ornette: made in america
TRANSCRIPT
ORNETTE: MADE IN AMERICA USA | 1985 | 77 min | col e b/n
CREDITIRegia e montaggio: Shirley Clarke Musiche originali: Ornette Coleman Produzione: Kathelin Hoffman Fotografia: Ed Lachman © 1984 Caravan of Dreams Productions
SINOSSIA cinque anni dalla morte del grande pioniere del free jazz Ornette Coleman, Ornette: Made in America di Shirley Clarke ci consegna un ritratto unico del suo straordinario talento e della sua profonda umanità. Girato tra Fort Worth, New York, la Nigeria e il Marocco, il film mescola interviste, estratti televisivi, scene di finzione, ‘video-clip’ e girati in Super-16mm documentando alcune memorabili performances del sassofonista statunitense e della sua Prime Time band come Prime Design/Time Design, eseguita da un quartetto d’archi sotto la cupola geodetica progettata da Buckminster Fuller. Le riprese del film iniziarono negli anni ’60, grazie alla comune amicizia di Yoko Ono, e si conclusero nel 1983 in occasione dell’inaugurazione del centro per le arti performative Caravan of Dreams a Fort Worth (Texas), nella città natale di Coleman, dove il sassofonista si esibì nella sua celebre sinfonia Skies of America. Nel film compaiono, tra gli altri, i poeti beat William S. Burroughs e Brion Gysin, e i grandi jazzisti Charlie Haden, Don Cherry e Denardo Coleman, figlio di Ornette, assieme a sua madre, la poetessa e attivista Jayne Cortez.
INTERPRETI Ornette Coleman • Prime Time: Denardo Coleman (batteria), Charles Ellerbe (chitarra), Sabir Kamal (batteria), Albert McDowell (basso), Bern Nix (chitarra), Jamaaladeen Tacuma (basso) • Ed Blackwell • Caravan of Dreams Ensemble Theater • William Burroughs • Don Cherry • James Clay • Jayne Cortez • Charles Ellerbe • Brion Gysin • Charlie Haden • Hamri e Master Musicians of Jajouka • Ibadan Musicians of Nigeria • David Izenzon • James Jordan • Bob Bolen (major) • Bob Palmer • Dewey Redman • George Russell • John Rockwell • Viva e Martin Williams • John Giordano (direttore della Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra) • Demon Marshall e Gene Tatum (interpreti del giovane Ornette Coleman)
PREMIERE MONDIALE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL DI TORONTO, 1985 PREMIERE DEL RESTAURO BERLINALE, 2012
RESTAURORestaurato da Ross Lipman e UCLA Film & Television Archive. Il restauro dei materiali sonori è a cura di John Polito di Audio Mechanics.
DISTRIBUZIONE Ornette: Made in America è distribuito in Italia e in Svizzera da Reading Bloom grazie a una collaborazione con Milestone Film che cura il progetto di distribuzione e restauro di tutti i film di Shirley Clarke: Project Shirley: www.projectshirley.com
★★★★★
RASSEGNA STAMPA
“Ornette: Made in America. Non è un documentario. […] Ma è un viaggio visionario libertario del terzo tipo… […] Era un gioiello introvabile. […] E quando la pellicola, poi, costò troppo, Shirley Clarke passò al più economico video. Esempio per tutti di come essere una filmmaker totalmente sincera e inguaribilmente indipendente. […] la distribuzione nelle sale ‘attive’ del nostro circuito di questo bellissimo e ever green film del 1985, a lungo invisibile, ma importante per la storia del jazz radicale e del cinema indipendente newyorkese. E in particolare di una sua feconda ramificazione femminista, che, a stretto contatto con la new dance, con il poderoso movimento di liberazione dei corpi dalla schiavitù puritana, e con l’affermazione dell’assoluta libertà creativa da salvaguardare a tutti i costi, ha sperimentato una estetica, né hollywoodiana né underground, ma neppure di inerte subalternità rispetto alle esperienze, a volte dogmatiche, del ‘cinema verità’ e della scuola documentaristica di Manhattan (Cassavetes, Leacock, Pennebaker…)” - Roberto Silvestri, ilCiottaSilvestri
"Quello che sorprende è la libertà di impostazione e il tono affettuoso. Quello che rimane è l’immagine di un genio costruttore di mondi sonori come fossero architetture, tanto inventive quanto eleganti – l’interesse di Coleman per l’opera di Buckminster Fullerparlachiaro.Intutto questo, Clarke si dimostra come una ritrattista con pochi eguali.” - Gianluca Pulsoni, «Alias», il manifesto
“Ornette: Made in America è una sinfonia di montaggio. […] è una sintesi continua tra il concerto filmato e il documentario biografico, che evita la semplificazione delle due forme prese singolarmente. Un film che non può che chiudersi con un lungo applauso.” – Giampiero Raganelli, Quinlan
“L’intera pellicola vive di questi contrasti: alternando alle immagini dell’inaugurazione dell’83 con il girato in 16mm di metà anni 60, segue itinerari non-lineari che ricordano da vicino le ‘harmolodie’ di Coleman, dove diverse melodie convivono entro un unico quadro snodandosi attraverso percorsi differenti.” – Simone Dotto, Il Mucchio Selvaggio
“Documentario sui generis, Ornette non smentisce la passione della sua autrice per il cinema come mezzo d’indagine intima e psicologica. […] Il modo in cui varie forme di soggettivazione e dominazione (di classe, sesso, razza, sessualità, genere) si tengono insieme nei ritratti che emergono nei documentari di Shirley Clarke è ancora oggi avanguardistico e davvero eccezionale per l’epoca in cui la regista lavorò. […] Il suo cinema merita
dunque di essere ri-scoperto e studiato con attenzione.” – Silvia Nugara, CultFrame - Arti Visive
“L’incontro tra il jazzista e la filmmaker darà vita a quello che è uno dei modelli per il cinema documentario di sperimentazione. […] Ornette è al contempo un concerto e la storia di una vita: storia che segue e si intreccia con quella dell’America di Coleman, delle prime conquiste dello spazio e delle marce per Martin Luther King, della controcultura della East Coast e dei “suburbs” neri di metà Novecento. Tutto in un andirivieni temporale libero da logiche meramente esplicative che sa ridare allo spettatore non solo il ritratto di un grande artista ma anche l’affresco di un paese ormai distante.” – Alessandro Del Re, Sindacato Belleville
"Ornette is an intricately knit series of riffs on free jazz giant Ornette Coleman, one of the greatest artists twentieth-century modernism produced. What makes the movie thrilling beginning to end is the score that Coleman himself wrote for it, largely derived from one of his major works, Skies of America.” - Artforum
"The last major work of the great American independent Shirley Clarke [...] this ambitious and affectionate effort to capture an elusive subject is undoubtedly worth a look." - Chicago Reader
“Ornette isn’t just a love letter to the liberty of jazz rhythms; it excels at expressing them.” - IndieWire
“Ornette [...] is full of tantalizing stuff: formal juxtapositions, half-sketched implications, parallel experiments of image and sound. By virtue of the footage alone, it’s a valuable time capsule for anyone drawn to Mr. Coleman’s work.” - The New York Times
“The restoration and reissue of Ornette: Made in America, [...] the saxophonist whose recordings and performances in the late fifties and early sixties were among the most liberating avant-garde breakthroughs in the history of jazz [...] is cause for celebration—both for its value as a movie and for its exploration of Coleman’s art.” - The New Yorker
“Now is the time to see Shirley Clarke’s superb, vigorously expressive 1984 documentary Ornette: Made in America. [...] Though Ornette is hardly a straight-up biographical doc [...] it’s the place to go to unlock some of the most precious secrets of Ornette.” - The Village Voice
“The result is both an immersion in Coleman’s music and philosophy, and a remarkable non-linear mosaic. A triumph of editing, at once jagged and fluid.” - Blouin Artinfo
A PROPOSITO DI ORNETTE: MADE IN AMERICA A Jazz Portrait ‘Ornette’ 20 Years In The Making by Don Snowden «Los Angeles Times», 22 January 1986
“I wasn’t trying to make a ‘documentary’ of Ornette Coleman,” said director Shirley Clarke in her room at the Chateau Marmont. “I hope nobody goes to this film expecting a record of Ornette’s musical life because that’s not what it is. We wanted people to come away feeling a certain way about somebody and knowing a little bit about his music and its relation to him. Ornette is not violently well known (outside the jazz world) and that had something to do with my choosing to make a film that could appeal to people who just want to see this kind of film making and don’t have to know it’s about Ornette.” Clarke’s groundbreaking portrait of the celebrated saxophonist/composer, Ornette: Made in America, would qualify as unusual even if it was a straight documentary. It took the veteran, New York-based director 20 years to complete the film. Clarke was a dancer who studied with Martha Graham before she moved out of performing and into the movie world in the late ’50s. She became well known in independent film circles in the early ’60s for her films The Connection and The Cool World before directing a 1964 documentary on poet Robert Frost that won an Academy Award. She met the saxophonist through a mutual friend, Yoko Ono, during a mid-’60s Parisian sojourn. When an independent New York producer approached Clarke to do a movie about jazz, she embarked on a film centered around Coleman’s decision to use his 11-year-old son Denardo as the drummer for his group. But the original project foundered in 1969 when the producer disliked a partially completed version of the film. Clarke engineered her firing from the project to avoid being liable for $40,000 in expenses and the footage spent the next dozen years gathering dust under people’s beds. The experience shook Clarke so much that she abandoned films for the fledgling video field. Video techniques played a central role in assembling and completing Ornette: Made in America. “Video allows for an emotional response on the part of the person editing,” Clarke said. “What’s going to change is that you’re going to have the same kind of freedom that actors have on stage, yet you can record it. It allows the film maker to stay in the creative process longer.” The film project was resurrected in 1983 when the Caravan of Dreams Performing Arts Center in Fort Worth, Tex., opened its doors by engineering Coleman’s first hometown appearance in 25 years. Producer Kathelin Hoffman formed a production company to capture the event and Coleman suggested that Clarke be contacted. The core of Ornette: Made in America is a nightclub set by Coleman’s Prime Time band, a performance of his Skies of America symphony combining Prime Time with the Fort Worth Symphony and scripted segments dramatizing some early childhood memories there. The film captures much of the improvisational flavor and unorthodox structure of
Coleman’s singular musical style. “I knew I was connecting to the way he sounded because the first thing I laid down was the sound,” Clarke said. “Then I decided what images were going to go with that particular sound. I shot every single piece we used without knowing what I was going to do with it. Having laid the spine down, which was his music, I edited to the music. That’s where the rhythms and energy came from. The film looks like how Ornette sounds and has the same basic thinking.”
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. She now views the 16-year delay in completing Ornette: Made in America as a blessing. “Had I finished the film at the original time, it would not have been a particularly wonderful film and probably a disaster. The fact that we had those extra years, that technology changed and the Caravan of Dreams people entered our lives, allowed a totally different thing to happen. I think it’s advanced the technology of film making by a big bang.”
