Few intersections are as potentially thrilling and explosive as the meeting of great artists from different disciplines. When Oscar (R)-winning filmmaker (and former dancer) Shirley Clarke trained her cameras and creativity on jazz great Ornette Coleman, the result was a documentary portrait like no other - kaleidoscopic, mesmerizing and well, cosmic. This meeting of extraordinary New York talents originated in Forth Worth in the early 1980s. Producer Kathelin Hoffman was preparing to open Caravan of Dreams, an innovative new cultural center, and invited native son Coleman to write a jazz piece to perform with his band Prime Time for the opening. Hoffman then set out to find a director to document the performance. Speaking with Coleman, she learned that Clarke had started a film about him back in the 1960s. So Hoffman visited the filmmaker at New York's Chelsea Hotel and the trio embarked on a three-year project that would stretch the conventions of the documentary genre in almost every way possible. The team confronted a number of technical challenges that provoked innovation. In order to end up with a 35mm projection print, Clarke and Hoffman had to invent editing techniques to handle footage shot in a wide variety of film and video media. Since she had filmed the original footage, Clarke had become a leading innovator in experimental and documentary video production. The pair decided to try out a new Super 16 film stock and hired young cinematographer Ed Lachman, based on his brilliant Super 16 work on Peter Greenaway's The Draughtsman's Contract. The structure of the documentary required creativity and collaboration. While Coleman and Hoffman were focused on making a film about the creative process, Clarke wanted to continue the film she had begun years earlier about the musician and his relationship with his talented son, Denardo. The team also hoped the film could tell the story of a poor black kid returning home as a famed composer. And to make things even more challenging, Coleman decided to create a nightclub performance, a symphony, and a chamber music piece to celebrate his Fort Worth homecoming. The documentary uses the score of Coleman's symphony "Skies of America" as an underlying script and, like his avant-garde jazz, exploits non-linear means of storytelling to bring everything together. Dazzling sound and visual editing weave together archival shots from 16mm and video; dream and flashback sequences; animation; the theories of Buckminster Fuller; North African influences on 1960s luminaries (including William Burroughs, Tennessee Williams, Paul Bowles and Allen Ginsberg); a music video; and Coleman's musings on the intellectual and experiential basis for Southern jazz and blues. And all are syncopated to Coleman's "harmolodic" score, which music critic Thom Jurek described as "dangerous and rewarding music." ORNETTE: MADE IN AMERICA opened in 1986 to a wave of enthusiastic reviews. David Sterritt in the Christian Science Monitor called it "a quirky cinematic spree that unfolds the saga of Coleman's career while visually evoking the boundless 'free jazz' flights of his unpredictable music." Don Snowden of the the Los Angeles Times wrote: "Clarke's use of rapid-fire editing, the juxtaposition of images and its non-linear story line gives the film a far more sweeping scope than a standard portrait of an artist." But sadly, Clarke soon afterwards developed Alzheimer's and in the years following her death in 1997, the documentary was rarely shown. In 2011, Milestone and producer Kathelin Hoffman Gray brought the original elements to the UCLA Film & Television Archive to oversee a restoration of ORNETTE: MADE IN AMERICA. With the active participation of Hoffman Gray, cinematographer Lachman and Milestone's VP Dennis Doros, UCLA restorationist Ross Lipman (Killer of Sheep, The Exiles, Wanda) painstakingly color corrected each scene of the collage-like film. Then Lipman and Audio Mechanic's John Polito restored the soundtrack to insure that the sound quality matched the film's splendor. If You Like this movie you can streaming Ornette: Made in America movie without downloading HERE Movie Title : Ornette: Made in America Release Date : Aug 31, 2012 Limited Genre Movie :Documentary Mpaa Rating : Unrated Actors :Ornette Coleman,William S. Burroughs,Brion Gysin,Demon Marshall,Eugene Tatum
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User Ranting Movie Ornette: Made in America : 3.6 User Count Like for Ornette: Made in America : 76 Critics Ranting For Ornette: Made in America : 7.2 Critics Percentage For Ornette: Made in America : 83 %
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Review For Movie Ornette: Made in America
[A] fascinating, maddening, one-of-a-kind film. Peter Rainer-Christian Science Monitor
Ms. Clarke's portrait is of an extraordinary artist and genuinely likable man. John Anderson-Wall Street Journal
Coleman's life and work are treated as a continuum, which Clarke pulls from at will. Keith Uhlich-Time Out New York
A funky tribute to the great saxophonist. Melissa Anderson-Village Voice
A hazy but inviting glimpse of the great modern jazz musician and his world. Janet Maslin-New York Times
For the sight and sound of the man in action (including some fine archive footage from the early '70s), it's essential viewing for any jazz aficionado. Geoff Andrew-Time Out
It's significant that Coleman tells Clarke's cameras that he thought of being an architect or 'brain specialist' before becoming a musician; as a jazz composer, instrumentalist and bandleader, he achieved all his goals. John Beifuss-Commercial Appeal (Memphis, TN)
Heeding Louis Armstrong's 'if you gotta ask you'll never know,' this film does not attempt the impossibility of explicating the difficult music, on which you groove or you don't. Donald J. Levit-ReelTalk Movie Reviews
Shirley Clarke's portraiture eschews cohesive biography and often spirals off into lyrical dissonance. Joseph Jon Lanthier-Slant Magazine
Ornette: Made in America is a look at a groundbreaking artist by a groundbreaking artist. Jordan Hoffman-Badass Digest
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A young black woman discovers that her father was a sperm donor, and if that weren't bad enough, he's white.
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