Starting today, New Yorkers will have an unprecedented opportunity to see two hard-hitting documentaries on race relations in the U.S. at Maysles Cinema in Harlem, one of the crown jewels of the nation’s most famous Black neighborhood. As a team, Albert and David Maysles were documentary filmmakers, whose work encompassed a wide variety of topics, from the hustling bible salesmen of the 1968 “Salesman” to the Rolling Stones concert flick “Gimme Shelter”. The younger brother David died of a stroke at the age of 55 in 1987. Now 86, Albert Maysles is still going strong. Only two years ago Albert served as director of photography on Oliver Stone and Tariq Ali’s “South of the Border”, a real inspiration to me as a 67-year-old aspiring Vimeo auteur. If Albert Maysles can gallivant around in the thin air of the Andes, then I should have twenty good years ahead of me as well.
The best thing you can say about “The Central Park Five” and “The Loving Story” is that they are the sorts of films that David Maysles must look down on with admiration from his perch in filmmaker’s heaven. They do him proud. Starting today and running through the 29th, “The Central Park Five” is a study of the naked racism of New York’s police department, district attorney’s office, and mass media collaborating together to carry out an act of injustice that is no exaggeration to compare to the Emmett Till case. As Malcolm X said in a 1964 speech: “America is Mississippi. There’s no such thing as a Mason-Dixon line—it’s America.” full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2012/11/23/the-central-park-five-the-loving-story/ _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
