Music for the Movies: Bernard Herrmann

An intimate portrait of Suzan-Lori Parks, featuring actors Don Cheadle and Jeffrey Wright. The film shows the playwright’s process and how a play gets produced in behind-the-scenes footage of Topdog/Underdog in rehearsal and performance. It captures the play’s triumphant Broadway debut and traces Parks’ opportunities, challenges, and personal milestones during the production of her 2002 Pulitzer Prize winner.

Using historical footage, still photographs, and live interviews, the filmmaker tells the story of Jewish life in Poland between the two World Wars. Includes scenes of urban and rural life, and covers the rise and flourishing of the many religious and secular economic, political, and social movements which characterized Jewish society at this time. Film is a broad survey rather than focusing on any particular sub-topic. Notable in that it deals with the vibrancy of the life of this population of 3.5 million, and not with the tragedy of its subsequent destruction.

This extraordinary film tells the story of the men and women who formed the Jewish partisan movement in Vilna, Lithuania, during World War II. Using rare archival film footage dating from 1939 to 1944 and contemporary interviews with 40 partisan survivors (including Abba Kovner, a founder of the partisan movement and one of Israel's leading poets) the film explores the difficulties of organizing under the anarchic conditions of the ghetto.

This film documents the coal miners' strike against the Brookside Mine of the Eastover Mining Company in Harlan County, Kentucky in June, 1973. Eastover's refusal to sign a contract (when the miners joined with the United Mine Workers of America) led to the strike, which lasted more than a year and included violent battles between gun-toting company thugs/scabs and the picketing miners and their supportive women-folk. Director Barbara Kopple puts the strike into perspective by giving us some background on the historical plight of the miners and some history of the UMWA. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with New York Women in Film & Television in 2004.

Celebrities and creatives -- including musician David Byrne, performance artist Spalding Gray, comedian Sandra Bernhard, radical activist Abbie Hoffman, and poet Allen Ginsberg-- recall their earliest sexual experiences.

With a revived interest in the scores created for Hollywood films in the 1930's and 40's. "Music for the Movies: The Hollywood Sound" explores a segment of that legacy through composers like Max Steiner ("Gone with the Wind"), Franz Waxman ("Bride of Frankenstein") and Erich Korngold ("The Adventures of Robin Hood"), all of whom came from Europe. Steiner was a pupil of Ravel. The American roster includes David Raksin ("Laura") and Alfred Newman ("The Hunchback of Notre Dame"). Host and narrator John Mauceri conducts the BBC National Orchestra of Wales against a backdrop of clips from the various movies.