Ernest Hardy

Although some American filmmakers still try to make movies inspired by something other than movies — stories born of some divine flicker, some pressing need to shine a light in a darkened corner — increasingly they are the exception. Armed with an aesthetic and a world-view that go no deeper......

Photo by Alexander Abela WHAT CONSTITUTES SUCCESS WHEN IT COMES TO putting minority images on the big screen? Is it merely the fact that they're up there at all? Is it a preponderance of "positive" imagery that scrubs away any hint of stereotypical behavior, positing squeaky-clean heroes and heroines who'd......

AMERICA SO BEAUTIFUL BEGINS SANS IMAGE, with a darkened screen and the voices of two network anchors, Sam Donaldson and Ted Koppel, taken from a newscast in 1979. The men are discussing the Americans who were then being held hostage in Tehran. "It seems to me," says Donaldson, "that this......

IN GERRI HERSHEY'S CLASSIC OVERVIEW of American R&B, Nowhere To Run: The Story of Soul Music, Isaac Hayes is quoted as saying, "Now, it was the standard joke with blacks that whites could not, cannot clap on a backbeat. You know -- ain't got the rhythm? What Motown did was......

You can be the shit, flash the fattest five . . . Have the biggest dick, but when your shell get hit You ain't worth spit, just a memory --Biggie Smalls "You're Nobody ('Til Somebody Kills You)" THERE ARE TWO FORMIDABLE PRESENCES IN Nick Broomfield's deceptively rambling, shrewdly ragtag documentary......

By 1930, when Warner Bros. subsidiary Vitaphone Corp. finally stopped recording audio for the first talkies directly, and exclusively, onto phonograph discs, thousands of short films had used a technique whereby, as images were captured on film, the soundtrack was recorded separately onto shellac. Projectionists had to be careful, prior......

”People were allowed to live at the end of their imagination,“ says one of the talking heads in The Cockettes, a fascinating, richly detailed documentary about the legendary queer collective based in San Francisco in the late ‘60s and early ’70s. The speaker is talking not so much about that......