EVERY TIME WE SAY GOODBYE: FILMS BY BRUCE WEBER
Featuring new 4K restorations courtesty of Kino Lorber!
Films in this Program
Bruce Weber
75 minutes
Black-and-white pics of male models in Calvin Klein knickers - that's photographer Bruce Weber. Or is it? His first feature, an experimental documentary in b&w and color, breaks the mold. BROKEN NOSES centers on ex-Olympian lightweight boxer Andy Minsker as he devotedly coaches teenage hopefuls, even as he realizes his dream is gone.
The film follows Minsker around Portland, Oregon: he talks to camera, engages parents and friends in tense, hearty conversation, and hangs out with his adopted gang, the tough kids he trains in his Mt Scott boxing club. Most of the kids are from broken homes and many of their parents were in prison. The film traces Minsker’s boxing career, his fights in Las Vegas and his training of the young men whom he’s almost adopted as his own sons. The unstable foundations of faux machismo gently rock the screen and truth leaks out. Weber's eye is insistent, coaxing out the most deeply engaging moments from this battered world.
The film follows Minsker around Portland, Oregon: he talks to camera, engages parents and friends in tense, hearty conversation, and hangs out with his adopted gang, the tough kids he trains in his Mt Scott boxing club. Most of the kids are from broken homes and many of their parents were in prison. The film traces Minsker’s boxing career, his fights in Las Vegas and his training of the young men whom he’s almost adopted as his own sons. The unstable foundations of faux machismo gently rock the screen and truth leaks out. Weber's eye is insistent, coaxing out the most deeply engaging moments from this battered world.
Bruce Weber
120 minutes
A James Dean look alike pretty boy whose jazz trumpeting and melancholy epitomized ’50s cool, Chet Baker had become, when famed photographer Bruce Weber finally caught up with him after three decades of fandom, an alcoholic and a junkie, whose petulantly angelic looks peeping out from behind a gaunt, valleyed and crevassed face could have starred for Sam Peckinpah. Here we spend two visually stunning and musically moving hours with the iconic jazz trumpeter in the most romantically erotic jazz documentary ever made, shot in stark, brooding film noir black & white. Shifting back and forth from past to present, from Baker’s breakout performance and his controversial “doomed youth” years, to his poignant late-career decline and struggles with addiction, LET’S GET LOST forms a dreamy, improvisational quality offering a rare, behind-the-scenes glimpse into the decadent life of one of jazz music’s shattered geniuses.
Bruce Weber
98 minutes
For over four years Bruce Weber photographed one subject: Peter Johnson. What began as a photographic journey to document Peter’s transition from boyhood into manhood led to the making of the film CHOP SUEY. A deeply personal film, feeling very much like a journal or a scrapbook, CHOP SUEY is an homage to all things the filmmaker loves most: from Robert Mitchum and Diana Vreeland to such less-known figures as lesbian jazz legend Frances Faye and desert explorer Sir Wilfred Thesiger. Mixing film, archival footage, still photography and a rich and expansive soundtrack, the movie is a piquant show-and-tell, a sophisticate’s tour that delves surprisingly deep into the hurting heart of image-making.
