Christian Blackwood

Playwright Arthur Miller, director Volker Schlöndorff and actor Dustin Hoffman are seen creating the Roxbury Productions and Punch Productions teleplay Death of a Salesman (1985).

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A soldier, returning home from war, chances upon a stranger who offers to buy his violin. The stranger is none other than the devil.

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Documentary on the making of the movie Under the Volcano.

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Documentary profile of singer-actress Eartha Kitt.

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A light-hearted, toe-tapping portrait of the well-known 8 Oscar winning Hollywood costume designer filmed in her opulent house and garden. Edith Head presents some of her famous designs using glamorous models to impersonate Mae West, Barbara Stanwyck, Dorothy Lamour, Ginger Rogers, Audrey Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor and Grace Kelly. They move to the music of the films for which she was the designer as Head recalls the times and places that served as inspiration for the famed looks.

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A brief visit with Sam Fuller on the set of his film “White Dog” (1982).

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When Brooklyn's Kings Theater -- one of five "Wonder Theaters" in the New York area -- closed its doors in 1977, the neighborhood mourned. In a series of interviews, local aficionados of the palace as well as its projectionist, its organist, and former employees, reminisce about the Kings and its charmed days gone by.

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Documentary examining the life and career of producer/director Roger Corman. Clips from his films and interviews with actors and crew members who have worked with him are featured.

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For the first 50 years of film history, the newsreel was a fixture in American movie theaters. From 1911 to 1967, these shorts proved an influential source of information – and misinformation – for generations of American moviegoers. Television news and public affairs programs became a great improvement over the scanty information offered by the newsreels. This documentary offers insight into a medium which has disappeared.

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In the silent film era, movies were never really silent. In the background of films that made figures like Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton into cultural icons, were the musical giants whose compositions defined the very films that captivated a generation of movie-goers. Arthur Kleiner converses with the still-living legends from that bygone golden age of cinema.

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Isamu Noguchi talks about his career in this documentary featuring Ezra Pound.

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German writer Uwe Johnson lived for several years in the 1960s on Manhattan’s Upper Westside where he got to know his neighborhood very well, observing the goings-on in the streets, cafeterias, and parks. In 1968 German Television agreed to co-produce a film for broadcast featuring interviews with various neighborhood characters.

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A concentrated look at one of America's early Pop artists, the film was made during Dine's 4-year residency in London. Actively at work in his studio on several large collages, one can clearly see Dine's masterful balance of artistic freedom and control, as he adds and modifies illusionistic images, written words and real life objects to his compositions. The artist talks about his connections to literature and about his frequent collaboration with poets; he also discusses his own poetry, some of which he reads for the camera. The parks and streets of London are the setting for Dine's frank comments about his voluntary exile in that city. On one walk, Dine encounters Gilbert and George as they endlessly repeat "Underneath the Arches" in bronze make-up, their earliest performance piece.

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Renowned English painter, David Hockney, takes us on a visual journey as he shares with us his treasured photo diaries. Consisting of polaroids Hockney has been collecting since 1967, the diaries act as both a tribute and an artist's notebook, often times including images the painter used for his large canvas works. A fine example of Hockney's pictorial inspiration are several photographs of castles he took during a boat trip down the Rhine that were later adapted for a suite of etchings to accompany six Grimm's fairy tales. Seeing his projects long before the work begins, Hockney used his camera to slow time and capture images that would go on to boast his unique style of realism. In David Hockney's Diaries the artist is seen at work on a large canvas of his friends Celia and Ossie Clark and their cat Percy, commissioned by the Tate Gallery.

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Part one of a two-part portrait of the great Jazz composer and pianist. In 1968, we had the opportunity to spend time with Thelonious Monk and his musicians, following him in New York and Atlanta. In New York his quartet plays at the Village Vanguard and at recording sessions for Columbia Records; in Atlanta they appear at a Jazz Festival organized by George Wein. The members of the quartet were Charlie Rouse, Larry Gales, and Ben Riley.

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Part two of a two-part portrait of the great Jazz composer and pianist. On his European tour his quartet was joined by Ray Copeland, Clark Terry, Phil Woods, and Johnny Griffin. They traveled as part of George Wein’s Newport Jazz Festival road company to London, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Berlin, Mainz, and Rotterdam.

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In a highly entertaining overview of what is considered the first, genuinely all-American dance form, Christian Blackwood's Tapdancin' illuminates the New York driven renaissance of the once-flourishing art form. Blackwood shows how the triumphs and defeats of many great dancers from the past were mingled with the rejuvenation of this art form by a class of talented newcomers. A series of heartwarming interviews, which shed light on the history of the discipline as well as on the racial misgivings of the entertainment world in America, are mixed with beautifully captured footage of the tap masters in action that will have you tapping your own feet along to beat. The whimsically fast-feet of the Nicholas Brothers, Honi Coles, John Bubbles, the Copasetics, and many more tap legends, make this a film that is not only a pleasure to watch but that offers a glimpse into the past, present, and future of an authentically American art form.

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A visit in 1971 to the classrooms of the Juilliard School, New York's prominent music academy, introducing some of the talented students and many of the brilliant faculty. Through interviews and observations this film explores the history of the school and showcases the musical curriculum, which the students throw themselves into with rigor and passion. Encouraged by their professors the budding musicians learn to study, analyze and approach a piece with curiosity and determination. "Juilliard" serves as a meaningful documentation of the school that was founded in 1905 as the Institute of Musical Art before becoming The Juilliard School of Music in 1962.

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