Directing
In his new film, Spirit of Golf, photographer and documentary filmmaker Christopher Felver traces his personal 20-year odyssey in search of the essence of the “auld Scots game.” Inspired by Michael Murphy’s book, Golf in the Kingdom, he travels to many of golf’s historic, fabled courses: St Andrews, Pebble Beach, Augusta National, among others. He interviews many of the game’s great champions and more than a few colorful characters, who are asked the question, “What is the spirit of golf?” We hear from Arnold Palmer, Tiger Woods, Jack Nicklaus, Johnny Miller, the wonderfully unique Moe Norman, Kathy Whitworth and Nancy Lopez, and notable teachers such as David Leadbetter, “Butch” Harmon and commentators Herbert Warren Wind, Jack Whitaker, and Jim Nantz. All the answers are marvelously diverse, funny, and poetic… just like the game itself.
Cecil Taylor was the grand master of free jazz piano. "All the Notes" captures in breezy fashion the unconventional stance of this media-shy modern musical genius, regarded as one of the true giants of post-war music. Seated at his beloved and battered piano in his Brooklyn brownstone the maestro holds court with frequent stentorian pronouncements on life, art and music.
The poet and painter, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, is among the world's living monuments to arts and letters. For well over a half century, Ferlinghetti helped shape the currents of poetry and literature with his forceful engagement with society and an ideological position that often found him at odds with the political currents of his day. Ferlinghetti's quiet, behind the scenes demeanor and disarming mien may have assuaged, or even fooled, certain opponents, while in reality he was a literary mercenary, a rebel at the forefront of our own cultural revolution.
One of the most versatile sculptors working today is Tony Cragg. Shaping forms in plastic, glass, stone, wood, steel, fiberglass, and found objects he has been making magic come alive in hard materials since emerging in the mid-70s. His vocabulary is wide and his ideas explode across a broad creative landscape, destabilizing our normal viewing habits, while widening our perspective and attitudes. The Celebration of Sculpture is cinema verité at its most powerful. Cragg reveals himself while installing exhibitions of his work internationally, and restlessly moving around in his Wuppertal studio. Filmed in New York, California, London, Eindhoven, and Dusseldorf, one senses the peripatetic nature of a restless creator. The sculptor's workplace is where he prefers to be.
The poet and writer Lawrence Ferlinghetti is an iconic presence in the world of arts and letters. For well over half a century he has helped shape the currents of poetry and literature through his forceful engagement with society. Armed with an ideological position that often found him at odds with the political dogma of his day, Ferlinghetti became the best selling poet of the modern era, a literary mercenary and a rebel at the forefront of a cultural revolution.
An artist and critic, there was a considerable duality to Donald Judd (1928-1994) - he was at once a man of intellectual rigor and a multi-disciplinary conceptualist who deftly moved towards a new minimalism. In 1971, he relocated from New York, to the prairies of Presidio County in Southern Texas, twenty miles from the Mexican border.
Christopher Felver's enormously engaging documentary is a serious and powerful portrait of San Francisco's legendary poet, painter and City Lights publisher. Lawrence Ferlinghetti has been a vital creative force in the American literary scene since the 1950's when he arrived in San Francisco and began to write his infamous poems, including A Coney Island of the Mind.
