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Home of Academy and
Emmy
nominated filmmaker Frederick Marx |
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PROJECTS |
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NOTES FROM A VIDEO STORE JOCKEY
"The uncanny timing of video releases never ceases to amaze me. This week, Facets Video releases three documentaries by Frederick Marx, right on the heels of the House of Representatives' request that employees of National Public Radio fill out questionnaires regarding their political affiliations. Despite its overall brevity - 52 minutes - the collection encompasses half a century of the toll taken by such political repression. As in the outstanding HOOP DREAMS, a collaboration with filmmakers Peter Gilbert and Steve James, Marx poignantly reveals the clash between people's dreams, both political and personal, and the systems of power they entrust them with. In HOUSE OF UN-AMERICAN ACTIVITIES (1984), Marx paints a portrait of his father, Werner Marx, whom he never got a chance to know. The elder Marx, a German Jewish refugee before World War II and a U.S. Navy sailor during it, was investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee in the mid-'50s and died when the filmmaker was 9. Using home movies, government documents and interviews with his mother, Marx attempts to fill in the silences created in HUAC's aftermath. In the mid-'80s, Marx picks up echoes of that silence in Communist China. In DREAMS FROM CHINA (1989), Marx explores the cityscapes of Tianjin and Beijing in the months before the government's renewed fight against "cultural pollution." Good friends stop speaking to Marx - a foreigner, and worse yet, a foreigner with a camera. In the five minute DREAM DOCUMENTARY (1981), a compilation of found footage, Marx fuses Vietnam, China, the civil rights movement and American sports into a whirlwind of politics and culture. Marx's work, taken as a whole, is an eloquent, sobering and, unfortunately, all-too-timely reminder of the constant threat to our civil liberties."
-- Paul Malcolm, LA WEEKLY, 2/17/95
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DREAM DOCUMENTARY
"A well titled fantasy with a conscience."
-- P.G. Springer, C-U News Gazette
"A filmic version of Arnold Schonberg's 'Accompaniment for a Cinematographic Scene' which Schonberg composed for an imaginary film and subtitled "Coming Danger - Fear - Catastrophy."
With film material shot by others, footage from Viet Nam... a credit sequence shown backwards, a dramatic change between black and white film stock, Marx succeeds in evoking a feeling of danger which is as fearful as it is inexplicable... What is especially brilliant about this short film is the precision with which it is edited. Each sequence has exactly the right length, to keep our senses over-awake and in tension... a masterpiece of compilation film.
Eisler in his book on film music: "To the extent that the motion picture in its sensationalism is the heir of the popular horror story and dime novel and remains below the established standards of middle-class art, it is in a position to shatter those standards, precisely through the use of sensation, and to gain access to collective energies that are inaccessible to sophisticated literature and painting." If one follows this definition of film as political object, DREAM DOCUMENTARY is one of the most politically relevent films of the last few years.""
-- Alf Bold, Berlin Kinemathek Catalog
"Especially impressive, DREAM DOCUMENTARY uses found footage, inventive editing, and an effectively selective soundtrack to comment on the ways that we look at the third world."
-- J. Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
"Compelling ambivalence caught between the personal and the public, passion and analysis."
-- Bruce Jenkins, Walker Art Center
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HOUSE OF UNAMERICAN ACTIVITIES
"A documentary that mixes personal and public history as it describes the 1956 persecution of Marx's father - a Jewish refugee who fled Germany in 1939 and joined the Communist Party in 1945."
-- J. Rosenbaum, The Reader
"I have been against all kinds of enslavement of people all my life regardless of where they occur, and against any curtailment of civil liberties wherever they occur." So said Werner Marx - German-Jewish refugee, distinguished sailor in the U.S. Navy during WWII, American Communist - to the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities in 1956. "You are not fit to be a citizen of the United States," replied the U.S. Representative who tried to have Marx denaturalized.
Drawing on a wealth of family archives (stills, home movies, documents, and a video interview with the filmmaker's mother), this film is both a personal look at a man by a son who never really knew his own father and a pointed look at an era."
-- Ron Epple, Picture Start Catalog
"A tension caught between De Antonio revelation and the lyricism of personal filmmaking. Quite an achievement in the sheer efficacy of its telling."
-- Bruce Jenkins, Walker Art Center
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DREAMS FROM CHINA
"A foreigner's personal confrontation with the historic political and economic changes taking place in China. Shot between 1983-1985 when Marx was working in Tianjin and Beijing, the film is a diary-like account of his alienation and acclimation, a highly lyrical film essay lending perspective to the 1989 tragedy of Tiananmen Square."
-- Milosz Stehlik, Facets Video Catalog
"The portrait of China it presents is highly personal, full of fascinating details, and for the most part, given Marx's leftist background, unfashionably negative."
-- J. Rosenbaum, The Reader
"Extremely sincere... Marx’s voice-over presents a paradox of Chinese politics and society."
-- Caryn James, New York Times
"Sensitive, powerful, and prophetic."
-- Edwin Jahiel, C-U News Gazette
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