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Along the Sepik

Set on the Upper Sepik River in New Guinea, this film records the day-to-day experiences of Kiap (one-man representative of the Australian government in regional areas) Barry Downes as he patrols an area that in 1963 had only recently been brought under control from headhunters. As well as being a record of the role of the colonial administration, Along the Sepik offers insights into some tribal communities' cultures through depictions of their spirit houses and traditional 'sing sing' ceremonies. Downes investigates a murder, and the culprit is caught and tried by a magistrate in a jungle courthouse under the Australian flag, on the edge of the Sepik River. Australian patrol officers and their men operated under rugged conditions to bring western law and order to this remote area. The film also portrays some of the impact the colonial government had on regional, traditional communities.

Along the Sepik

NR 1964
Sunday

Dan Drasin's documentary short, shot in a single afternoon in 1961, is often cited as the first major social protest film of the Sixties. When 19-year-old Drasin and his friends joined folk singers and protesters in Greenwich Village's Washington Square Park, they confronted NYC authorities to protest the cancellation of a standing permit to gather and sing in the park on Sundays. Here are the first signs of the political, racial and cultural issues that would soon erupt during the decade.

Sunday

6.2 1961
Eleftherios Venizelos

Historical documentary, on the life and work of the great Greek politician who contributed decisively to the shaping of the physiognomy of modern Greece. Venizelos came to Athens in 1909, after the Goudios Movement, at the invitation of the Military Association and, upon assuming the prime ministership, clashed with the palace. The film follows the man's path, through recorded testimonies (cinematic newsreels, photographs, newspapers), from his beginnings in Mournies, Crete, until his death.

Eleftherios Venizelos

7.0 1966
The Way It Is

This documentary (first of a five-part series on education) examines the battle to educate at Junior High School 57-a slum school in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant ghetto. In September 1966, New York University's Clinic for Learning, backed by a Ford Foundation grant, began an educational rehabilitation program at the school. The object: to reach apparently unreachable and disinterested students before they become drop-outs. Cameras look in on a seventh grade class, observing new approaches to working with disadvantaged youngsters: challenging students to be more aggressive in their studies; permitting class members to hold arguments pertaining to their lessons; and attempting to establish more personal contact between teachers and students. There are also problems. Discipline is poor among the students, who must be taught to have respect for themselves and for the education they can get.

The Way It Is

NR 1967
Besuch bei Busch

The main committee is of the opinion that the rating "especially valuable" can be retained. The style of the film is appropriate to the subject of "Visiting Busch" in its concentrated limitation to the authentic living environment. The individual visual motifs are composed with great care. On the one hand, the small world appears endearingly portrayed, on the other hand, the film's allusions to the background of the Wilhelm Busch phenomenon are convincing. Above all, the Committee would like to uphold the rating because the film, made in 1961, sought out the people who still knew Busch and bear witness to them in the film in an impressively simple and not exaggerated manner.

Besuch bei Busch

NR 1961
Hands of Inge

The work of sculptor Inge Hardison is the subject of this beautiful short portrait of an artist. Hardison is perhaps best known for "Negro Giants in History," her important series of busts made during the early 1960s. Hands of Inge was edited by Hortense "Tee" Beveridge, a pioneer in her field who worked in the commercial industry and on independent, non-commercial films such as Amiri Baraka's 1968 film "The New-Ark". In the mid-1950s Beveridge became the first Black woman to gain admission to Local 771, the motion picture editors union.

Hands of Inge

NR 1962
Living & Glorious

Leonardi's film about the Living Theatre is less concerned with a straight documentary presentation of the exile theatre group from New York, but rather is concerned with the specific atmospheric factor which is indicated by their name, and which constitutes the highly suggestive effect of their playing. Cutting, for Leonardi, is the most decisive aesthetic device. The result is a wonderfully composed furioso of pictures. The hand-held camera catches rehearsals, conversations without sound, bits of theatre and daily life actions (which, for Living Theatre people, is very often intermixed).

Living & Glorious

NR 1965
Brindisi '65

Initial panorama of Brindisi, a city with a peasant tradition. The petrochemical, city within a city. Children in poor neighborhoods, workers' voices: the crisis, the layoffs, the need for the recommendations of the Christian Democrats to enter Montecatini. Wealthy men and women binge at the restaurant. Voices of agrarians, forced to leave the earth to make room for the petrochemical. A ballroom. In a puppet theater, a show is staged in which the worker is addressed as "starved". At a course for foremost workers, various compliant testimonies follow one another: Monteshell is a large industry, and no one has any criticisms against it. But another worker, elsewhere, with his face in the shadows, confesses that everyone is afraid to speak, skilled workers get the same pay as simple ones, 400 colleagues have been fired, union activists are "special supervised", and going on strike is a business. 35mm b/w

Brindisi '65

6.0 1966