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Being the film-makers' bookkeeper
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Being the film-makers' bookkeeper
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Views | Duration | ||
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71. Screenings and venues in the 1960s | 76 | 04:45 | |
72. Arrest for screening Un Chant d'Amour | 107 | 04:45 | |
73. Flaming Creatures lands me in court | 121 | 05:34 | |
74. Walking out of the Mike Wallace Show | 112 | 02:54 | |
75. Interviewing Fritz Lang | 115 | 02:07 | |
76. Being the film-makers' bookkeeper | 108 | 04:13 | |
77. My films are like haiku poems | 192 | 05:57 | |
78. Filming memories | 58 | 02:32 | |
79. Filming The Brig | 108 | 04:58 | |
80. My very personal version of The Brig | 69 | 03:44 |
My acquaintances and friendships and meetings with the film-makers covered the whole range from, you know, extreme commercial to extreme avant-garde because I, during the Film Culture period and since I was the only, for three years, the only reviewer at The Village Voice of films and I reviewed... I met, you know, I knew from Antonioni, or Otto Premminger or, I, you know, I was sort of, met Fritz Lang and did interviews or met or... and then of course, the avant-garde, so I... I, there were some funny, some funny memories, some funny meetings, some funny like, like Fritz Lang where I did extensive four hours long interview with him and instead of taping, Herman Weinberg suggested that I use a stenographer and I did so and Weinberg was there, it was... my brother was there, it was a terrific interview. We all had a good time and, but the next day the stenographer calls, says on her way home she lost the notes in the subway. So, then when Fritz Lang used to come to town I used to avoid, I did everything that we couldn't meet because he would ask, you know, where's that interview, oh boy, I managed to avoid meeting him for years.
Jonas Mekas (1922-2019), Lithuanian-born poet, philosopher and film-maker, set up film collectives, the Anthology Film Archive, published filmzines and made hundreds of films, all contributing to his title as 'the godfather of American avant-garde cinema'. He emigrated to America after escaping from a forced labour camp in Germany in 1945.
Title: Interviewing Fritz Lang
Listeners: Amy Taubin
Amy Taubin is a contributing editor for "Film Comment" magazine and "Sight and Sound" magazine. Her book, "Taxi Driver", was published in 2000 in the British Film Institute's Film Classics series. Her chapter on "America: The Modern Era" is part of "The Critics Choice" published by Billboard Press, 2001, and her critical essays are included in many anthologies, mostly recently in "Frank Films: The Film and Video Work of Robert Frank" published by Scalo.
She wrote for "The Village Voice" weekly from 1987 into 2001 both as a film and a television critic. She also wrote a column for the "Village Voice" titled "Art and Industry" which covered American independent filmmaking. Her first weekly film criticism job was at the "SoHo Weekly News". Her writing has also appeared in "Art Forum", the "New York Times", the "New York Daily News", the "LA Weekly", "Millennium Film Journal", "US Harpers Bazaar" and many other magazines. She is a member of the National Society of Film Critics and the New York Film Critics Online.
She started her professional life as an actress, appearing most notably on Broadway in "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie", and in avant-garde films, among them Michael Snow's "Wavelength", Andy Warhol's "Couch", and Jonas Mekas' "Diaries, Notebooks and Sketches".
Her own avant-garde film, "In the Bag" (1981) is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art and the Friends of Young Cinema Archives in Berlin.
She was the video and film curator of "The Kitchen" from 1983-1987.
She has a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and an M.A. from N.Y.U. in cinema studies. She teaches at the School of Visual Arts in both the undergraduate and the MFA graduate programs, and lectures frequently at museums, media centers, and academic institutions. In 2003, she received the School of Visual Arts' art historian teaching award.
Tags: Otto Preminger, Fritz Lange, Michelangelo Anotonioni, Herman Weinberg
Duration: 2 minutes, 8 seconds
Date story recorded: September 2003
Date story went live: 24 January 2008