ACTUALITY DRAMAS OF ALLAN KING - DVD-ECLIPSE SERIES 24 (CRITERION)

Details

• Genre: Drama
• Plot: Canadian director Allan King is one of cinema's best-kept secrets. Over the course of fifty years, King shuttled between features and shorts, big-screen cinema and episodic television, comedy and drama, fiction and nonfiction. It was with his cinema-verité-style documentaries—his 'actuality dramas,' as he called them—that he left his greatest mark on film history. These startlingly intimate studies of lives in flux—emotionally troubled children, warring spouses, the terminally ill—always done without narration or interviews, are riveting, and at times emotionally overwhelming. Humane, cathartic, and important, Allan King's spontaneous portraits of the everyday demand to be seen.; ; WARRENDALE; In his feature debut, which followed years of short films, King takes viewers into an experimental home for troubled youths. This unsettling, cleansing work of pure emotion is one of the benchmarks of Direct Cinema.; ; A MARRIED COUPLE; The institution of marriage gets a major workout in this alternately amusing and disturbing peek at the domestic lives of Billy and Antoinette Edwards, who, like the viewers of A Married Couple, are too close for comfort.; ; COME ON CHILDREN; Inviting a group of disaffected teenagers to live on a farm, away from parental supervision, for ten weeks. King captures for posterity an oddly beautiful portrait of early 1970s alienation.; ; DYING AT GRACE; King's late-career masterpiece is one of the most emotionally affecting works of nonfiction in cinema history, an uncompromising look at the final days of five terminally ill patients. Such a description can barely prepare you for the power and elegance of Dying at Grace.; ; MEMORY FOR MAX, CLAIRE, IDA AND COMPANY; In filming a group of nursing home residents with different forms of dementia, King takes a touching, immensely humane portrait of the precariousness of memory.
• Runtime: 9:12
• Media Format: Movie