While you’re recovering from the election results, why not relax by casting your minds back to another equally politically turbulent era? As famously noted in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, “the ’60s are an important and exciting time,” and one pioneering documentarian knew this more than most.
On (or pretty close to) the anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Ecstatic Truths presents a trilogy of Kennedy films: Primary, Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment, and Faces of November. All directed by Robert Drew, these are foundational to the history and development of observational cinema, innovating new filmmaking techniques to get as close as possible to its subjects.
But it wouldn’t be an Ecstatic film if it didn’t have some sort of trickery going on behind the camera; this screening explores the idea of how direct cinema, ostensibly one of the most “realistic” forms of filmmaking, can be used as a form of political propaganda, and how the truth is portrayed rather than truth itself.
See you there!