Marc Blitzstein

A true story of politics and art in the 1930s USA, centered around a leftist musical drama and attempts to stop its production.

Joris Ivens’s advocacy documentary for the Republican cause intercuts a besieged Madrid with a nearby village digging an irrigation canal, linking the war to bread, land, and survival. Produced by the writers’ collective Contemporary Historians, edited by Helen van Dongen, scored by Marc Blitzstein, and narrated in its U.S. version by Ernest Hemingway (after an initial Orson Welles track), it blends frontline reportage with persuasion against Franco’s forces and their German–Italian backers.

This film was not intended to stand by itself, but was designed as the cinematic aspect of Welles' Mercury Theatre stage presentation of William Gillette's 1894 comedy about a New York playboy who flees from the violent husband of his mistress and borrows the identity of a plantation owner in Cuba who is expecting the arrival of a mail order bride. The film component of the performance was ultimately never screened due to the absence of projection facilities at the venue. Long-believed to be lost, a workprint was discovered in 2008 and the film had its premiere in 2013.

A filmed version of the 1985 revival of the Marc Blitzstein musical. This revival was filmed at the Old Vic, with former members of The Acting Company.

A documentary examining the effects of industrial automation on a small American town.

The use of human hands as characters in a dance inspired narrative are used to explore female experience and representation. By drawing upon experimental traditions found in international art, film, and photography movements of the 1920s, Simon transforms a simple melodramatic love story into an avant-garde feminist short film.