Just a few more days to enjoy the cinema section of the Suoni Per Il Popolo festival, presented in partnership with Cinéma Moderne. The programming contains some standout titles, starting with Ornette: Made in America, the 1985 documentary on saxophonist and composer Ornette Coleman by filmmaker Shirley Clarke.
It will be remembered that Ms. Clarke – one of the few women directors at the time – had launched her first feature film, The Connection, in 1961. It was an adaptation of a play about a band of heroin-addicted jazz musicians who, like in the famous Velvet Underground tune “I’m Waiting for the Man”, anticipate a visit from their dealer. The soundtrack, by pianist Freddie Redd, was in the bop tradition in vogue at the time, and featured Jackie McLean’s alto saxophone. If this film is her best known, it’s because most of the other films she’s made since then have had all sorts of problems with censorship in the United States. Ornette: Made in America was her last production.
This portrait of the father of harmolodics is a complex mosaic of archival images, fictional sequences, concert footage, and interviews. Among those interviewed were musicians Don Cherry and Charlie Haden, who were longtime members of Coleman’s group, as well as composer and conductor George Russell, authors William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, and even architect, designer and theorist Buckminster Fuller.
It’s preceded by a short film on the free jazz saxophonist Marion Brown, shot in 1967.
Another program worth mentioning is a retrospective of short films by Karl Lemieux. In addition to 16 of his experimental shorts – the oldest of which, with music by Lee Ranaldo, dates back to 1998 – are excerpts from multi-projection performances, with Jerusalem In My Heart at Suoni Per Il Popolo in 2007, Godspeed You! Black Emperor at Bataclan in Paris in 2015, BJ Nilssen at the 25 FPS International Experimental Film and Video Festival in Zagreb in 2017, and Philip Jeck and Michaela Grill at the Foundation for Art and Technology in Liverpool in 2017.
Also noteworthy, in a program of various portraits and documentaries, is the 2018 film Pauline Julien, intime et politique, which filmmaker Pascale Ferland has devoted to the muse of the independence movement. Note that this film, like many from the National Film Board of Canada, can be viewed at any time and free of charge on the NFB site.
