Movies: Dick Fontaine

First broadcast in 1987 on the UK's Channel 4, Bombin' is a documentary about Afrika Bambaataa's Zulu nation bringing American hip-hop culture to the UK for first time. The main focus is the graffiti art of Brim and the variety of reactions he is f...

Renowned Black writer 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 battlegro...

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 visi...

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 Ta...

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

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'....

BBC TV Special from 1988....

The life of the world’s top model Jean Shrimpton and her svengali photographer David Bailey....

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...

The end of the 'Daily Herald' and the beginning of a new daily paper, 'The Sun'. Also a portrait of its first editor, Hugh Cudlipp....

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....

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, J...

Dick Fontaine documents Norman Mailer’s 1969 bid for the Mayor’s office in New York City. Accompanied by his running mate, Jimmy Breslin, Mailer charismatically works the press and the public with a provocative platform that ultimately fails....

A satire on celebrity with a cacophony of gossip merchants, publicists, and “a host of stars.”...

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 st...

Report on the death in San Quentin prison, California, on 21 August 1971 of six men including black militant, George Jackson, whose funeral was an occasion for oration by Black Panther leaders including Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton....