Articles about All Categories, tagged avant-garde
When Buster Keaton Met Samuel Beckett: FILM and NOTFILM
 |
| Buster Keaton caught by the camera in FILM (1965). |
Sometimes preservation can give a film a second life, or even inspire a movie about it. A case in point is FILM (1965), an avant-garde short that united two great 20th-century artists: Samuel Beckett and Buster Keaton.
Producer Barney Rosset, founder of Grove Press and Beckett’s publisher, envisioned producing a trilogy of short films written by his most famous clients, but only Beckett’s script made it to the big screen. It remains the only movie written by the Nobel Prize–winning author/playwright, who closely supervised the Brooklyn-set production during his only trip to America. Director Alan Schneider was a longtime Beckett collaborator who had staged the first American production of Waiting for Godot, while the cinematographer was Oscar-winner Boris Kaufman (On the Waterfront).
The star, in one of his last major roles, was … Read more
Seven Films to be Preserved Through Avant-Garde Masters Grants
 |
| Gregory Markopoulos’ Twice a Man (1963) |
Owen Land’s “structuralist” subversions, a Ken Jacobs reckoning with silent narrative, a mythic reverie from Gregory Markopoulos, an early work from Fred Camper, and a poetic nature study from montage maestro Slavko Vorkapich will all be saved through the 2015 Avant-Garde Masters Grants awarded by The Film Foundation and the National Film Preservation Foundation. All told, seven films will be preserved and made available through the 2015 grants.
Gregory Markopoulos’ Twice a Man, starring Olympia Dukakis and Paul Klib, will be saved through a grant to Temenos, an archive dedicated to the work of Markopoulos, which will partner with the Austrian Film Museum to complete preservation of this landmark film. Often cited as Markopoulos’ masterpiece, this modern take on the Hippolytus myth was a leap forward in the creation of what he … Read more