Directed by Terence Dixon • Documentary • With James Baldwin • 1970 • 27 minutes
Shot in Paris, a city in which Baldwin lived for nine years after leaving New York — a decision he has described “as a matter of life and death.” The early sequences find Baldwin uncooperative, even hostile to the British director and cameraman, clearly resenting their controlling role. He brings them to the Bastille, whose significance he explains: “They tore down this prison… I am trying to tear a prison down too. When a white man tears down a prison, he is trying to liberate himself. When I tear down a prison, I am simply another savage. What you don’t understand is that you for me are my prison guard, you are my warden. I am battling you, not you Terry, but you the English, you the French.” —Film Forum
Picture and audio restoration by Mark Rance, Watchmaker Films, London
Up Next in The Sixties
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What the Fuck Are These Red Squares?
Documentary • 1970 • 14 minutes
Striking students meet at a "Revolutionary Seminar" at the Art Institute of Chicago in response to the invasion of Cambodia and the killing of protesting students at Kent and Jackson State Universities. They explore their role as artists in a capitalist society an...
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Woo Who? May Wilson
Directed by Amalie R. Rothschild • Documentary • With May Wilson, Meredith Monk • 1969 • 34 minutes
When her husband informs her, after 40 years of marriage, that his future plans no longer include her, May Wilson, age 60, former "wife-mother-housekeeper-cook" and a grandmother, moves to New Yor...
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Circuit Earth
Directed by John Abrahall, Christopher Bamford, Robert Feldman, Michael Katz, Peter Krotoczynski • Documentary • 1971 • 43 minutes
CIRCUIT EARTH was produced in honor of the first Earth Day in 1970. Shot throughout Philadelphia during Earth Week in the lead up to festival, and at the festival it...
