Michael Blackwood Productions (Firm)

The members of a graduating class at the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of The Cooper Union in New York City explain their imaginative solutions to their fifth-year thesis assignment. In lucid and informed reasoning, they individually describe their sources and processes and also their progress in architectural language that impressively conveys the empowering nature of inspired professional education. With the participation of John Hejduk....

"There is no longer Japanese art, only Japanese artists. In the 1950s one could find Japanese qualities in the work of our abstract painters, but with Pop Art young artists felt liberated from the past and in the reality of the actual world. I am interested in the new generation of artists.". Filmed with ten artists and selected five for "JAPAN The New Art".. One was the Gutai group. It was one of the most important art movements and artist groups...

Filmed in 1983, AZNAVOUR: BREAKING AMERICA documents French "pop deity" Charles Aznavour as he moves his family from France to Los Angeles, while also attempting to make his name known to the masses in America. Known as "France's Frank Sinatra", we hear Aznavour's distinguished tenor voice as we follow him to rehearsals, recording his songs in english, and performing on Broadway. Within this film Charles' passion for his songs and stage work is displayed....

This video documents a historic two-day conference organized in March, 2003 by Bernard Tschumi, then Dean of the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture. The conference assembled some of the greatest minds in architecture. Most participants presented cutting edge concepts and ideas.

Known as "The B-Movie King", Roger Corman's filmography has paved ways for genre films, igniting the screen with his rambunctious exploitation cinema. This portrait, made by Christain Blackwood who at the time was an aspiring filmmaker himself, takes a closer look at Corman's plentiful career. Corman's early casts and crews were oftentimes bursting with young talent such as Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme and David Carradine. His horror-comedy hits...

Shot in 1959, Michael Blackwood's first film, Broadway Express, is a portrait of the people of New York City, as experienced in the city's lively subways. Blackwood's camera captures the beautiful and chaotic choreography of the commuters. Accompanied by a sparse musical score driven by punchy snare drums and rumbling piano notes that emulate the rhythmic, pacing pounding of the subway cars, this short film pulses with a frenetic energy that builds...

A visit in 1971 to the classrooms of the Juilliard School, the prominent music academy, introducing some of the gifted students and many of the brilliant faculty including: Paul Mann, Peter Mennin, Rosina Lhévinne, Jennie Tourel, Jose Limon, John Houseman, Ivan Galamian, Ania Dorfmann, Saul Goodman, and Beverley Johnson. A meaningful documentation of the school that was founded in 1905 as the Institute of Musical Art. The composer Peter Mennin became...

Set in and around East 77th Street, NEW YORKERS follows inhabitants of the neighborhood, documenting their small businesses, daily encounters and commentary on New York in the 1970s. With the neighborhood experiencing changes in culture, cost and character we get to know a wide range of residents, each vastly different from the last.

During the era of the silent film, movies were never really silent. Hidden in plain sight behind the films that made figures like Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton into cultural icons, were the musical giants whose compositions defined the very films that captivated a generation of movie-goers. "HOLLYWOOD'S MUSICAL MOODS" is an intimate conversation with some then-living legends from a bygone golden age of Hollywood, a freeze-frame of an era where...

Bernd and Hilla Becher discuss their beginnings as documentarians of 19th century industrial architecture while showing us their retrospective exhibition at Berlin's Hamburger Bahnhof Museum. Bernd and Hilla Becher had been working together as photographers since 1957, documenting and classifying endangered architecture, such as industrial structures, that are now vanishing from the modern landscape. By the end of the 1960's they became part of the...