This fine piece of fusion art is created by Hamish McCormick the brain and power behind Carnival Cinema. Over the last 11 years this fine film maker has followed yours truly around with a video camera and pretty much captured way more than the highlights of my life and career. As an ongoing series he will produce videos spanning a decade and fitting all matters of styles and contents. I will be posting them here on the Illuminated Showman and they will also be appearing over at the Carnival Chronicles.
The film below has been filmed in several sessions over a few years and the track is by the extraordinary blues man and raconteur C.W. Stoneking.
I truly hope you like this first installment in the series in The Way of the Showman - the Life and Times of Captain Frodo.
This is an episode from Penn and Teller's mini series called Magic and Mystery tour. There are so many things that are great about this show that I just urge you to check it out.
The journey they take as magicians to meet fellow crafts men living in rather simple ways is very interesting. They set out to discover the Indian Rope trick but the show is much more than that. It's a respectful look at street magicians in India. To put the two intrepid suit wearing magicians in touch with the apparently lowly caste of gypsies to which the street magicians belong they have the author of the superb study of Indian Street Magic; the Net of Magic by Lee Siegel.
It is a beautiful and insightful look at the history and origin of Magic by two of my favorite magicians. Enjoy.
This is a sweet surreal or possibly impressionistic look at Coney Island. Great footage from behind the scenes and from before the crowds of the amusement parks and beaches arrive to the heated girls shows packed with people at night.
The Venice Film Festival Prize-winning documentary Coney Island, USA
(1952), narrated by New York wit & journalist Henry Morgan, without
totally trashing Coney Island is the first film to really get round to a
bigger dose or reality than might be expected of a tourist film.
Throughout it retains an air of the macabre, weird dolls &
mannequins, shouting barkers, eerie angles of whirling rides like the
Virginia Wheel & the Cyclone, the screaming of frightened
funseekers, hairy arms tearing tickets, the promise of being
half-killed, humanity swarming like insects as Henry Morgan narrates
with venomous irony, "You & I in the sun, you & I alone." Shots are speeded up, blurry, distorted; the music rises in an
industrialist beat shifting into happy carny sounds shifting into
suspense notes.
Verging into horror documentary, the attitude of grotesquery never quite
warns you away from Coney Island, but is a lot more honest than any
earlier film, showing everything except the outright prostitution &
pickpocketing.
The Venice Film Festival Prize-winning documentary Coney Island, USA (1952), narrated by New York wit & journalist Henry Morgan, without totally trashing Coney Island is the first film to really get round to a bigger dose or reality than might be expected of a tourist film.
