Ok, now that I've recovered from my trip to the dark side ("
Friday Frivolity") I can get back to serious work. Thursday night I attended the Guggenheim Symposium at the
AFI Discovery SilverDocs festival, where I was wowed by the body of work by DA Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus, the honorees and stars of the event. Sen. Al Franken, their subject in "Al Franken: God Spoke" started the show with a series of refreshingly hilarious, self-deprecating remarks. I was dying for him to break into "Stuart Smiley" just one last time, but that milieu didn't lend itself to shout-out requests. He introduced a film compilation of the prolific team's body of work, films about a very young Bob Dylan, Carole Burnett, Al Gore, John DeLorean, Bill Clinton, James Carville. Their films are like poetry in the way that they capture a moment of time--simply as it is, for what it is. No tidy endings, no protagonist appeals to the audience to "like me, like me."
Their next project is a restoration of Richard Leacock's "
A Stravinsky Portrait". The filmmaker captures Stravinsky's intensity, passion and the joy he finds in his work just by filming him talk about it. If you want to catch a little Hegedus and Pennebaker for yourself, go see "
Kings of Pastry" running through Saturday.
Click here for a clip.
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