MacArthur Genius Filmmaker Stanley Nelson 4/7

Meet award-winning filmmaker and MacArthur Genius Stanley Nelson who will answer your questions following a screening of his acclaimed film, The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, this Friday night, 7PM start time, Page Hall, UAlbany Downtown campus.

"Sober yet electrifying!" A. O. Scott, New York Times
"Essential history and a primer in making sense of how we live now."-- Washington Post
April 7 (Friday): THE BLACK PANTHERS: VANGUARD OF THE REVOLUTION

 Film screening with commentary by director Stanley Nelson — 7:00 p.m. [note early start time], Page Hall, 135 Western Avenue, Downtown Campus

 Directed by Stanley Nelson (United States, 2015, 115 minutes, color and b/w)

 This feature length documentary explores the remarkable history of the Black Panther Party, its formation and ultimate downfall, and its cultural and political significance to the broader American culture. Nikki Baughan of the Alliance of Women Film Journalists, called the film “Compelling and incisive,” and said, “The most shocking aspect…is how painfully relevant its message still is.” The film premiered at Sundance, aired on PBS, and received awards for Best Documentary from the Image Awards and the National Board of Review

Stanley Nelson is an Emmy Award-wining documentary filmmaker and recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship. He was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Obama in 2014. Nelson’s other films include FREEDOM RIDERS, JONESTOWN: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF PEOPLE’S TEMPLE, and THE MURDER OF EMMETT TILL, among others.
Note: Producer Marcia Smith, also originally scheduled to attend, will not appear at the event because of a scheduling conflict.
Sponsored in conjunction with UAlbany’s School of Criminal Justice’s Justice & Multiculturalism in the 21st Century: Crime, Justice, and Public Memory Film Series.

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Announcing the Spring 2017 Series!

Here are a few highlights of a truly exciting season:

Robert Coover, beloved American fiction writer, with Huck Out West, a rollicking sequel to Huckleberry Finn.

Convicted murderer Shaka Senghor, with his memoir of redemption, Writing My Wrongs.

Jazz violinist and MacArthur Genius Regina Carter on stage with Joe Donahue.

Diane Ackerman, with the new film tie-in edition of Zookeeper’s Wife which will star Jessica Chastain.  

Preeminent Postmodernist painter David Salle with his book How to See, on stage with Joe Donahue.

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor presenting her memoir, My Beloved World.

MacArthur Genius and filmmaker Stanley Nelson with his acclaimed new documentary, The Black Panthers.

Young Irish novelist Ruth Gilligan, the youngest author to reach #1 on Ireland’s Bestseller List, with a novel about Ireland’s Jews.

Iraq war interrogator and torturer Eric Fair with a memoir about his crisis of conscience.

Douglas Brinkley, CNN’s official Presidential Historian, with a new book on FDR’s crusade for public lands.

David Ebershoff, author of The Danish Girl, the basis of the Oscar-winning film.

AND MANY, MANY MORE!

All events are free and open to the public!

For a complete schedule, see the Visiting Writers Series here:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/programpages/vws.html

See the Classic Film Series here:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/programpages/cfs.html#.WHUQKE3FDs0

For more information, contact the Writers Institute visit our website at www.albany.edu/writers-inst.

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A searing directorial debut-- Jason Osder

Jason Osder, who visits UAlbany on Friday, is profiled in Filmmaker magazine:
Osder’s searing directorial debut, Let the Fire Burn, which premiered at the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival, is an archival footage marvel. With no narration and sparse title cards, it dives into the maelstrom that was the Philadelphia Police Department’s tragic raid on the black separatist group MOVE’s West Philadelphia compound in 1985, during which the home, where 13 men, women and children lived, was shot upon 10,000 times, doused with unspeakable amounts of water and then finally firebombed. Almost everyone inside died, and nearly 70 other homes in the surrounding working-class black community were destroyed.

More in Filmmaker magazine:  http://filmmakermagazine.com/people/jason-osder/#.VNO-ll8o7s0

More about Osder's visit tomorrow:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/osder_jason15.html

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Let the Fire Burn reviewed in the L. A. Times

L. A. Times critic Kenneth Turan reviews Let the Fire Burn (2013), by Jason Osder who visits UAlbany for a screening and Q&A tomorrow, Friday 2/6 at 7PM in Page Hall.

"Let the Fire Burn" is a brooding, disturbing documentary about an inferno that becomes an enigma. It earns its considerable impact by telling an unnerving story and leaving it, in ways both daring and effective, fundamentally unresolved.

The events detailed here are some of the most unsettling in modern American urban history. On May 13, 1985, the Philadelphia police, stymied in a standoff that stemmed from a bitter conflict with a radical group called MOVE that had sputtered on and off for more than a decade, dropped an incendiary device on the row house that was the group's headquarters.

More in the L. A. Times:  http://articles.latimes.com/2013/oct/17/entertainment/la-et-mn-let-fire-burn-review

More about our event with Jason Osder:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/osder_jason15.html

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Online Chat with the Central Park Five

 

The five wrongly convicted Harlem teenagers (now grown men) will chat online on the New York Times City Room blog, tomorrow April 17 at 6:30 PM.

Whether you missed or managed to attend our special advance screening of Central Park Five on April 5 at Page Hall with co-directors Sarah Burns and David McMahon, you may wish to pose your questions to "the five," as well as to David, Sarah and Sarah's father, Ken Burns.

City Room Blog link:  http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/.

You can still catch the film today-- its official national air date-- April 16 at 9PM, on PBS stations. WMHT will also air the film again today at 11PM, and on Wed. 4/17 at 2AM, Fri. 4/19 at 2AM, Sun. 4/21 at 3AM and Mon. 4/22 at 3AM.

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400 People at Page Hall for Central Park Five Event

Film director Sarah Burns (daughter of leading filmmaker Ken Burns) and her husband and
codirector David McMahon met with an Albany audience of approximately 400 at Page Hall last Friday following a screening of their award-winning documentary, Central Park Five.

Picture:  Sarah and David talk with the audience at Page Hall.

Special thanks to our cosponsors, the UAlbany School of Criminal Justice, and PBS station WMHT.

The documentary tells the story of five Harlem teenagers falsely convicted of the rape and attempted murder of a female jogger in Central Park in the 1980s.

Sarah and David has such a great time that they expressed a wish to come back to Albany with the "five," who are seeking damages from the City of New York.

More about the film:  http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/centralparkfive/

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Central Park Five Screening in Albany

Sarah Burns, daughter of  major  documentary  filmmaker Ken Burns) and her husband David McMahon will present a Q&A following a screening of their new film, Central Park Five, winner of the New York Film Critics Circle Award. 

Sarah Burns and David McMahon codirected and cowrote the film with Ken Burns. Based on Sarah's book of the same name, the film documents a miscarriage of justice of epic proportions-- the wrongful conviction of five Harlem teenagers in the rape and beating of a white jogger in Central Park in 1989.

The event is cosponsored by UAlbany's School of Criminal Justice, PBS television station WMHT, and the New York State Writers Institute.

More about the event:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/programpages/cfs.html#central

More about the film on the PBS website:  http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/centralparkfive/

Picture:  Sarah Burns

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Roger Ebert on Kinyarwanda

"I thought I knew something about Rwanda, but I didn't really know very much. I was moved by Hotel Rwanda (2004), but not really shaken this deeply. Not like this.... Here is a powerful film."

Full review by Roger Ebert:  http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=%2F20111130%2FREVIEWS%2F111139995

Kinyarwanda will be screened 9/28, 7:30pm at Page Hall, followed by a Q&A with Rwandan star actress Hadidja Zaninka and producer Darren Dean.

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John Sayles on "The Black Stallion"

John Sayles offers some close analysis of the 1941 children's novel, The Black Stallion, in a videotaped Writers Institute interview partially available on YouTube.

He credits the novel, which he read at the age of 10, with making him aware of how to structure plot.

Sayles visited the Writers Institute on February 27, 2012.

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Peter Bogdanovich on "Daddy-Long-Legs"

Major Hollywood director, critic and son of Kingston, NY, Peter Bogdanovich talks about

Daddy-Long-Legs, the 1919 silent film that will be screen this Friday, March 30th, 7:30PM at Page Hall, in a piece that appeared in IndieWire, May 11, 2011:

"Neilan’s easy, casual grace, his daring, his ability to evoke extraordinarily simple yet complex reactions, his flair for human comedy, is apparent throughout. And for those who ever wondered if Mary Pickford was just a goody-two-shoes playing one childlike note, this single film—-of the scores of good ones she starred in between 1909 and 1933-–would blow that uninformed misconception away. She was brilliantly expressive, absolutely real, equally on the money at every second in comedy, drama and all points between. You want to see good modern movie acting, check out Mary Pickford in Daddy-Long-Legs."

More on IndieWire.

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Undergraduate Meets Legendary Director

UAlbany sophomore Marisa Mazart (pictured with maverick movie director John Sayles) writes about her experiences at the John Sayles events on February 27th:

Hi readers! My name is Marisa Mazart and I am a volunteer at the Writers Institute. I had the pleasure of meeting the independent film director, screenwriter and novelist John Sayles after the seminar on February 27th. The seminar was question-and-answer based. It was housed in the Campus Center of the University at Albany, and was open to the public. John Sayles was able to captivate the audience with every answer he gave, and his intelligence and sense of humor shined. After attending the seminar I was extremely eager to meet him. Interested in pursuing a career in film, I immediately grasped the opportunity to discuss film production with John. My main passion is film editing. I asked John how he edited his own films. And to my surprise he started editing films before they became digital. He wrote, directed and edited most of his films, like the 1980s movie Return of the Secaucus Seven which focuses on a the reunion of a group of college students. With no previous experience, he had to learn how to edit his film right on the spot. Even though this might have been a limitation in how his early works were edited, he spoke about his early movie career with a big smile. His advice to me was to look into film school. Unfortunately, this option is costly so he also advised me to make sure I am familiar with the new editing softwares that are now available like Final Cut Pro, and to also seek out internships in order to get my foot in the door.
John Sayles is very friendly, and responded to my question about why his movie Passion Fish is named what it is with the utmost honesty. Towards the end of the movie one of the characters cuts open a fish and calls the smaller fish inside its stomach “passion fish.” What an odd name! I had to ask John why it is called passion fish and why the movie is called the same name. I mistakenly thought there might have been a symbolic meaning, but when John revealed the name was chosen because it was the winner of a contest I was presently surprised. I couldn’t help but chuckle at his response. Importantly, he emphasizes that naming a movie is a very difficult process and sometimes the best way is to collaborate.
I learned a lot the night I met John Sayles, and not just information relating to film. Being a novelist he also divulged how he is able to get into the minds of his characters not just in film but in novels as well. He said it is because of his acting experiences in college. Being able to play many characters and get a feel for how they act in certain situations influenced how he portrayed his characters in his recent novel A Moment in the Sun.
I am extremely happy I was able to meet John Sayles, and as my friends can report I was jumping up and down all night with the adrenaline rush from meeting such a respected and experienced director and writer.

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Wally and Andre Return

Wallace Shawn, who visited the Writers Institute in 2007, and Andre Gregory, have announced their third collaboration, a film directed by Jonathan Demme of Shawn's adaptation of Ibsen's "The Master Builder." Their two previous collaborations include 1981's My Dinner with Andre, and 1994's Vanya on 42nd St.

From the New York Times:

When your two previous film collaborations have been a 110-minute dialogue on the nature of theater, art and life; and an informal, street-clothes performance of Chekhov’s "Uncle Vanya" what do you do for an encore?

After a cinematic hiatus of nearly 18 years, Wallace Shawn and André Gregory, the creators of the influential art-house films "My Dinner with Andre" and "Vanya on 42nd St." are ready to answer that question. More.

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John Sayles: Literary Child of John Dos Passos

Maverick movie-maker John Sayles, who takes your questions tonight at the UAlbany Performing Arts Center uptown, is the author of A Moment in the Sun, newly out in paperback.

Ben Crair of The Daily Beast compares the sprawling historical novel, set during the upheavals of the late 19th century, to the work of Great American novelist John Dos Passos:

"A Moment on the Sun looks past its contemporaries on the New Releases shelf and takes a page instead from John Dos Passos, whose gigantic U.S.A. trilogy is a stylistic and spiritual forebear. The book blends invented characters—like an African-American soldier named Junior and a drifter named Hod—with historical figures, including Mark Twain and McKinley's assassin. Chapters jump between perspectives in a narrative montage—one of the few techniques that fiction writers have successfully appropriated from film. Sayles sometimes tosses in letters, newspaper headlines, and advertisements. The sum total is a sprawling, mosaic portrait of the nation. "If human beings have a way of looking at the world, nations do, too," Sayles explains.

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Sayles on Creating Music Videos for Bruce Springsteen

The "Golden Age of Music Video" website has a detailed interview with John Sayles (who visits today) about creating classic music videos for Bruce Springsteen in the 1980s.

In the case of the “Born in the U.S.A.” video, the only real mandate we had was “This should be gritty,” and we do gritty. So we shot it in 16 millimeter, it was mostly documentary footage. Ernest Dickerson, who was Spike Lee’s cinematographer, actually had shot [Sayles’ film] Brother from Another Planet. We shot most of it in Jersey — we were living in Hoboken at the time — and we shot some of the Vietnamese neighborhood in L.A. For the concert footage, we shot four nights at whatever that venue is down by USC. They obviously wanted to use the record track for the video, but Bruce didn’t want to have to lip-synch to it for a performance in front of an audience. We just figured if he wears the same clothes night after night for at least that song and we shoot in from many different angles, maybe we’ll be able to rough synch it, and, you know, match the drummer, try to keep the same beat as the record. Bruce was not a guy who was having a rhythm machine drumming for him – every night it was something different, and that’s great! Every night, you get into the groove, and the song has a slightly different character than the night before. But the great thing was that we got to go to four Bruce Springsteen concerts! (laugh).... More.

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Sayles: Racial Military Coup in North Carolina, 1898

Amy Goodman of Democracy Now interviews John Sayles (who visits today) about his new novel, A Moment in the Sun, which features many forgotten events of late 19th century history, among them the seizure of power by white militants from duly elected Black officials in Wilmington, North Carolina in 1898.

AMY GOODMAN: There are so many stories in this. I mean, how does Wilmington, North Carolina, relate?

JOHN SAYLES: Yeah, Wilmington was, in 1898, a city that was probably two- or three-to-one African American to white. Because African-American men could vote—women of no race could vote at that point—they had city councilmen who were African American, firemen, policemen, who had the right, even if they didn’t exercise it very often, to arrest white people. And that didn’t sit well with the kind of old bourbon Democrats, who planned a secret coup that started with intimidating black voters from coming out. Eventually, they purchased a Gatling gun. It was demonstrated to the leaders of the black community, and then told, "Tell your people not to vote tomorrow." On the day after election day, the Gatling gun was kind of wagoned around town. A lot of people were killed. And pretty much anybody they didn’t like, black or white, was put in handcuffs, put on a train, and sent into exile. And after that, a new government was sworn in that day. So it was a racial military coup, that was countenanced by the federal government, because, by this time, they really had decided, "OK, we want Southerners to vote for us. We’ve already pulled our troops out." You know. And I think, in certain cases, just, "Well, things must have been out of control there. I’m glad the white people got them back under control." More.

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John Sayles: Good Guys Shouldn't Always Win

John Sayles, the "grandfather of indie cinema" who visits UAlbany on Monday 2/27, talks to the New Jersey Star-Ledger:

“The studios realize that most people don’t go to movies for complexity,” he says. “Most people want escapism, and white hats, and bad guys who are so bad you can cheer at the end when they get torn to pieces by wild dogs. Movies that are complex are rarer and they confuse audiences at first. Honestly, we figure it’s going to take the average moviegoer who doesn’t necessarily go to this sort of thing 10 or 15 minutes to decide if they’re going to stay or walk out. And maybe they’ll stay and say, well, that was interesting, that was cool. Or they say, what the hell was that? The good guys didn’t win.”

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John Sayles: The Script Doctor

John Sayles, who visits Monday, is best known as an independent filmmaker, but he also happens to be one of Hollywood's most sought-after script doctors, renowned for his ability to make characters come alive with just a few lines of dialogue.

Much of his script work is uncredited, especially if he decides he doesn't like the project. Films he has worked on include The Fugitive, Apollo 13, Mimic, The Quick and the Dead, Piranha 3-D, and The Spiderwick Chronicles.

In 2004, Sayles was asked to do a rewrite of the as yet unreleased Jurassic Park IV.

Picture: The Spiderwick Chronicles.

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John Sayles School of Fine Arts

In case you didn't know, Schenectady High School has a School of Fine Arts named (since 1998) for its most famous filmmaking alum (who visits the Writers Institute on Monday 2/27).

The John Sayles School of Fine Arts

Awarded the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts National Schools of Distinction in Arts Education

The John Sayles School of Fine Arts (SSFA) is a smaller learning community of approximately 650 students at Schenectady High School. We carry the name of one of our famous district graduates internationally known filmmaker, John Sayles. The school provides an integrated Regents high school curriculum with an interdisciplinary focus in visual art, music, theatre, and dance. Schenectady High School, with an enrollment of approximately 2900 students, is divided into five communities, including the Sayles School. The Sayles School of Fine Arts provides unique arts opportunities in the region. The John Sayles School of Fine Arts was recently awarded the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts National Schools of Distinction in Arts Education and its students performed on the Millennium Stage at the Kennedy Center.

More.

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John Sayles: A Tornado of Voices

John Sayles, who visits Monday, is interviewed by Alec Michod of The Rumpus about his new historical novel, A Moment in the Sun.

The Rumpus: Your new novel, A Moment in the Sun, is written in—I wouldn’t say English, exactly, because you’ve taken and twisted the language to make it your own. It reads like a tornado of voices.

John Sayles: Every character has their own language, voices and styles. There’s a chapter from the point of view of a correspondent, and it’s written like the correspondence of that time. I read a bunch of those guys, Richard Harding Davis, and picked up on their locutions, which aren’t locutions we use anymore. More.

Picture: American writer Richard Harding Davis (1864-1916)

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John Sayles: Filmmaker for the Environment

John Sayles, who visits UAlbany this coming Monday, Feb. 27, is this year's recipient of Duke University's LEAF Award for Lifetime Environmental Achievement.

"Nicholas School Dean Bill Chameides said the LEAF Award does not necessarily go to artists whose work is explicitly environmental, but goes to those who explore environmental themes on a profound level."

"'[Sayles examines] the theme of our connection to land, to the earth and to the difficulties we have in trying to balance the various needs and desires for the resources of that land,' Chameides said." More.

Picture: Water buffalo in Amigo, to be screened Friday, Feb. 24 in the Performing Arts Center uptown.

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