Dick Fontaine

Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up?

Dick Fontaine

Merv Griffin, Norman Mailer

Portrait of Norman Mailer at the time of the Pentagon demonstrations in 1967, documenting Mailer's involvement and arrest, together with two TV appearances and shooting on the set of his second film 'Beyond the Law'.

Sound??

Dick Fontaine

Rahsaan Roland Kirk, John Cage

Although Rahsaan Roland Kirk and John Cage never actually meet in this film (Cage's enigmatic questions about sound are intercut with some of Kirk's more ambitious experiments with it) these two very different musical iconoclasts share a similar vision of the boundless possibilities of music.

Beat This!: A Hip Hop History

Dick Fontaine

Afrika Bambaataa, Grandmaster Caz

Beat This: A Hip-Hop History is a 1984 BBC documentary film about hip-hop culture, directed by Dick Fontaine. The cast includes Afrika Bambaataa, DJ Kool Herc — the film includes footage from Herc's original dance parties — The Cold Crush Brothers, Jazzy Jay, Brim Fuentes, and The Dynamic Rockers. It is narrated by Imhotep Gary Byrd. Originally part of the Arena television series, it was among the first crop of documentaries about hip-hop.

I Heard It Through the Grapevine

Dick Fontaine, Pat Hartley

James Baldwin, Chinua Achebe

James Baldwin retraces his time in the South during the Civil Rights Movement, reflecting with his trademark brilliance and insight on the passage of more than two decades. From Selma and Birmingham and Atlanta; to the battleground beaches of St. Augustine, Florida, with Chinua Achebe; and back north for a visit to Newark with Amiri Baraka, Baldwin lays bare the fiction of progress in post–Civil Rights America, wondering “what happened to the children” and those “who did not die, but whose lives were smashed on Freedom Road.”

Sonny Rollins: Beyond the Notes

Dick Fontaine

Sonny Rollins, Ornette Coleman

Sonny Rollins: Beyond the Notes uses his 80th birthday concert to look into the man and his music.

David, Moffett, and Ornette: The Ornette Coleman Trio

Dick Fontaine

In Paris in the spring of 1966, Ornette Coleman, controversial Free Jazz composer, wrote and recorded the soundtrack for a Living Theatre project, a film entitled Who's crazy? This documentary short is a record of the two days Ornette spent in the studio making music with collaborators, virtuoso bass player David Izenson (formerly of the NBC Symphony Orchestra) and drummer Charles Moffett. Ornette plays alto, violin, trumpet and piano and introduces his haunting ballad "Sadness." When not performing, the artists discuss the precariousness of the musical life, the price of artistic freedom and personal fulfillment, and in the cases of Ornette and Moffett, the pain of discrimination.

Art Blakey: The Jazz Messenger

Dick Fontaine

Art Blakey

A portrait of inspirational jazz drummer and teacher Art Blakey with Dizzy Gillespie, many pupils including Wayne Shorter, the Marsalis brothers, and a surprising new generation of musicians and dancers.

Double Pisces, Scorpio Rising

Dick Fontaine

Dick Fontaine, Norman Mailer

One of the human trio is Dick Fontaine, the director, a thin, long-haired youth who has put together this highly personal exercise on something or other that runs, mercifully, for 58 minutes and comes from an English group of movie folk called the Tattooists. The second visitor to the animal abattoir is a pretty girl. The third is a porky, middle-aged man addicted to the expression, "Ya know?" The two men carry on a running argument about whether they should make a picture about pigs. "Are we making a movie, ya know?" says Fatso. "Where is it, ya know?" Then a bit later: "I'm making a movie about pigs, ya know?"

Who is Sonny Rollins?

Dick Fontaine

Sonny Rollins

Portrait of the jazz great during his self-enforced exile from his audience as protest against the war in Vietnam. Filmed playing with students in Harlem, in the countryside, and on the Williamsburg Bridge, Rollins' melodic sense throughout the film is as probing as soulful as ever.