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Marc Israel is a filmmaker and musician. He started his career as a traveling "one-man band", but later changed his focus to making documentaries and films about his life.
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Marc Israel is a filmmaker and musician. He started his career as a traveling "one-man band", but later changed his focus to making documentaries and films about his life.
Marc Israel was born and raised in Cinnaminson Township, New Jersey. A graduate of the New School for Social Research, Israel spent the remainder of his twenties hitchhiking the world and performing as a one-man-band. His often-improvised songs were of a humorous and sometimes bawdy nature, based on early American musical forms such as Delta Blues and primitive country music. Beginning in 1994, Israel lived and performed with Allen Ginsberg on and off until the poet's death. [1] His first feature-length film, How I Spent My Summer Vacation (1997), documented one of his cross-country hitchhikes as well as the effects and aftershocks of Ginsberg's passing on his close friends. It featured conversations with futurist Geoff Manaugh, poet Anne Waldman, and a host of strangers in their cars.
In 1999, due to mounting stage fright, Israel ceased performing music, but continued creating films of various lengths, genres, and styles, often focusing on his own emotional troubles, presented with candor and humor. In 2000, he completed the low-budget comic/horror fiction film Frankenstein's Little Monster, a re-visioning of Mary Shelley's novel focusing on the monster's frenzied sexual desires and eventual spiritual awakening. It included Beat Generation poet Peter Orlovsky in the role of Hindu holyman Rick Shaw. The documentary La Hamburguesa Magica (2003) presents a plagued and near-fatal Mexico misadventure undertaken by Israel and then-girlfriend Elyse Allen. By film's end they have separated and Marc is in a mental hospital. Nearer My God to Thee (2005), then follows a heartbroken and fragile Israel to Brazil, where he is seeking the help of famed "miracle man" João de Deus (medium) (John of God). It also explores the previous year's difficulties leading to this journey, including tendinitis, an invasion of ants into his house, an accidental wound to his penis, the aforementioned heartbreak, and a newly failed relationship. [2] A Balancing Act (2007), which won "Best Comedy Documentary" at both the Atlanta International Documentary Film Festival [3] and Montezuma International Film Festival, begins by tracking Israel as he presents Nearer My God to Thee at festivals, but departs from his trademark self-surveillance style as he learns about a mysterious event in Vietnam where contestants balance various objects on motorbikes. His curiosity leads him first to the Museum of Ephemerata in Texas where the curators restore him to health with their life-affirming attitudes and endless supply of Kombucha tea, [4] then to Iowa City where he develops a strong kinship with an eccentric university scholar who lectures on the balancing contest, and eventually to Southeast Asia, hitchhiking through Thailand, Cambodia, and finally Vietnam, where the contest takes place. [5]
After A Balancing Act, Marc Israel has created a series of short films including Encounters With Sarah [6] (commissioned by Found Magazine founder Davy Rothbart), a music video about his cat Barkley, [7] a documentary about folk music legend Michael Hurley, [8] and "an epic sea odyssey" filmed entirely in his bathtub using rubber duckies.
While Israel's personal documentaries have been lauded for their emotional honesty, [9] some viewers have questioned the legitimacy of Israel's claims to mental illness. "Supposedly suffering from an undiagnosable condition....the more he dwells on himself, the more convinced he is (and the less convinced the viewer is) of his mysterious handicaps", writes one film critic. [10] Alternately, there has been some speculation about whether the Museum of Ephemerata's "unique" Kombucha brew really had the positive mental health effects Israel claimed. "I no longer wanted to kill myself or anyone else. It caused a 'rebirth of wonder' within my whole molecular structure", says Israel in A Balancing Act. Mr. Israel started his own Kombucha brand, Phenomenal World Kombucha (named after his production company Phenomenal World Cinema), but halted operations due to an overwhelming increase of supply and demand inspired by word-of-mouth, association with his films, and endorsements by Michael Hurley.
Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and writer. As a student at Columbia University in the 1940s, he began friendships with William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, forming the core of the Beat Generation. He vigorously opposed militarism, economic materialism, and sexual repression, and he embodied various aspects of this counterculture with his views on drugs, sex, multiculturalism, hostility to bureaucracy, and openness to Eastern religions.
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"Nearer, My God, to Thee" is a 19th-century Christian hymn by Sarah Flower Adams, which retells the story of Jacob's dream. Genesis 28:11–12 can be translated as follows: "So he came to a certain place and stayed there all night because the sun had set. And he took one of the stones of that place and put it at his head, and he lay down in that place to sleep. Then he dreamed, and behold, a ladder was set up on the earth, and its top reached to heaven; and there the angels of God were ascending and descending on it..."
The Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles(IFFLA) is an annual film festival held in Los Angeles, California. Established by Christina Marouda in 2003, as a nonprofit organization devoted to paving the way for a greater appreciation of Indian cinema and diverse culture by providing the public with a selection of films from and about the Indian diaspora by Indian and international filmmakers.
Michael Hurley is an American folk singer-songwriter who was essential to the Greenwich Village folk music scene of the 1960s and 1970s. In addition to playing a wide variety of instruments, Hurley is also a cartoonist and a painter.
Khosrow Sinai was an Iranian film director, screenwriter, composer, poet and scholar.
My Winnipeg is a 2007 Canadian film directed and written by Guy Maddin with dialogue by George Toles. Described by Maddin as a "docu-fantasia", that melds "personal history, civic tragedy, and mystical hypothesizing", the film is a surrealist mockumentary about Winnipeg, Maddin's home town. A New York Times article described the film's unconventional take on the documentary style by noting that it "skates along an icy edge between dreams and lucidity, fact and fiction, cinema and psychotherapy".
Rosto, was a Dutch artist and filmmaker best known for his award-winning short film trilogy and online graphic novel Mind My Gap. Rosto is the founder and owner of Studio Rosto A.D, a film production company, animation studio and atelier in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Jeffrey Friedman is an American filmmaker. In 2021, he and Rob Epstein won a Grammy Award for their work on the documentary film Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice
Howl is a 2010 American film which explores both the 1955 Six Gallery debut and the 1957 obscenity trial of 20th-century American poet Allen Ginsberg's noted poem "Howl". The film is written and directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman and stars James Franco as Ginsberg.
Barry Michael Avrich is a Canadian film director, film producer, author, marketing executive, and arts philanthropist. Avrich's film career has included critically acclaimed films about the entertainment business including The Last Mogul about film producer Lew Wasserman (2005), Glitter Palace about the Motion Picture Country Home (2005), and Guilty Pleasure about the Vanity Fair columnist and author Dominick Dunne (2004). In addition, Avrich produced the Gemini-nominated television special Caesar and Cleopatra (2009) with Christopher Plummer. Avrich also produced Canada's Sports Hall of Fame Awards (2015) as well as the Canadian Screen Awards (2015-2017) and The Scotiabank Giller Prize (2015-Current).
Psalm 71 is the 71st psalm of the Book of Psalms, beginning in English in the King James Version: "In thee, O LORD, do I put my trust: let me never be put to confusion". It has no title in the Hebrew version. In the slightly different numbering system used in the Greek Septuagint and Latin Vulgate translations of the Bible, this psalm is Psalm 70. In Latin, it is known as "In te Domine speravi".
Psalm 87 is the 87th psalm of the Book of Psalms, beginning in English in the King James Version: "His foundation is in the holy mountains.". In the slightly different numbering system used in the Greek Septuagint and Latin Vulgate translations of the Bible, this psalm is Psalm 86. In Latin, it is known as "Fundamenta eius in montibus sanctis". It was written by the sons of Korach. It describes Jerusalem as the center of the world or the "mother of nations", where God placed the Torah.
The 2014 Sundance Film Festival took place from January 16, 2014 until January 26, 2014 in Park City, Utah, United States, with screenings in Salt Lake City, Ogden, and Sundance Resort in Utah. The festival opened with Whiplash directed by Damien Chazelle and closed with musical drama Rudderless directed by William H. Macy.
