American Press.
$249 (institutions); $99 (public libraries). 1996. 111 min. New Day Films.

Over the course of his remarkable eighty-year career as a muckraking journalist, independent publisher, and indefatigable public interest crusader, George Seldes witnessed and reported on the long parade of demagogues, madmen, and oligarchs strutting and fretting upon the stage of 20th Century history. In scrutinizing these individuals and events, Seldes never hesitated to go to the battlements in support of the public's right to know the full truth, particularly when this good fight revealed the failures and malfeasance of the mainstream press itself. Tell the Truth and Run interviews Seldes' in his 98th year, still feisty, funny, and fiercely committed to the idea of a free, democratic press in America.

Arguing the World.
$39.95 1996. 109 min. FACETS, and other distributors

Irving Howe, Nathan,Glazer, Daniel Bell and Irving Kristol were four bright, scrappy kids from poor Jewish immigrant families who came of intellectual and political age together in the rancorous, politically-charged atmosphere of New York City College in the 1930's. Arguing the World documents the central role subsequently played by these four writers, teachers, and social critics in leading and shaping national political and cultural thought and discourse over the next six decades. It's an amazing picture of brilliant, protean thinkers, growing increasingly apart politically, but ceaselessly engaged in debate with each other, and passionately immersed in a world of intellectual inquiry, ideas, and opinions.

A Portrait of Mr. Pink.
$125 1997. 15 min. Filmakers Library,

Mr. Pink is a 73 year old retired refuse collector, hunkered down for the last 30 years in a comfortable victorian in the suburbs of London's South End. And what a vision that house is!: wildly bedizened with the brilliant tropical colors of Pink's native Jamaica, walls embellished with patterns and symbols, sacred and profane, it stands out like a coruscating hothouse flower amid drab row-house neighbors. Probably too joyful and serene to qualify as a true curmudgeon, Mr. Pink nonetheless reveals a wonderful curmudgeonly penchant for doing exactly what he damn well pleases to satisfy his mind and spirit.

Burroughs: The Movie.
$39.95. 1984. 90 min. FACETS, and other distributors.

Jack Kerouac once explained the "beat" in Beat Generation as meaning "beatific." Of all the beat icons, old Bill Burroughs couldn't have fit this description less. Looking like a kindly, natty Midwestern banker, Burroughs was the demonic hipster granddad with a cultural pipe bomb and a flask of morphine in his coat pocket. Howard Brookner's film captures Burroughs as he revisits his childhood home in St. Louis, visits with new and old literary cronies, and reads excepts from his poisonous, often grimly hilarious works in a voice that sounds something like the baleful creaking of a haunted house.

Worlds Apart

January 2000

A few weeks ago, an ATM wantonly devoured my card. Last weekend, my high-tech toaster melted down. On the way to work yesterday, a guy in a Lexis cut me off at a stoplight and then offered colorful observations regarding my lineage. As I gnawed on my pathetically pale bagel this morning, it was, understandably, hard to avoid falling into a gloomy meditation on the joys of modernity. What would it be like to live apart from the staggering technological and social baggage that seems to have encumbered most of our lives? The following videos look at disparate communities which, by virtue of religion, cultural history, or geography, have managed to do just that-avoid the roiling ways of the modern world by clinging to unique worlds of their own.

We Have No War Songs.
1995. $350. 53 min. Filmakers Library; http://www.filmakers.com/

Can there be a group whose folkways are more antithetical to the workings of modern Western civilization than the Gypsies?: no fixed residence, no regular employment or savings, no national loyalties, no war songs. It’s precisely their stubbornly unyielding “otherness” and freedom that have made Gypsies the objects of fear and persecution throughout Europe for centuries. We Have No War Songs is a passionate, music-filled look at the mysteries of Gypsy life, philosophy, and faith, focusing on an annual pilgrimmage to the French port of St. Maries-de-la-Mer to dance and sing to the Gypsy patron saint.

The Amish: Not To Be Modern.
1995. $29.98. 57 min. FACETS, (http://www.facets.org) and other distributors.

More visual tone poem than rigorous ethnography, Not To Be Modern presents a glimpse of a culture guided by the Old Ways: self-sufficiency, simplicity, community, and an unwavering belief in the literal word of the Scriptures. We’re shown beautifully photographed scenes of everyday life in this closely circumscribed world of horse-drawn buggies, hand threshing, quilting, and prayer. It’s a picture which is uniformly lyrical and sympathetic…except, perhaps, for the story told by an apostatic son about being violently upbraided by an Amish bishop for daring to imply that the earth is round.

A Life Apart: Hassidism in America.
1997. $59.95. 95 min. FACETS, (http://www.facets.org) and other distributors.

In the first half of the 18th Century, a charismatic mystic known as Ba'al Shem Tov led an unthinkable rebellion against Jewish orthodoxy. The heretical spiritual movement that he founded, Hasidism, renounced religious asceticism, emphasized prayer, joy, and charity, and stressed connection to the divine in everyday activities. Life Apart traces Hasidism from its roots in Eastern Europe, through the flames of the Holocaust, and to America after the War. It’s a riveting portrait of a frequently controversial “minority-with-a-minority,” a community struggling to preserve ancient traditions in the face of America's treyfe medina--impure land

Return from Extinction.
1998. $250.00. 50 min. Bullfrog Films, http://www.bullfrogfilms.com/

It is amazing to realize that as late as 1968, groups of isolated stone age peoples inhabited the forests of Amazonia; it’s profoundly sad to ponder the horrific fate of these indiginous dwellers upon contact with the 20th Century. Return from Extinction (part of the excellent three volume Last of the Hiding Tribes series) tells the remarkable history of the Panara, a small tribe living in the deepest part of the southern Brazilian rainforest. Having fled and hidden from the lethal onslaught of Portuguese colonialism in the 18th Century, the Panara faced near-extinction as new roads and cities, disease, and the mercinary plundering of the environment brought “civilization” to their doorstep 200 years later. Only through the dedication of Claudio Villas Boas, of Brazil’s Indian Protection Service, did the Panara survive to tell their story.

Classic Reelism, Part II

September 1999

In the last installment of QuickVids, I presented a sampling of works by pioneers of the documentary film form. This time around we'll focus on the upstart cinematic progeny of those pioneers. Armed with newly-developed portable cameras and tape recorders, the documentary filmmakers who came of age after World War II set about to create a radically new type of cinema,.a new film grammar. This new style-christened cinema verité in France and Direct Cinema in the US-looked like nothing that had screened before. Verité filmmakers assiduously avoided the narrative artifice, the highly-polished cinematography, and the self-consciously heroic subject matter that characterized earlier documentary style; they recorded their subjects with minimal directorial intervention. The results were often startlingly raw-looking films that framed the world in absolutely unique ways. At its best-including the defining works described below-- these films constitute a cinema of enormous immediacy, gritty honesty, and often-amazing insight.

Salesman.
1968. $79.95. 85 min. Facets (www.facets.org), and other distributors.

In Salesman, brothers Albert and David Maysles, the fathers of Direct Cinema, follow a quartet of dogged Irish Catholic bible salesmen as they pitch their glossy-covered, fully-illustrated, Vatican-approved wares to the wary denizens of working class Irish and Latino neighborhoods from Webster, Massachusetts to Opa-Locka, Florida. If there's a "star" of the tragi-comic show, it's salesman Paul Brennan, a kind of loveable, voluble Irish poet, whose increasing discouragement and distaste for the door-to-door life become heartbreakingly apparent as the film progresses.

Lonely Boy (National Film Board of Canada: A History; vol. 2).
1961. $150 27 min. National Film Board of Canada; 22-D Hollywood Ave., Hohokus, NJ 07423; (800) 542-2164

Directed by NFB yomen filmmakers Wolf Koenig and Roman Kroiter, Lonely Boy is perhaps the first serious rock and roll documentary, and it still stands out as one of the best. In this profile of 20 year old singer Paul Anka, Wolf and Kroiter manage to capture a handful of defining moments which speak volumes about the nature of both pop stardom and pop fandom. In one unforgettable sequence, Anka croons to a girl he has plucked from the audience, as the relentless camera reveals the astonishing mix of emotions flitting across the faces of the girl and the audience. Other scenes of the screaming crowd and beleagured cops look like something straight out of some pop-culture version of Picasso's Guernica.

Primary.
1961. $250.00 60 min. Direct Cinema, PO Box 10003, Santa Monica, CA 90410; (800) 525-0000

Robert Drew's verité take on the 1960 Wisconsin presidential primary race between Hubert Humphrey and John Kennedy remains unparalleled in its evocation of the look and feel of life on the campaign trail. Drew captures Humphrey, the dumpy, folksy everyman, and JFK, the patrician Eastern glamor-boy, as they trudge the dreary backroads and press the flesh in Elk and Grange Halls throughout the state. As with all great cinema verité, it's the small details that tell the story: Humphrey serenaded by an accordion orchestra,; Jackie addressing a group of doughty farm wives in Polish, looking like a Chanel-clad deer caught in the headlights of public notoriety.

High School.
1968. $350. 75 min. Zipporah Films; http://www.zipporah.com/

For many of us, to walk down the dismal, locker-lined halls and to sit in the interminable classes of Frederick Wiseman's High School is to experience a particularly nasty case of déjà vu. The crew-cut fascist gym coach, the condescending counselors, the hollow, force-fed lessons in moral and social responsibility, all come back in enormous, unblinking close-ups to haunt us. As depressing as these scenes may still be, in the wake of Columbine, they also somehow seem like an urban archaeological discovery of some long-lost, and enormously innocent culture.

Classic Reelism

June 1999

The earliest movies were little more than mirrors of the real world. Decades before color and sound, before editing and plot, pioneering filmmakers used their lenses to capture the subject matter closest at hand--the quotidian comings and goings of people and machinery, the workings of art and nature. As the movies evolved , the reflections in the cinematic mirror were to change and distort radically. Fortunately, the art of using the camera to observe and comment on the real world has also survived and continued to develop in the past 100 years (although generally well outside of mainstream Hollywood). John Grierson, one of the patriarchs of modern film realism, gave a name to this stubbornly persistent genre: documentary. The best documentary work, including the early classics discussed below, have yielded some of the most indelible and illuminating images of this century

On a blustery December night in Paris, 1895, brothers Auguste and Louis Lumiere irrevocably changed the world. In a dim café backroom, they coaxed the startling illusion of life from a small box and onto a screen-ordinary yet astounding 50 second images of trains arriving, factory workers heading home, babies being fed. This compilation of beautifully restored Lumiere "actualities", narrated by director Bernard Tavernier, offers a fascinating window into a lost world, and a glimpse of a culture-shaking technology being born.

Commissioned by the British General Post Office in 1936 as a publicity piece, Night Mail is an inspired early example of the work of John Grierson, Basil Wright, and Harry Watt, leading lights of what has come to be known as the British Documentary Movement. With a stirring score by Benjamin Britten and narrative contributions by W.H. Auden, Night Mail follows a postal special delivery train as it roars from London to Glasgow. A celebration of the power and rough beauty of technology, and the poetry and heroism of everyday work.

While Grierson and his circle were busy producing an impressive body of government-sponsored documentary works in Great Britain, the same thing was happening on the other side of the Big Pond. In the US, the Great Depression produced a generation of great filmmakers, many of whom were recruited by the Feds to document the economic plight of the nation, to publicize federally-underwritten public works, and to boost national morale. Pare Lorentz, a journalist by trade, was among this corp of documentarians in the field. With the artistic assistance of brilliant photographers Ralph Steiner and Paul Strand, Lorentz produced The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936), an enormously moving cinematic essay on the decimation of the Dust Bowl and the epic migration of families west. A film which stands as one of the defining documents of the era.

Dziga Vertov's silent 1929 masterpiece of cinematic constructavism is not so much a straight documentary as it is a passionate love affair with the movie medium, with modernism, and with the early Soviet social experiment. Vertov's on-screen alter ego careens around Moscow, taking in and synthesizing everything: the balletic movements of factory machinery, street scenes, men and women at work. Virtually every scene bursts with amazing visual innovation and vitality, and with enormous optimism for the brave new world in front of the lens. David Shepherd's restoration of this classic, which includes a wonderfully edgy new score by the Alloy Orchestra, is magnificent.

All videos are distributed by Kino (www.kino.com); also available from Ingram, Baker & Taylor, and other distributors.

Family Affairs

March 1999

Old Count Tolstoy’s observations about the sameness of all families and the uniqueness of unhappy ones doesn’t hold up particularly well in the ‘90s.

Having been buffeted by the sundry cultural and economic riptides of the last half century, the family clearly ain’t what it used to be. There are no longer easy generalizations to be made about the structure, dynamics, functions, or future of families, happy or not; no quick or universally applicable prescriptions for the well-being of the institution or its members. Despite these sociological shifts, at least one thing has not changed since Tolstoy’s time – the complexity and drama inherent in the lives and histories of all families. The videos below capture some of that astonishingly varied familial drama, played out in a wide array of setting and contexts.

The History of the Luiseño People: La Jolla Reservation, Christmas 1990.
$200. 1993. 29 min. Video Data Bank., 112 S. Michigan Ave., Chicago, IL 60603; 312-345-3550.

Christmas Day. A darkened room decked with six packs and cigarette cartons. On the TV, Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye croon and caper in White Christmas, like a cruel background chorus. James, an American Indian, sits alone in quiet desperation, drinking, methodically phoning relatives and ex-lovers, trying to connect. In the spare, sad, one-sided conversations that unfold, volumes are revealed about James’s life, and about the suffocating lonliness of being both a family and a cultural outsider.

Italianamerican.
$24.95 1974. 49 min. Facets (www.facets.org), and other distributors.

A year after Marty Scorsese filmed Robert DeNiro and Harvey Keitel haunting the mean streets of Little Italy, he tackled an even grittier project: filming his mama making meatballs. Italianamerican fondly captures Scorsese’s parents at home in their tchotchke-filled, vinyl-clad Orchard Street apartment, engaged in feeding little Marty and the viewer a deliciously filling, nonstop torrent of stories, squabbles, quips, history, and lore about their marriage, the family, and the neighborhood in which they’d lived for over 60 years.

Me, Mom, and Mona.
$150. 1993. 29 min. National Asian American Telecommunications Assn.; http://www.naataneet.org/distrib/index.html

The "Me" of the title is filmmaker Mina Shum, director of the wonderfully goofy and insightful feature flick, Double Happiness. In this, her first film effort, Shum developed her cinematic chops by simply focusing the camera on an intimate dialog between her sister, her mother, and herself. Mina and Mona are hip, independent, Canadian-raised girls. And although Chinese-born Mom comes from a radically different cultural world and generation, the conversation between mother and daughters uncovers as many affinities and close emotional bonds as differences. Among the strongest of these bonds are those forged in the course of the trio’s various inventive ploys to keep the wool pulled firmly over poor, clueless, tradition-bound dad’s eyes.

In Search of Our Fathers.
$149. 1992. 61 min. Filmakers Library; http://www.filmakers.com/

Fairly early in African-American filmmaker Marco Williams’s documentary, it becomes apparent that the seven-year search for the father he never met is something of a "McGuffin"-Alfred Hitchcock’s term for an ultimately irrelevant plot device used as the pretext for diving in to deeper dramatic waters. In Williams’s case, those deeper waters contain a remarkable family history: four generations of indomitable women who successfully raised their children under one roof in Philadelphia, all without husbands. Williams’s eventual meeting with his father is a heartbreaking anticlimax, but the truths garnered in the course of his quest-about his mother, his family’s past, and his own history prove to be precious rewards in themselves.

Seeking Refuge

December 1998

Wars, coups, "ethnic cleansings"--the horrifyingly familiar grist of late 20th Century headline mills. Perhaps more than any other period in history, the past fifty years have seen an ugly pattern of international social and political brutality, with large populations forced into far-flung exile under the threat of repression and violence. What the 10:00 news seldom reveals about these cataclysmic global events, however, are the ruined individual lives, shattered communities, and profound cultural disruption behind the current event stock footage. The following videos are notable for their close, sympathetic focus on refugee communities, and for their ability to evoke both the sorrow of unwillingly leaving a familiar life, and the bravery of starting over in a strange land.

Tibet in Exile.
1991. $75. 30 Min. Video Project, 200 Estates Drive, Ben Lomond, CA 95005; (800) 475-2638

Over the course of China's invasion and occupation of Tibet, nearly 1/5 of the indigenous population has been killed. The six million Tibetans remaining in the country have become an oppressed minority, forbidden all connections to their cultural and religious traditions. Tibet in Exile tells the story of the thousands who escaped these fates by making the perilous trek across the Himalayas to a difficult new life in India. A moving record of a community sustained by intense spiritual vision and unflagging hope for a return to the native land.

Blue Collar and Buddha.
1988. $150. 57 min. National Asian American Telecommunications Association, 346 Ninth St., San Francisco, CA 94103; (415) 552-9550

Rockford, Illinois: a bedraggled factory town with a depressing unemployment rate, an imploded downtown, and taverns full of working stiffs seething with frustration and free-floating anger. Blue Collar and Buddha documents the often disturbingly violent culture clash between these locals and the small group of Laotian refugees who improbably come to call Rockford home. In watching the video, one can't but help feel an overriding sadness for a community that has escaped death and repression in one country, only to face manifest hostility and prejudice in another.

Mayan Voices: American Lives.
1994. $225. 56 min. First Run/Icarus Films 153 Waverly Pl., New York, NY 10014; (212) 727-1711

For centuries, the Mayan peoples of Guatemala have been caught in the cross-hairs of their country's turbulent history. Forced into relocation and plantation labor by the Spanish, marginalized by subsequent generations of Guatemalan ruling elite, the Maya found themselves in the dead center of a string of civil wars in the 1980's. During that decade thousands of Maya emigrated north--to Mexico, to California, the Southwest, and, rather weirdly, to a small agricultural burg named Indiantown, Florida. Through interviews with members of the Indiantown Mayan community and with other residents, Mayan Lives provides a vivid picture of a individuals attempting to set down new roots, pursue old and new dreams, and keep ancient traditions alive.

The Tree of Our Forefathers (Developing Stories II).
1994. $150. 53 min. Bullfrog Films, Inc., PO Box 149, Oley, PA 19547; (800) 543-3764

It is 1993. An accord has been signed ending 15 years of internecene civil war in Mozambique, and Alexander Ferrao and his extended family are making the long journey back to their village after a ten year sojourn in Malawi. The Tree of Our Forefathers is a moving visual essay, which, using excerpts from Alexander's diary as narrative, follows the difficult course of his group as they make their way toward a bittersweet reunion with surviving family members. The image of Alexander lugging the red wooden door from his Malawi house on his journey, a precious symbol of the past and future, is unforgettable.

Watchin' About My Generation

September 1998

Robin Williams' neo-aphorism is pointed directly at the hearts of boomers like me: "If you can remember the 60's, you weren't there." In fact, the memories most of us do have of that roiling decade are inherited--images absorbed directly from the nightly news or the movies. It was an era uncomfortably saturated with memorable sights and sounds; no previous decade had played itself out as harrowingly or as universally on small and large screens. Suddenly, the whole world was, truely, watching. And the generation that came of age during these years was perhaps the first to fully-recognize the revolutionary political and cultural power of the images being watched. The following documentaries revisit some of that instantly captured history, and provide a look at movements, personalities, and events which defined the decade.

Monterey Pop
1967. $19.98. 98 min. Available from Baker & Taylor, Ingram, and others.

Of all the documentarians filming the `60's, none caught the zeitgeist better or more honestly than D.A. Pennebaker. Two years before Michael Wadleigh lugged his camera to Woodstock to chronicle the groovy happenings on Yasgurs' farm, Pennebaker was backstage at Monterey, capturing the incendiary birth of 60's rock (and rock mega-festivals). Janis and Big Brother, Jefferson Airplane, The Animals, Otis Redding, Jimi Hendrix, Ravi Shankar, The Who...far out, man!

Gimme Shelter.
1969. $29.99. 90 min Available from Baker & Taylor, Ingram, and others.

Just two years after Pennebaker filmed at Monterey, the Maysles brothers documented the death knell of 60's counterculture idealism with their disturbing verite record of the Rolling Stones' disasterous Altamont Speedway concert. The sight of Hell's Angels moving in for the kill still raises shivers of fear, and sadness for a generation's innocence suddenly lost.

Growing up in America.
1988. $29.99. 90 min. Available from Baker & Taylor, Ingram, and others.

In his 1969 film, "Breathing Together," Morley Markson caught heroes of the counterculture in action, including Allen Ginsberg, Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, William Kunstler, and Timothy Leary. Eighteen years later, Markson made "Growing Up in America," which deconstructs his earlier film and intersperses scenes of the surviving crew reflecting on the rambunctious images of their younger and shaggier shelves. The segment featuring poor, middle-aged Jerry Rubin promoting disco theme nights at an upscale yuppie nightclub is enough to make any sixties veteran weep.

Chicago 1968.
$19.99 1995. 57 min. Available from Baker & Taylor, Ingram, and others.

Filmmaker Chana Gazit provides an effective, workmanlike chronology of the events leading to and surrounding the infamous `68 Democratic convention. After thirty years, it's still both hypnotizing and terrifying to watch the almost unbelievably rankorous partisan skirmishes inside the convention hall, matched by the carnage outside in the streets. Part political Grand Guignol, part Shakespearean tragedy with gas masks, you couldn't invent more riveting drama or more powerful dramatis personae.

Framing the Panthers in Black and White.
$200.00. 1990. 30 min. Video Data Bank, 112 S. Michigan Ave. Chicago, IL 60603 (312) 345-3550

The 60's, with its mix of radical politics and anti-authoritarian antics, was paranoic catnip for J. Edgar Hoover. No left wing bete noire haunted Hoover more than the Panthers. Framing the Panthers is a brief, disturbing expose of the FBI's trecherous COINTELPRO program and its covert efforts to "neutralize" the Panthers and other "subversive" groups and individuals in the 1960's and 70's. Focus is on ex-Panther Dhoruba Bin Wahad, who spent 19 years in Federal prison for a crime he very likely did not commit. Other Panthers targeted by COINTELPRO, such as Fred Hampton, weren't nearly as lucky.

The Global Groove

June 1998

Not so long ago, it seems, the popular idea of the musically exotic extended little beyond the occasional watered-down cha cha or Don Ho's island kitsch. Contrast this cultural provincialism with the past few decades, during which we've been handed the expansive sonic ways of the world on various electronic platters. The 90's have heard Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan's ethereal sufi chants gracing movie soundtracks; Paul Simon jamming with Ladysmith Black Mambazo; Astor Piazzolla's edgy tango-nouveau backing TV ad copy. Not surprisingly, the advent of video has opened similarly vast and varied windows on the planetary musical scene. The titles below offer a tiny sampling of notable explorations of the global groove. Open your ears and watch!

Konkombe: The Nigerian Pop Music Scene.
1988. $19.95. 50 min. Available from Baker & Taylor, Ingram, and other distributors.

The roots of American blues and jazz are buried deeply in Konkombe, the polyrhythmic music of Nigeria, carried by slaves to the New World. This installment of Shanachie Records' excellent 14-part series, Beats of the Heart, surveys the evolution of the popular musical forms that stayed behind in Africa. It's a fascinating introduction to the diverse Nigerian mix of traditional and western styles, from the chants of urban street buskers, to juju, highlife, and Afro-pop.

Chutney in Yuh Soca: A Multicultural Mix.
1996. $195.00 21 min. Filmakers Library, 124 E. 40th, New York, NY 10016; (212) 808-4980

Culinary chutney is a thick mix of spicy ingredients. The musical syle known as chutney is an equally spicy East Indian pop style with roots in traditional women's marriage-songs. Carried to Trinidad and Tobago by indentured Indian laborers, chutney has mixed and fused with Afro-Caribbean traditions over the years, much like the Indian community itself on those islands. Chutney in Yuh Soca offers the sights and sounds of two diasporic peoples co-mingled in an unlikely, culturally-rocking stew.

The Singing Sheik.
1991. $125.00 12 min. First Run/Icarus Films, 53 Waverly Pl. New York, NY 10014; (212) 727-1711

The Shinging Sheik is a tantalizingly brief profile of musical incendiary, Imam Mohammad Ahmad Eissa. Eissa's songs, full of poetry and rage against poverty and oppression, are sung in the streets and cafes of Cairo's old city. His lyrics have earned him both the adulation of the poor throughout the Arab World, and outlaw status with the Egyptian government. Listen to his unforgettable story of singing midnight protests between the bars of his prison cell for his fellow prisoners and the world outside to hear.

El Charanguero.
1995. $24.99 56 min. Multicultural Media; Box 6655, Granger Rd., Barre, VT 05641; (800)550-9675.

Who'd have thought that ten steel strings stetched over a dried armadillo carcass could produce the music of beating hummingbird wings, rippling mountain water, ancient memory? The charango is a South American folk instrument that evokes those things and more in the hands of Argentinian master musician, Jaime Torres. El Charanguero is filmmaker Jeffrey Briggs' loving tribute to Torres and to the rich cultural traditions of Northern Argentina and Bolivia.

Pepper's Pow Wow.
1995. 57 min. 1$99.00 Upstream Productions, 420 1st Ave. West, Seattle, WA 98119; 206-281-9177

The late jazzman, Jim Pepper, grew up as an "urban Indian," an outsider in his native Portland. A largely self-taught musician, Pepper inherited a strong link to Native American dance and musical roots from his Creek grandfather in Oklahoma. Pepper's Pow Wow traces Pepper's evolution as a musician, his influencial role in the jazz-fusion scene of the 1960's, and his full-circle return to incorporating the music of his ancestors into his moving jazz compositions.

A Change of View(ing)

March 1998

Don't get me wrong. On most days, I think that I have one of the coolest jobs on the planet...it's just that, as an academic kind of guy, my video diet does tend to be a bit, well, unrelentingly heavy and adult. Imagine, then, my surprise and delight upon recently being invited to teach a series of video workshops to school teachers and media specialists--an unprecedented chance for a change of viewing. Imagine, also, my panic: all I really knew about kidvid I had learned from my eight year old daughter, Becky. Fortunately, with the assistance of several excellent lists of "notables" and festival winners, and with the wise counsel of my pal Irene Wood at Booklist, I was able to assemble a wonderful sampling of stuff to show and discuss. The following were among the biggest hits of the workshop.

Pumpkin Circle.
1997. $99.95. 20 min. Informed Democracy. P.O. Box 67, Santa Cruz, CA 95063. 800-827-0949

Film maker George Levenson has come up with a must-see treat for pumpkin lovers of all ages. With a gentle, funny, and informative verse narrative read by Danny Glover, and a terrific folksy score by George Winston, Pumpkin Circle takes us through the wondrous growing cycle of a shaggy backyard patch. But that's just for openers! The meditation on seasons and natural cycles is only a prelude to an unforgettable romp through pumpkin lore, pumpkin art, and, of course, tastey pumpkin eats.

A close runner-up in the "favorite fruits and vegetables" video category is Susan DeBeck's delightful Apples, which does for Macintoshes, pippins, and Granny Smiths what Levenson's video does for pun'kins. (1997. 30 min. $29.95. DeBeck Educational Video. 3873 Airport Way Box, PO Box 9754, Bellingham, WA 98227-9754; 604-739-7696)

Faces of the Hand.
1996. $195.00 29 minutes. Bullfrog Films. PO Box 149 Oley, PA 19547; (610) 770-8226

Searching for a near-by miracle? Look no further than the ends of your wrists. In under half an hour, this is superbly shot and edited, video manages, with minimal narration, to convey the enormous physiological complexity of the hand, it's vast flexibility and uses across cultures as an instrument of creation, healing, aggression, communication, and tenderness. An extraordinarily moving work which reveals poetry and wonder in the everyday world at hand.

Notes Alive! On the Day You Were Born.
1995. 30 min. $19.95 Minnesota Orchestra 1111 Nicolett Mall, Minneapolis, MN 55403, (888) 666-6837

Like the Chinese puzzle balls we used to get as kids, On the Day You Were Born contains multiple layers and varied gifts which are revealed as the piece unwinds. The video deftly intercuts between author/illustrator Debra Frasier reading her lyrical story about the natural world embracing a newborn child; a lovely animated version of her pictures; and the Minnesota Orchestra accompanying her with a stirring score by composer Steve Heitzeg. At the end of the piece, both author and composer discuss how story, art, and music were created and interwoven to form their unique and beautiful collaborative work.

Make a Wish Molly.
1995. 30 min. $295.00; Phoenix Films and Video. 2349 Chaffee Dr., St. Louis, MO 63146; 800-221-1274

A sequel to the popular book (and video), Molly's Pilgrim, Make a Wish Molly finds the young soviet Jewish emigre faced with a heartbreaking dilemma. Molly is overjoyed to be invited to the birthday party of her best friend; but it's Passover, and the beautiful cake baked by her friend's mom is forbidden food during the holidy. Should Molly observe her family's religious traditions, or indulge in the cake along with her classmates. This well-acted and engaging video offers valuable lessons in what it means to be a cultural outsider, and what it means to celebrate cultural diversity and friendship.

Language Lessons

November 1997

In my undergraduate anthropology days, I happened to take a course from a flamingingly eccentric, emeritus expert in animal ethology. As I recall, the majority of my work for this course was undertaken on my knees, attempting to divine the significance of the lip-curling, neck-baring, leg-raising, and nocturnal vocalese of dogs and cats. What I got out of this exercise (other than bruised knees) was a greatly expanded understanding of animal social interaction and behavioral inheritance. I also came to appreciate the infinitely more complex nature of human communication mechanisms, which, unlike the genetically-determined moves of my whiskered subjects are learned, hugely flexible, and continually evolving. The videos below amply demonstrate these complex qualities, along with the amazing cultural and psychological nuance, influence, and diversity which characterize everyday communication, both verbal and non-verbal.

American Tongues.
1986. 57 min. $285 Center for New American Media. 524 Broadway, 2nd floor, New York, NJ 07423; (212) 925-5665

"Who do you think has a funny accent?" The answer is: all of us in the ears of someone or other. American Tongues is a wonderfully spirited sociolinguistic romp across the country--from Lonestar drawl to the swallowed r's of Boston Brahmins. It's an insightful look at how our unique ways of speaking have been created by culture and geography, and how we are all in turn shaped and influenced both by our own dialect and the speech of others.

A World of Gestures: Culture & Nonverbal Communication.
27 min. $295 University of California Center for Media and Independent Learning. 2000 Center St., 4th floor, Berkeley, CA 94704; 510-643-2788

Along with a minimal introduction and wrap-up by the video's good-humored creator, UC Santa Cruz sociology Professor Dane Archer, the World of Gestures is little more than a no-frills, cross-cultural sampling of seven categories of human hand and body gestures. Professor Archer records international students having great fun demonstrating the startling variety (and sameness) of this rich global gestural vocabulary, ranging from the bellicose to the amatory, the scatalogical to the silently poetic. Elegant filmmaking this ain't; absolutely mesmerizing to watch, it is.

A Word in Edgewise.
1986. 26 min. $250 Women Make Movies. 462 Broadway, New York, NY 10013; (212) 925-0606

Words are seldom neutral: they reflect the biases, the fears, the prevailing social and psychic politics of the society in which they circulate. Language imparts these codes and cues in both subtle and not-so-subtle ways. The messages handed down between the linguistic lines often determine the manner in which we perceive and interact with the world and with each other. A Word in Edgewise is an eye-opening look at the various forms of gender bias and misogyny which have crept into the English language, particularly over the course of the last several hundred years. A timely and fascinating discourse on language as cultural mirror and cultural weapon.

The Human Language Series.
1995. 3 videocassettes, 55 min. each. $545. Ways of Knowing, Inc. 200 West 72nd St., New York, NY 10023; 800-343-5540.

The most distinguishing of all human characteristics is the use of language--arbitrary representational abstractions called words piled into infinitely variable conceptual arrays called sentences. The nature and rules of these systems of meaning, how we mysteriously come to acquire them, how the codes and patterns vary or compare from culture to culture, and how verbal and nonverbal language construct everyday social interactions, are among the subjects covered in this provocative and engaging series. And you've just got to love any video that's got George Carlin, Noam Chomsky, Sid Caesar, and Stephen Jay Gould holding forth under one tent.

Rebel Girls and Union Maids

June 1997

The annals of 20th Century American labor are filled with heroes and icons, firebrands and martyrs--myth-sized men like Big Bill Heywood, John L. Lewis, A. Philip Randolph, Walter Reuther, and Harry Bridges who spent their lives on the battlements fighting the good fight for the working class. Frequently obscured or missing in discussions of this stormy social and political history, however, are the names and stories of the equally notable women workers and warriors who drove the machines, marched the picket lines, inspired and organized the masses, dodged the bullets, and wrote the anthems. The following videos help redress some of this cultural oversight by singing the praises of remarkable working women, from passionate organizers and leaders, to heroines of the rank and file.

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, The Rebel Girl.
1993. 19 min. $175 University of California Center for Media and Independent Learning. 2000 Center St., 4th floor, Berkeley, CA 94704; 510-643-2788

Elizabeth Flynn (1894-1964) was born to incite. Growing up in an immigrant family steeped in socialism and feminism, Elizabeth took to the soapboxes at an early age, honing her fiery rhetoric and revolutionary politics on street corners and in union halls. For the next four decades, between prison stints, she stumped almost ceaselessly around the country as champion of various radical and libertarian organizations and causes, from the militant Industrial Workers of the World, to the ACLU (which she helped found). Rebel Girl is a fond tribute to Flynn's half-century career of tireless activism and commitment to economic and social justice.

Dreadful Memories: The Life of Sarah Ogan Gunning.
1988. 38 min. $195 Appalshop, Inc. 306 Madison St. Whitesburg, KY 41858 (800) 545-7467

Like some Appalachian Job, Sarah Gunning's life as a Kentucky coal miner's wife in the 1930's was filled with almost impossibly cruel trials, tribulations, and sorrow, including unspeakable poverty which killed two children and a husband. But instead of shaking an angry fist at God, Sarah began writing songs--moving a cappella laments which combined traditional ballad forms with grassroots labor radicalism. In Dreadful Memories, family, friends, and eminent folkies offer tales of Sarah's life, and testify to the power of her songs as true life stories and as potent calls to action.

Trade Secrets: Blue Collar Women Speak Out.
1985. 23 min. $195 Women Make Movies 462 Broadway, 5th floor, New York, NY 10013; 212-925-0606.

Whatever happened to Rosie the Riveter? As Trade Secrets demonstrates, after the Equal Opportunity Employment Act of 1972, she's back on the job in increasing numbers, despite the continuing challenges and hardships of surviving in these most testosterone-drenched of all occupations. Trade Secrets interviews four determined women in various construction trades, who talk unabashedly and with humor about both the satisfaction and the considerable hardships along the road to becoming journeywoman in a journeyman's world.

State of the Unions.
1995. 27 min. $89.00 The Working Group, 5867 Ocean View Dr., Oakland, CA 94618; 510-547-8484

An installment of the public broadcasting series "We Do the Work," State of the Unions is a brisk and informative look at the present leadership and organizing strategies of the beleaguered AFL-CIO. Hands down, the most interesting aspect of this show is its tantalizingly brief profile of Linda Chavez-Thompson, a 51 year old Latina from Lubbock, Texas, who rose from minimum-wage secretary, to public employees union mover and shaker, to recently-elected AFL Executive Vice President--the highest rank ever held in the union by a woman or a minority. Here's hoping Chavez-Thompson gets a documentary devoted exclusively to her some day soon.

Views From the Fringe

In the beginning (of the movies) there was experimentation. Early filmmakers, drunk with the heady new storytelling possibilities of cinema, reveled in pushing the boundaries of the medium, both technically and as a narrative form. Even when the movies hunkered down into their familiar role as glitzy box office fodder, the cinematic experimentation did not stop--it simply retreated underground for the most part. From the dawn of the 20th Century onward, the movies have maintained a secret avant-garde life, full of small, often startling films made by artists and other cultural provocateurs with matters other than Hollywood on their minds. Screened for relatively tiny audiences in galleries, cafes, and other fringe-friendly haunts, these films have continued to question the basic nature, uses, and techniques of cinematic expression. The videos described profile four of my favorite dancers on the cinematic edge.

In the Mirror of Maya Deren. $195.00. 2002. 101 min. Zeitgeist Films (www.zeitgeistfilms.com)

If there's such a thing as as a grand dame of experimental cinema, Maya Deren (1917-1961) is most certainly it. A dancer and poet, wild-maned and peasant-skirted, Deren was, as one hipster wag has put it, "her own avant-garde movement." Picking up a 16mm camera in the early 40's, she produced a handful of surreal, lyrical, and sensuously rhythmic films over the next twenty years, many featuring Deren herself in all her exotic and enigmatic glory. In the Mirror of Maya Deren, traces the trajectory of Deren's artistic contributions, with particular emphasis on her intense involvement in the mid-1950's in studying and filming Haitian folk culture. For an introduction to the filmmaker's essential works, pick up a copy of Maya Deren: Experimental Films ($29.95. 76 min. VHS and DVD. Mystic Fire. Video. www.mysticfire.com)

Len Lye. $59.95. 1957. 28 min. FACETS (www.facets.org)

New Zealand artist Len Lye (1901-1980) was a man of many media, including kinetic sculpture, painting, and film. And what wonderfully jumpin' films they are! Lye began experimenting in the late 1920s with the techniques of painting, stenciling, etching, or exposing images directly onto raw film stock. When Lye's footloose images bop and mambo across the screen, it's almost impossible not to laugh out loud and stomp your feet. Although this 1957 video doesn't really do justice to Lye or his wonderful inventions, it does feature one of my favorite jazzy Lye films: Trade Tattoo (1937), done as a promo piece for--improbably-- the British Post Office. Those with cash to burn should definitely also consider The Len Lye Collection ($200.00. FACETS)

Stan Brakhage. $39.95. 1999. 75 min. Zeitgeist Films (www.zeitgeistfilms.com)

Among my circle of late 60's friends--sallow-faced, red-eyed, cinema addicts, all--Stan Brakhage (1933-2003) was a god. We watched and re-watched the images coalesce, and collide, and superimpose in Brakhage's Dog Star Man (1961), looking for cosmic portents and revelations. Watching these images nearly forty years later, I'm still enthralled by Brakhage's ability to take "ordinary" visual stuff--home movies, shots of nature, found footage--and transform it into gold through some strange artistic alchemy. In this moving tribute, filmmaker Jim Sheridan provides an overview of Brakhage's work and captures the filmmaker in his last years, speculating on the nature of his art and life.

John Cassavetes. $ 375.00. 1998. 50 min. First Run/Icarus Films (www.frif.com)

At the beginning of each Sundance Festival, the audience should offer up a raucous benison for John Cassavetes (1929-1989), the patron saint of American indie film. In the first of the two profiles on this tape (1965), French filmmaker André Labarthe interviews an ebullient, wildly irreverent Cassavetes in LA, at a time when the handsome enfant terrible was little known outside of art house circles (primarily for his moody, largely-improvised film Shadows [1959]). In the second interview, a (figuratively) more sober Cassavetes chats in Paris on his way to the Venice Film Festival and the screening of his verité-esque film Faces (1968). Both of the cited films are available from most home video distributors on DVD for around 23 bucks--they're essential.

Video Salmagundi

March 1997, pg. 84

So much cool stuff, so few column inches! I admit that writing QuickVids is often an agonizing challenge for a guy as hopelessly prolix and media-drunk as I. Every three months, I'm forced to play editorial Procrustes, wantonly cutting off the heads and feet of my reviews to fit this slim 590 word bed. Sometimes, titles which I love get shoved rudely off the bed altogether, either for lack of room, or because they don't fall neatly into the theme of the month. Well, for this installment at least, I've decided to throw off the chains of topical tyranny. The excellent videos which follow have little in common except the fact that they all provide insights into the life and times of unforgettable individuals, and that they greatly moved, educated, or amused me in the past year.

The Boys From Termite Terrace.
1975. 56 min. $49.95. Creative Arts Television Archive, P.O. Box 739, Kent, CT 06757; 860-868-1771

Creative Arts TV Archives has done a considerable service by releasing on video the large library of interviews with notable movie people originally broadcast in the 1970's on the TV program Camera 3. The Boys From Termite Terrace is among my favorites of the bunch. Termite Terrace was the name given to a ramshackle studio on the Warner Brothers back lot that was home to the gaggle of goofy geniuses who gave the world the anarchic likes of Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny, the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote, and Sylvester and Tweety in the 1930's-1950's. Founding Loony Tuners Friz Freleng, Chuck Jones, Bob Clampett, and Mel Blanc provide a fond history of Warner cartoons, and an entertaining look at the evolution of the nutty characters which populated them.

Halving the Bones.
1995. 70 min. $295. Women Make Movies, 462 Broadway, New York, NY 10013; 212-925-06

Ruth Ozeki Lunsbury uses the blackly humorous events surrounding the disposition of her grandmother's cremated remains as a jumping off point for a wonderfully realized meditation on the remarkable lives of her maternal grandmother and grandfather and mother in Japan, Hawaii and the US; on family, cultural, and personal history; and on the complex relationship between mothers and daughters. Ozeki is a teriffic storyteller and a sly visual trickster who delights in keeping us off-guard, awake, and thinking about the nature of memory and identity.

Mao, the Real Man.
1995 54 min. $295. First Run/Icarus Films, 153 Waverly Place, New York, NY 10014; 212-727-1711

The century's greatest political mysteries explained! The strange history of Mao's Chicago gangster brother and evil doppelganger revealed! And what about those recent sitings of Elvis and the beatific 103 year old Mao in a Dubuque K-Mart? Film maker Szilveszter Siklosi's hilariously demented brand of historical revisionism interweaves "real" history, carefully edited archival footage, fake "expert witnesses,"and straightfaced academic blather to demonstrate that in an age of electronic reproduction, anything is possible and everything is dangerously close to believable.

I Shall Not Be Removed: The Life of Marlon Riggs. 1996.
$49.95. California Newsreel, 149 9th St., Suite 420, San Francisco, CA 94103; 415-621-6196

The death of film maker, educator, and activist Marlon Riggs in 1994 was an enormously tragic loss for America. Riggs left behind him an extraordinary body of intensely personal and insightful documentary films dealing with the experience of being African American and gay. I Shall Not Be Removed is a poetic and fitting tribute to both Marlon's enduring work and vision and his unwavering courage in facing frequent attacks from the political Right and other foes of intellectual and individual freedom.

Meet Me at the Fair

December 1996; pg 67

Ages before the nightly news dropped us all into the roiling midst of the global village; before the advent of ubiquitous, blockbuster infotainment; even before the quaint chat of radio and newsreel, there were world's fairs. Beginning with the 1893 Chicago World Exhibition, and continuing to the grand exhibitions of Buffalo, St. Louis, San Francisco, Chicago, New York City, and later venues, world's fairs have been tremendously popular draws--and not surprisingly so. For the price of admission they have offered heaping servings of unadulterated cultural optimism, technological and aesthetic wonderment, and good old cheap thrills. The following videos provide a diverse look at these major extravaganzas, revealing in the process the complex and evolving tangle of national fetishes and fallacies, hopes and dreams embodied in their midways and sideshows.

Come to the Fairs (Walk Through the 20th Century).
1983, $69.95. 58 min. PBS Video, 1320 Braddock Pl., Alexandria, VA 22314-1698; 800-344-3337.

Good ol' Uncle Bill Moyers takes us on a leisurely stroll through great world's fairs of the past, handing out homilies and pointing out the most noteworthy attractions and innovations along the way. We're treated to nostalgic disertations on the the changing nature of fairs and fair themes over the last century; the impact of TV and other media on these events, the fate of past fairgrounds; and the reasons for the continuing attraction of fairs in an age of electronic communication and amusement. While not long on historical or socio-political insights, it's a lovely, introductory outing.

A World on Display.
1994, $79.95. 53 min. Cinema Guild, 1697 Broadway, Suite 506, NY, NY 10019-5904; (800) 723-5522

The 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis was the biggest public bash of its kind up to that time. The fairgrounds encompassed over 1500 acres of stunning pavillions, waterways, and amusements; they also featured a huge "reservation" into which indigenous peoples from various countries were imported to titillate and edify the paying throngs who came to gawk and wonder. Using a dazzling combination of archival photos, rare film clips, and interviews with now-elderly fair-goers, A World on Display offers a sense of the astounding uniqueness of the fair and its peculiar mix of educational intent and carnyism, as well as insights into some of the disquieting cultural baggage which anchored many of its exhibits.

Also worth checking out on the same subject are Bontoc Eulogy (1995, $350. 56 min. Cinema Guild), Fi