Slideshow
DUTCHMAN
U.K., 1966
Directed by Anthony Harvey
Based on the 1964 play by Amiri Baraka
Starring Shirley Knight, Al Freeman Jr.
Approx 55 min.
Adapted by Anthony Harvey from the controversial one-act play by Amiri Baraka, and nominated for the Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion, the British independent feature DUTCHMAN remains as provocative today as it was in 1966. In an empty New York City subway car, a sexually audacious white woman named Lula (Shirley Knight) taunts Clay (Al Freeman Jr.), a mild-mannered Black man, with mocking flirtations and increasingly offensive race-baiting. When Lula pushes him to his breaking point, Clay’s furious response appears to provide cathartic liberation—unless it portends a far more tragic fate. Baraka’s script suffuses DUTCHMAN with combative innuendo and allegorical dream logic, amplified by the tense, cinema-verité style of Harvey, a longtime editor who shot his directorial debut with fearless command, expertly excavating America’s deepest racial taboos.
Presented with support from The Ada Katz Fund for Literature in Film
With
The Candy Machine (1972, Directed by George Griffin)
“The man just wants a piece of candy. The candy machine just wants a piece of the man. A cartoon employing a novel xerox technique to combine animation and live action.” – George Griffin
Reviews
On The Candy Machine
“A paranoid trip into subway surrealism with a lurking figure who is the archetypical molester, a carnivorous candy machine, a brilliant technique of animation that looks like crazed Crayolas run amuck...”
– Harlan Ellision, L. A. Free Press