Saturday, July 30, 2011

Weekend Video 2

I may have posted the video excerpt from Jazz On A Summer's Day back in the earliest days of this blog, but so be it. It was brought to mind again when the fashion designer Wayne Hemingway was interviewed on BBC Radio 4 about the upsoming Vintage Festival 2011. This event on London's South Bank is in many ways a celebration of nostalgia and bygone elegance. (There's a link here to a Guardian article.)

But movies, too, are part of this retrospective. They include films which are to be screened in this  22-seat mobile cinema, restored to original condition but packed now with digital technology. And one of the movies Hemingway cited as being a unique record of a fascinating era is Jazz On A Summer's Day,filmed at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1958 while the Amerca's Cup yacht race was also taking place offshore of this Ivy League resort community.

This is a film, released in 1960, which was programmed at the art cinema in Dallas where I worked as a student and it was one of the very few American productions in a repertoire which otherwise comprised almost exclusively films made in nouvelle vague Europe. It was co-directed by the fashion photographer Bert Stern who shot so memorably the last session with Marylin Monroe and also created the iconic images with which later Lolita was advertised to successfully..

Okay, that explains sufficently... I think... the pix and clip posted below.


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