Tag Archives: ifc center

PARADISE IS BURNING

Three sisters come of age in one summer in Mika Gustafson’s Paradise Is Burning

PARADISE IS BURNING (Mika Gustafson, 2023)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
August 22-29
www.ifccenter.com
www.roomeightfilms.com

“I will never disappear / For forever, I’ll be here,” Swedish electropop musician and composer Fever Ray sings in their 2009 song “Keep the Streets Empty for Me.” The tune plays a key role in Swedish filmmaker Mika Gustafson’s heart-wrenching debut feature, Paradise Is Burning.

In a working-class Swedish suburb, sixteen-year-old Laura (Bianca Delbravo) is doing everything she can to keep her and her two sisters, twelve-year-old Mira (Dilvin Asaad) and seven-year-old Steffi (Safira Mossberg), together despite an absent father and a mother who disappears for long periods of time. When social services schedules a visit, Laura is worried that the three girls, who are very close, will be separated and put into foster care. Laura seeks help from her aunt Vera (Andrea Edwards) and their neighbors, Sasha (Mitja Siren) and Zara (Marta Oldenburg), an older couple who run a karaoke bar, but there’s not much they can do; Laura is on her own to preserve her family.

It’s summer, so school is not an issue. Laura comes up with elaborate plans to steal groceries from the supermarket. She avoids social services’ phone calls. She gives her sisters plenty of room to roam but fiercely protects and defends them if there are any problems. All three are going through major life events. When Mira gets her period, a group of friends hold a dramatic ritual celebration. Steffi is waiting for her first baby tooth to fall out. As Mira grows friendly with Sasha, “managing” his karaoke singing aspirations, Steffi collects stray dogs and meets Micai (Ellie Ghanati), another disaffected youth; they set up a unique little outdoor “home” where they can both let their rage out and find peace and privacy.

Laura enjoys breaking into other people’s houses and pretending to live like they do, eating their food, swimming in their pools, and trying on their clothes. She never takes anything from them; instead, she finds a kind of freedom, tinged with danger. In one house, she watches bullfighting on television; she is both matador and charging animal. Meanwhile, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker is on in their own home, a film about a journey into a mysterious forbidden Zone where it is believed that people can achieve their most inner desires.

Running away after being chased out by the angry owner of a house and looking lost, she bumps into Hanna (Ida Engvoll), a thirtysomething woman who is instantly intrigued by Laura. The two quickly grow close; Hanna joins Laura on her fantasy adventures into houses, becoming friend, confidant, and maybe more. Hanna is a kind of mother figure — the type of parent Laura wishes she had — before the teenager finds out more about Hanna and her quest for freedom.

It’s no mere coincidence that the title, Paradise Is Burning, evokes Jennie Livingston’s award-winning 1990 documentary, Paris Is Burning, about BIPOC/LGBTQIA+ ball culture in New York City, where anyone and everyone can feel safe and secure being whoever they are and whoever they want to be. In nearly every scene, Laura looks like she’s ready to explode, to break free of the life she has been forced into. The sacrifices she must make are too much for any teenager to be asked to do. In one telling moment, she brings home T-shirts for her and Mira; Mira initially chooses the one with an eagle on it, but when she sees Laura put on the other one, with wolves, she asks to switch, which Laura does without complaint. Mira, who also thinks she’s ready for her mother’s fancy white high heels, aspires to be more like her older sister, who she considers tough and strong, not acknowledging that Laura is just a kid too, one whose ability to soar is being suppressed. In fact, animals figure prominently throughout the film, from rats and dogs to a Botero-like cat and three white flamingos hiding their heads in the water, emphasizing the wild nature of the sisters’ less-than-standard domestic existence.

Laura (Bianca Delbravo) finds an unexpected new friend in Hanna (Ida Engvoll) in Paradise Is Burning

In her first film, Delbravo is absolutely brilliant as Laura — she was discovered six years before shooting by Gustafson’s cowriter, Alexander Öhrstrand (who also has a small but key part in the movie), when he overheard Delbravo screaming at someone over the phone. With her pouty lips, puppy-dog eyes, and button nose, she’s a mesmerizing figure, a young woman trapped between being a child and an adult, best exemplified by subtle changes she makes in her movement and mannerisms when Laura is with her sisters as opposed to when she is with Hanna — superbly portrayed by Engvoll — who is also caught between two worlds.

Named Best Director and Best Screenwriter (with Öhrstrand) at the 2023 Venice Orizzonti, Gustafson exhibits an impressive talent in her first full-length narrative film; she previously made such works as the short Mephobia and the documentary Silvana. Her grasp of character development packs an emotional punch, as does the tempting sense of freedom lurking just around each corner for every character, reminiscent of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Nobody Knows and Andrea Arnold’s American Honey and Fish Tank, while injecting a bit of David Lynch into the karaoke scenes.

“There’s no room for innocence,” Fever Ray also sings in “Keep the Streets Empty for Me.” Both Gustafson and Delbravo bravely navigate innocence and experience in their feature cinematic debuts, marking them as two to watch.

Paradise Is Burning opens this weekend at the IFC Center, with Gustafson participating in Q&As at the 7:00 sneak-peek screening on August 22 and the 7:15 shows on August 23 and 24.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

UNDER THE PAVEMENT, THE BEACH: SOMETHING IN THE AIR

The cultural revolution on the early 1970s is back in Olivier Assayas’s Something in the Air

SOMETHING IN THE AIR (APRÈS MAI) (Olivier Assayas, 2012)
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
Friday, August 9, 8:00; Saturday, August 10, 11:30 am; Tuesday, August 13, 4:30
Series continues through September 1
metrograph.com
www.ifcfilms.com

Olivier Assayas’s autobiographical coming-of-age tale Something in the Air, screening August 9, 10, and 13 in the Metrograph series “Under the Pavement, the Beach,” is a fresh, exhilarating look back at a critical period in twentieth-century French history. In this sort-of follow-up to his 1994 film about 1970s teenagers, Cold Water, which starred Virginie Ledoyen as Christine and Cyprien Fouquet as Gilles, Something in the Air features newcomer Clément Métayer as a boy named Gilles and Lola Créton (Goodbye First Love) as a girl named Christine, a pair of high school students who are part of a growing underground anarchist movement. Following a planned demonstration that is violently broken up by a special brigade police force, some of the students cover their school in spray paint and political posters, leading to a confrontation with security guards that results in the arrest of the innocent Jean-Pierre (Hugo Conzelmann), which only further emboldens the anarchists. But their seething rage slowly changes as they explore the transformative world of free love, drugs, art, music, travel, and experimental film.

Assayas (Les Destinées sentimentales, Summer Hours) doesn’t turn Something in the Air — the original French title is actually Après Mai, or After May, referring to the May 1968 riots — into a personal nostalgia trip. Instead it’s an engaging and charming examination of a time when young people truly cared about something other than themselves and genuinely believed they could change the world, filled with what Assayas described as a “crazy utopian hope for the future” at a New York Film Festival press conference. The talented cast also includes Félix Armand, India Salvor Menuez, Léa Rougeron, and Carole Combes as Laure, both Gilles’s and Assayas’s muse. Assayas fills Something in the Air with direct and indirect references to such writers, artists, philosophers, and musicians as Syd Barrett, Gregory Corso, Amazing Blondel, Blaise Pascal, Kasimir Malevitch, Max Stirner, Alighiero Boetti, Joe Hill, Soft Machine, Georges Simenon, Frans Hals, and Simon Ley (The Chairman’s New Clothes: Mao and the Cultural Revolution), not necessarily your usual batch of 1970s heroes who show up in hippie-era films.

Writer-director Assayas, editors Luc Barnier and Mathilde Van de Moortel, and cinematographer Éric Gautier move seamlessly from France to Italy to England, from thrilling, fast-paced chases to intimate scenes of young love to a groovy psychedelic concert, wonderfully capturing a moment in time that is too often marginally idealized and made overly sentimental on celluloid. “We’ve got to get together sooner or later / Because the revolution’s here,” Thunderclap Newman sings in their 1969 hit “Something in the Air,” which oddly is not used in Assayas’s film, continuing, “And you know it’s right / and you know that it’s right.” Indeed, Assayas gets it right in Something in the Air, depicting a generation when revolution required a lot more than clicking a button on the internet. “Under the Pavement, the Beach” continues through September 1 with three other films about civil unrest among the student generation, timely given the recent protests on college campuses around America: Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, and Ye Lou’s Summer Palace.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

CatVideoFest 2024

CatVideoFest 2024
IFC Center, 323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Nitehawk Cinema, 188 Prospect Park West
Saturday, August 3, and Sunday, August 4, 11:00 am
(Nitehawk bonus screenings August 10-11)
www.ifccenter.com
nitehawkcinema.com
www.catvideofest.com

“There have likely never been so many cats living on the streets of New York,” New York magazine declared in July. There have likely also never been so many cat videos living on the internet.

During times of strife, especially amid the tumult of social media, many of us seek solace in cat videos. There’s just something about the tricky little devils riding Roombas, squeezing into ridiculously tight spaces, sneaking up on us like ninjas, and jumping and climbing everywhere that soothes our souls. “There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats,” polymath Albert Schweitzer said.

Cat fanciers can find refuge from the maelstrom at Oscilloscope Laboratories’ “CatVideoFest 2024,” screening August 3 and 4 at IFC Center and Nitehawk Cinema. The final selection of videos were chosen from more than fifteen thousand short films, divided into such sections as drama, music, animation, and action-adventure. “Everything that you’d possibly want to see a cat do you will see a cat do,” IFC general manager Harris Dew told WPIX earlier this week.

A portion of the proceeds from IFC ticket sales will go to Animal Haven, which has been rescuing cats and dogs and finding them forever homes since 1967; the Nitehawk screenings, which continue August 10 and 11, benefit Sean Casey Animal Shelter, which specializes in the most difficult medical cases.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer, editor, and cat lover; you can follow him on Substack here.]

MODERNISM, INC.: THE ELIOT NOYES DESIGN STORY

Modernism, Inc. subject Eliot Noyes is hard at work in his New Canaan office (courtesy of the Pedro Guerrero Estate)

MODERNISM, INC. (Jason Cohn, 2023)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Opens Friday, July 19
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com

“Good design is good business” was the mantra employed by architect Eliot Noyes, who, with IBM CEO Tom Watson Jr., helped rebrand the company through its public image from top to bottom, from its logo to the look of its products, creating a legacy that is still in evidence today.

Noyes’s career is detailed in Jason Cohn’s documentary Modernism, Inc., opening July 19 at IFC Center, with Cohn on hand for Q&As on Friday and Saturday night at the 6:50 screening.

The eighty-minute film skips over Noyes’s childhood, beginning with his disgruntlement with the old-fashioned ideas taught at Harvard in the 1930s. In 1937, he started studying with German American architect and Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius and never looked back. Noyes wanted to incorporate the reality of modern life, including social and economic problems, into his work. “Gropius pushed Noyes to see the continuity between art, architecture, and the design of everyday objects, what Gropius called the total theory of design,” narrator and French actor Sebastian Roché explains.

In 1939, Noyes, who was born in Boston in 1910, was hired as the first director of industrial design at the Museum of Modern Art, where he staged the important 1941 exhibition “Organic Design in Home Furnishings.” He enlisted in the Army Air Force during WWII, exploring the efficacy of using gliders in battle. He espoused his theory of design on the television program Omnibus. From 1947 to 1960, he wrote an influential column for Consumer Reports called “The Shape of Things.”

In 1956, one of his colleagues on the Pentagon’s glider project, Watson, brought him over to IBM to remake its corporate culture; Noyes refused to become a full-time employee, instead accepting the position of consultant director of design, working from his home in New Canaan, Connecticut, where he and his wife, Molly Weed, who contributed to many of his designs, raised four children: Eli, Fred, Meridee, and Derry. New Canaan became a hub for designers, as Marcel Breuer, Philip Johnson, Joe Johansen, and others soon moved into the exclusive suburb.

Eliot Noyes was IBM’s consultant director of design from 1954 to 1977 (courtesy of the Eliot Noyes Family)

“Eliot Noyes had quite a curious view of Modernism, a deep-seated belief that design could be at the core of building a future society,” design historian Alice Twemlow says in the film. Noyes’s designs, from the conversation chair, IBM Selectric, and large computers to logos for such companies as IBM, Mobil, Westinghouse, Pan Am, and Xerox to his unique houses, felt as new as free jazz and abstract expressionism, interweaving form and function. He collaborated with such industry luminaries as Charles Eames and Paul Rand, known as “Matisse on Madison Ave.” Not everything was successful; one notable failure was his bubble house.

Describing what went into constructing a house for her family in 1978, Lyn Chivvis, interviewed in her Noyes-designed kitchen with her husband, Arthur, tells Cohn, “El was able to talk to his clients, my parents and us, and find out, what do you need for your daily life? El developed the open-shelving idea. He actually measured the shelves for me. It doesn’t fit you. It doesn’t fit you, it doesn’t fit anyone else but me.”

Cohn also speaks with IBM design head Katrina Alcorn, Noyes biographer Gordon Bruce, IBM chief archivist Jamie Martin, University of Toronto architecture professor and historian John Harwood, IBM design manager Tom Hardy, design historian Thomas Hine, and Noyes’s children, integrating archival footage, home movies, industrial films, and old advertisements (the film was edited by Kevin Jones), accompanied by a sensitive score by Steven Emerson/Ever Studio.

Noyes’s career trajectory took a turn at the 1970 International Design Conference Aspen, which he headed, when the theme of design fusing with the environment was seized upon by counterculture activists to protest against corporate greed, the Vietnam War, and the misuse of natural resources by design firms. The conference was filmed by his son Eli and director Claudia Weil, who captured intense moments. “I’m not a political guy. I’m interested in making my points through my work,” the elder Noyes tells Oscar-winning graphic designer Saul Bass. (Eli, who died this past March at the age of eighty-one, had been nominated for an Oscar for his 1964 claymation short Clay or the Origin of Species.)

“The designers who were at Aspen, their consciousness was good design can change things. I think Eliot Noyes would profess this,” Chip Lord, the cofounder of the alternative architecture collective Ant Farm and a conference attendee, explains. “Good design makes a good product or a good branding. It is a form of change. But our critique was beyond that because it didn’t matter how well you designed a gigantic SUV if it’s just guzzling fuel.”

The conference changed Noyes; he resigned from the IDCA and spent more time with his family. His children note that they really didn’t get to know their father until his later years, including a particularly memorable trip together.

Noyes died in 1977 at the age of sixty-six; he may not be a household name, but his impact on the visual and architectural history of twentieth-century American culture is still unmistakable in corporations and households around the world.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

CHRONICLES OF A WANDERING SAINT

Argentine writer-director Tomás Gómez Bustillo’s Chronicles of a Wandering Saint is a glowing debut

CHRONICLES OF A WANDERING SAINT (Tomás Gómez Bustillo, 2023)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Opens Friday, June 28
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
www.chroniclesofawanderingsaint.com

About thirty-five minutes into Tomás Gómez Bustillo’s gorgeous, elegiac debut feature, Chronicles of a Wandering Saint, a meditative dark comedy on love, faith, and the afterlife, a deeply sad tragedy occurs and the credits begin to roll. But just as the protagonist is reborn at that moment, so is the film itself.

In a small, religious Argentina town, Rita (Mónica Villa) spends much of her time at Saint Rita church, either praying with her three friends, Viviana (Noemí Ron), Beba (Silvia Porro), and Alicia (Ana Silvia Mackenzie), or cleaning, mopping the floors until they glisten. She and her husband, Norberto (Horacio Marassi), live a simple life; they have no children and don’t travel. While Norberto still has a lust for life, Rita looks tired. When Norberto suggests that they go back to the waterfalls they visited on their honeymoon forty years earlier, Rita doesn’t understand why.

“Well, the waterfalls are still the exact same,” she says. He responds, “But we’re not.”

Rummaging through the church basement, Rita comes upon an object she believes to be a statue of Saint Rita, missing for thirty years. Before even seeing it, Father Eduardo (Pablo Moseinco) declares it must be a miracle. However, when, after further research, Rita realizes it’s not Saint Rita, she and Norberto decide to fake it, proceeding with her claim nonetheless. It all goes well, until it doesn’t. But that’s only part of this tender and touching magical realism tale.

Chronicles of a Wandering Saint is built around the concept of a spiritual glow, as stated in Proverbs 13.9: “The light of the righteous shines brightly, but the lamp of the wicked is snuffed out.”

Early on, Rita is cleaning the floor of the church, and Beba tells her, “Quit mopping so much or those shiny floors will end up blinding us.” Several parishioners gather in the back and sing, “The light from your shining face will illuminate all the paths that lead to eternity.” And when people die, they eventually transform into a blinding white light; one person is actually reincarnated as a lightbulb. In one of the most surreal moments, Luchito (Iair Said), now a moth, can’t keep away from Quique (Mauricio Minetti), a bulb over a woman’s front door.

The film is reminiscent of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s 2010 Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, which is another fascinating integration of the human, animal, and spirit worlds. Bustillo maintains a similar slow pace but adds hilarious scenes beautifully photographed by Pablo Lozano, with spectacular production design by Doriane Desfaugeres, wonderful costumes by Margarita Franco, and a gentle, melancholic score by Felipe Delsart. The film is composed of still shots; the camera moves only once, zooming in on a piano, an instrument we later learn that Rita’s mother played.

When Norberto and Rita are in their kitchen talking about the waterfalls, they are both wearing yellow raincoats, the color echoed in the scrambled eggs and lemon wedge on their plates and the spray bottle on the table. Through the door is an old television set, furthering the idea that the couple, and the other parishioners, are living in an uncluttered, old-fashioned past despite Rita’s use of Facebook and a smartphone. Their old car has a cassette player; when she’s driving, Rita puts on a homemade mix tape that includes a dance-pop cover of Bryan Adams’s “Heaven.”

A shot of Rita sitting alone in a tiny bus shelter, looking downtrodden, surrounded by green grass and trees, a light pole rising behind her, is stunning; next to the shelter is a sign pointing out three nearby locations, but right then Rita has nowhere to go, unsure of which path to take. Not even the book she was reading about el Camino de Santiago, detailing the popular Christian pilgrimage itinerary, can help her now.

Villa (Wild Tales, The Holy Girl) is mesmerizing as Rita, a pious, devoted woman who wants to live up to her namesake. Her performance, especially her eyes, recalls Fellini wife and muse Giuletta Masina, who lit up such films as Nights of Cabiria and La Strada. Rita is not seeking much out of life, only a miracle. But as Norberto tells her, “If you want it to be a miracle, then it is.”

The multi-award-winning Chronicles of a Wandering Saint runs June 28 – July 11 at IFC Center; the LA-based Bustillo will be on hand for Q&As on Friday and Saturday at 7:05, joined by executive producer Samir Oliveros, producers Gewan Brown and Amanda Freedman, and moderators Taylor A. Purdee and Isabel Custodio.

Oh, one last note: Beware those unexpected sneezes. . . .

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

AMEI WALLACH: TALKING TAKING VENICE

Taking Venice examines 1964 biennale art scandal involving Robert Rauschenberg and the State Department

Who: Amei Wallach, Robert Storr
What: Postscreening Q&As for Taking Venice
Where: IFC Center, 323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
When: Friday, May 17, 7:15, and Saturday, May 18, 7:15
Why: “I grew up during the Cold War when the world seemed as dangerous as it does today. But it also seemed to be filled with possibility, with the actions of people who dreamed big and took big chances,” Amei Wallach says in the director’s statement for her latest documentary, Taking Venice. “This was especially true of artists, always looking to build something new. I became an art critic, then an author, and now a filmmaker. My goal is to make films about art that leap out of the art world and into a reckoning with what’s relevant in our lives through the stories that they tell. . . . Taking Venice builds on a tradition of telling the story of America then through the eyes of now because I want it to reflect how much the world and art have changed. I want there to be moments that sting with what we have lost, and moments that encapsulate what we have gained.”

In 2008, Wallach and codirector Marion Cajori made Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine, a fascinating exploration of the extraordinary French artist. Five years later, Wallach gave us Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Enter Here, a compelling look at the renowned Russian art couple.

Wallach is now back with her third film, Taking Venice, which invites viewers inside the controversy surrounding the 1964 Venice Biennale, where several forces might have teamed up in order to ensure that American artist Robert Rauschenberg would win the Golden Lion. The scandal involved art curators Alice Denney and Alan Solomon, art dealer Leo Castelli, and, perhaps, the US government, which saw Rauschenberg’s uniquely American pop art as a way to help fight communism. Among the people Wallach speaks with are artists Christo, Simone Leigh, Mark Bradford, Shirin Neshat, and Carolee Schneeman; authors Louis Menand and Calvin Tompkins; museum directors Valerie Hillings and Philip Rylands; 2007 Venice Biennale director Robert Storr; and Denney, who died this past November at the age of 101. Even Rauschenberg chimes in: “I had moments where I thought everything would be much better if I hadn’t been so lucky,” he says in an archival clip.

Taking Venice opens May 17 at IFC Center; Wallach will be on hand for Q&As following the 7:15 screenings on May 17 and 18, the latter joined by Storr.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

UNCROPPED

Photojournalist James Hamilton is the subject of fascinating documentary (photo by Jody Caravaglia)

UNCROPPED (D. W. Young, 2023)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Opens Thursday, April 25
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
www.uncroppedfilm.com

The centerpiece of this year’s fourteenth annual DOC NYC festival was the world premiere of D. W. Young’s warm and lovely Uncropped, now opening theatrically April 25 at IFC Center. The film is as gentle and unassuming as its subject, photographer James Hamilton, who should be a household name. But fame and fortune are clearly not the point for Hamilton, who grew up in Westport, Connecticut, and didn’t own his own camera until he was twenty. He’s lived in the same cramped Greenwich Village apartment since 1966 and has little online presence, especially when compared to several other photographers named James Hamilton.

However, he will take part in several IFC Q&As this week, with Young, journalist Kathy Dobie, and moderator Joe Conason on Thursday at 6:45, with Young and moderator Amy Taubin on April 26 at 6:50, and with Young, Sylvia Plachy, and moderator Jeffrey Henson-Scales at the 6:50 screening on April 27.

“James’s work is refreshingly devoid of ego,” Sonic Youth cofounder Thurston Moore says in the film, letting out a laugh. “Let’s put it that way.”

The soft-spoken, easygoing Hamilton notes, “My whole career was all about having fun.”

And what fun it’s been.

Patti Smith and Tom Verlaine are among the many famous and not-so-famous people photographed by James Hamilton (photo by James Hamilton)

Hamilton got his start by forging a press pass to gain entry to the Texas International Pop Festival in 1969 and used the shots to get a staff job at Crawdaddy magazine. He later took pictures for the Herald, Harper’s Bazaar, the Village Voice, New York magazine, the London Times, and the New York Observer. He photographed rock stars and fashion icons; joined with print journalists to cover local, national, and international news events, including wars; shot unique behind-the-scene footage on such film sets as Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums, Bill Paxton’s Frailty, and George A. Romero’s Knightriders; and captured life on the streets of New York City and elsewhere.

Among the people Young talks to are journalists Conason, Dobie, Alexandra Jacobs, Michael Daly, Thulani Davis, Richard Goldstein, and Mark Jacobson, editors Eva Prinz and Susan Vermazen, and photographers Plachy and David Lee. Young, who also edited the film and produced it with Judith Mizrachy, cuts in hundreds of Hamilton’s photos, which run the gamut from celebrities, politicians, and musicians to business leaders, kids playing, and brutal war scenes, accompanied by a jazzy score by David Ullmann, performed by Ullmann, Vincent Sperrazza, and others.

Hamilton, who has never been a fan of being interviewed, sits down and chats with Plachy, who shares fabulous stories of their time at the Voice; journalist and close friend Jacobson, who Hamilton took pictures for on numerous adventures; Conason, who discusses their transition from the Voice to the Observer; Dobie, who gets personal; and Prinz and Moore together. “We never crop James Hamilton’s photographs,” Prinz points out, raving about his remarkable eye for composition.

Uncropped also serves as an insightful document of more than fifty years of New York City journalism, tracing the beginnings of underground coverage to today’s online culture where professional, highly qualified, experienced writers and photographers are having trouble getting published and paid. But through it all, Hamilton has persevered.

in his previous film, The Booksellers, Young focused on bibliophiles who treasure physical books as works of art even as the internet changes people’s relationships with books and how they read and purchase them. One of the experts Young meets with is Nancy Bass Wyden, owner of the Strand, an independent bookstore founded in 1927 and still hanging on against Amazon, B&N, and other chains and conglomerates.

Near the end of Uncropped, Young shows Hamilton and Dobie perusing the outdoor stacks of cheap books at the Strand, dinosaurs still relishing the perhaps-soon-to-be-gone days of print but always in search of more fun.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]