About Me: A Musical. 1971. USA. Directed by Robert Frank. Cinematography by Danny Seymour. With Lynn Reyner, Jaime deCarlo, Vera Cochran, Sidney Kaplan, June Leaf, Allen Ginsberg, Hugh Romney, Danny Lyon. 4K digital restoration of the original version by The Museum of Modern Art. Funding provided by the Celeste Bartos Fund for Film Preservation. 35 min.
About Me is a film about the making of a film about music in America that then becomes a film about Robert Frank himself—only he’s played by an actress, Lynn Reyner, and the camera keeps drifting over to other interesting American things like a tattered flag on the Bowery, a man who holds his toddler like a football, and an a cappella group of Black male convicts in an Ellis, Texas, state prison. Frank, who likes to mess things up even further, stages a potted interview about the political commitment of the artist and the dull drudgeries of marriage with more vital images of “hope freaks” in the New Mexican desert, musicians in a Benares Temple, and his parents back home in Switzerland.
The High Lonesome Sound. 1963. USA. Directed by John Cohen. 16mm courtesy Anthology Film Archives. 30 min.
A founding member of the folk band New Lost City Ramblers and an accomplished still photographer in the tradition of Walker Evans, John Cohen also made a number of excellent documentaries on American and indigenous Peruvian music, crafts, and folklore. High Lonesome Sound is a classic of the genre—as essential as the work of ethnomusicologists John and Alan Lomax and Harry Smith—documenting mountain music in the hardscrabble coal country of eastern Kentucky during a period of dire poverty. The film is a haunting record of the Appalachian ballads of miners and farmers, of riverside baptisms and revivalist church meetings and Roscoe Holcomb on his back porch and Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys on main street, which Cohen (assisted by James Agee’s son Joel) made some 13 years before Barbara Kopple documented union strife in the same region in Harlan County, USA. Cohen, whose still photographs on the set of Pull My Daisy are exhibited in Life Dances On, shot with the same 16mm camera that Robert Frank, Danny Lyon, and Albert Maysles used on their own films.
Roscoe Holcomb from Daisy, Kentucky. 2010. USA. Directed by John Cohen. DCP courtesy Anthology Film Archives. 29 min.
Roscoe Holcomb was one of America’s greatest banjo players, a musician whose haunting vocal intonations, Old Regular Baptist in tradition, gave Bob Dylan and Eric Clapton the chills and gave John Cohen’s 1963 film High Lonesome Sound its name. Drawing on footage he shot in 1962 and 1974 in Daisy, Kentucky, Cohen made this incredibly moving portrait of Holcomb, for whom the holy spirit always rose up plain and true: “Sometimes, you know, you feel like playing certain songs. I feel like playing the old banjo, I feel like playing some religious songs. I sit down, I feel lonesome. I could play you some of these old religious songs and it just fits me plumb through. Or I could pick up the guitar—the guitar is mostly for the blues. It’s just according to what a man feels, what he’s got on his mind.” His body ravaged by a life in the coal mines and sawmills, Roscoe Holcomb died in 1981 at the age of 68.
Program approx. 94 min.