This program is comprised of four short films by Michael Almereyda (A Damn Fool Scheme), George Griffin (MacDowell: A User's Manual), David Petersen (2 Months to Be Quiet), and Elisabeth Subrin (The Caretakers, with Cara Seymour). Commissioned to celebrate the centennial of The MacDowell Colony, the "assignment" was to create something original, representative, and lasting that could contain and express the artistic impulses of a MacDowell Fellowship. In commissioning the films, MacDowell Chairman Robert MacNeil sought out Fellows making diverse and original films with equal commitment to excellence. Each film addresses a particular season and was shot, at least in part, on site. Video projection
A brief description of each film and filmmaker follows:
Michael Almereyda, whose films include Hamlet, with Ethan Hawke (2000), and recent documentary portraits of Sam Shepard (2003) and William Eggleston (2005), has twice been a MacDowell Fellow. His MacDowell film, A Damn Fool Scheme, is a kind of historical patchwork, a dual portrait of the Colony's founders, Edward and Marian MacDowell, and a sidelong glimpse at the Colony as it exists in the present. The film's central strand involves contemporary MacDowell Fellows watching a 1956 Hallmark Hall of Fame program, "The Lady in the Wings," in which the MacDowells are presented in a lovingly melodramatic light. Other layers are provided by Colony residents and workers reading from 20th-century accounts of the MacDowells, and from archival photos, landscapes, and excerpts from a reel of 16 mm film that was shot in the 1930s and recently discovered in the Colony Hall attic. Mr. Almereyda has received numerous awards and honors, including nominations for IFP Spirit Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a citation from the National Society of Film Critics, among others.
George Griffin's animations, many of them experimental, have spanned a broad range of styles and techniques, from narrative film, to flipbooks, to film installations and deconstructed "anti-cartoons." For the MacDowell Centennial film project, which evokes fall at the Colony, Mr. Griffin has created MacDowell: A User's Manual, which he calls "a synthetic documentary," mixing drawings, video, and photographs, all created at the Colony. Art-making is expressed both through the drawn figure of an artist and through footage of visual artists' working processes: drawing, painting, sculpting, folding, mechanical tinkering, and video editing. During his time as one of the first MacDowell Fellows in film (1975), Mr. Griffin made his early film Head. He has shown his work and served on the juries of many international animation festivals, and has received numerous awards, among them production grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
David Petersen was nominated for an Academy Award for best documentary for Fine Food, Fine Pastries, Open 6 to 9 (1989). His film for the Centennial project, titled 2 Months to Be Quiet, documents the development of work by diverse MacDowell artists—including the filmmaker himself—over the course of a summer. The film reveals the interplay between the evolution of art and that of the natural surroundings. As the artist states, the film "aims to create a cinematic poem of ritual and process." Mr. Petersen's most recent film, Let the Church Say Amen (2004), an official selection of the 2004 Sundance festival, among many others, premiered on the PBS series Independent Lens and was honored as "one of the best documentaries of 2004" by the Academy Award Documentary Committee. He has been in residence at the Colony three times.
Elisabeth Subrin, who is best known as an experimental filmmaker, has recently turned to narrative. Her MacDowell film, shot last winter, and titled The Caretakers, was inspired both by Ms. Subrin's own experiences as a Colony Fellow and by archival research and interviews that she conducted. The film, which stars Cara Seymour, follows a writer named Cleo as she is compelled by a MacDowell residency to shed her urban, driven life. It is a terrifying experience until she encounters a former Colony housekeeper who, in the words of Ms. Subrin, "challenges Cleo's understanding of the interdependencies between art making, caretaking, and love." Ms. Subrin has received numerous grants and awards for her films. Her current feature film project, Up, starring Rachel Griffiths and Kal Penn, is in development at Forensic Films with support from the Sundance Institute, The Guggenheim Foundation, and the Annenberg Foundation. The Caretakers premiered at the 2006 New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center.
2007, color, 1 hour, USA