Summer Shorts: Youth Run Wild

Relics and Forgotten Gems Curated from the Reserve Film and Video Collection

Wednesdays in August we’re bringing some of New York’s finest film experts to the Steven A Schwarzman Building, where they'll present one-time-only movie nights that they’ve curated from the Library for the Performing Arts’ 60-plus-year-old collection of 16mm films. Get out of the heat and watch wonderful and strange docs, shorts, tv movies, and features selected and presented in-person by curators from the Library for the Performing Arts, Alamo Drafthouse, Maysles Documentary Center, and the Criterion Collection.

August 16th’s program is curated and presented in-person by Brian Belovarac, from The Criterion Collection/Janus Films. “Youth Run Wild” will feature documentaries interspersed with Film Club self-portraits, all of which chronicle the complications of being kids in the late 1960s and early ’70s. Selections include:

• “David: Off and On” (1972, dir. Martha Coolidge)


• “Veronica” (1970)


• “Diane” (1969, dir. Mary Feldhaus-Weber)


• Full descriptions below

Descriptions from Brian Belovarac:
“David: Off and On” (Martha Coolidge, 1972, 42 min.) Before she became a prominent director of narrative features in the 1980s with Valley Girl and Real Genius, Martha Coolidge spent the ’70s making pioneering personal documentaries and essay films that focused on both her own experiences and those of her family. In “David: Off and On,” Coolidge visits with her then 21-year-old sibling and listens to his life’s narrative: a middle-class childhood, familial disruption, and a sense of isolation that gave way to drug abuse, alcoholism, and institutional stays. At once candid and guarded, with a deceptively flat delivery, David makes for an oblique and haunting subject in a film that can be seen as a precursor to later works of family nonfiction such as Italianamerican and Joe and Maxi.

“Veronica” (Pat Powell, 1970, 28 min.)
Not a “lost” film—but certainly an unknown one—“Veronica” focuses on Veronica Glover, a black teenager who has been elected to the Student Congress of her predominantly white high school in New Haven, Connecticut. Hoping to use her position to encourage conversation between her black and white classmates, Veronica narrates her experience in voiceover as we see brief, revealing scenes from her life: a debate in an African Literature class, discussions with her friends, and time spent with a teacher/counselor. “Veronica” was filmed in 1969 by Patricia Powell (who went on to edit Sandra Hochman’s Year of the Woman) and Monterey Pop cinematographer Roger Murphy.

“Diane” (Mary Feldhaus-Weber, 1969, 30 min.)
The late, Boston-based Mary Feldhaus-Weber worked primarily in public television, producing mixed-media pieces, short films, and the feature-length documentary Joan Robinson: One Woman's Story. One of her few films to receive non-theatrical distribution, “Diane” profiles (or, as the opening credits state, “stars”) Diane de Lorian, a young woman from South Dakota who has spent the last several years trying to make it as an actor in New York City. Comprising interviews with de Lorian, moments from a staged “party” in her apartment, still glamor shots, and footage of Diane’s South Dakota hometown, “Diane” mixes fact, film, photography, and fiction to powerful and unsettling effect.

Don't miss the rest of the series:

• August 9: New York Essence


• August 23: Curated by Edo Choi


• August 30: Sci-Fi TV Movies

FIRST COME, FIRST SEATED
Registration does not guarantee admission. For free events, we generally overbook to ensure a full house. All registered seats are released 15 minutes before start time, so we recommend that you arrive early.