Dick Fontaine

Sonny Rollins: Beyond the Notes uses his 80th birthday concert to look into the man and his music.  (more)

James Baldwin retraces his time in the South during the Civil Rights Movement, reflecting with his trademark brilliance and insight on the passage of more than two decades. From Selma and Birmingham and Atlanta; to the battleground beaches of St. Augustine, Florida ...  (more)

Beat This: A Hip-Hop History is a 1984 BBC documentary film about hip-hop culture, directed by Dick Fontaine. The cast includes Afrika Bambaataa, DJ Kool Herc — the film includes footage from Herc's original dance parties — The Cold Crush Brothers, Jazzy Jay, Brim ...  (more)

In Paris in the spring of 1966, Ornette Coleman, controversial Free Jazz composer, wrote and recorded the soundtrack for a Living Theatre project, a film entitled Who's crazy? This documentary short is a record of the two days Ornette spent in the studio making ...  (more)

Although Rahsaan Roland Kirk and John Cage never actually meet in this film (Cage's enigmatic questions about sound are intercut with some of Kirk's more ambitious experiments with it) these two very different musical iconoclasts share a similar vision of the ...  (more)

Portrait of Norman Mailer at the time of the Pentagon demonstrations in 1967, documenting Mailer's involvement and arrest, together with two TV appearances and shooting on the set of his second film 'Beyond the Law'.  (more)

Portrait of the jazz great during his self-enforced exile from his audience as protest against the war in Vietnam. Filmed playing with students in Harlem, in the countryside, and on the Williamsburg Bridge, Rollins' melodic sense throughout the film is as probing ...  (more)

One of the human trio is Dick Fontaine, the director, a thin, long-haired youth who has put together this highly personal exercise on something or other that runs, mercifully, for 58 minutes and comes from an English group of movie folk called the Tattooists. The ...  (more)

A portrait of inspirational jazz drummer and teacher Art Blakey with Dizzy Gillespie, many pupils including Wayne Shorter, the Marsalis brothers, and a surprising new generation of musicians and dancers.  (more)