New England Legacy Screenings: Primary, The Collective

Name: New England Legacy Screenings: Primary, The Collective
Start: 2025-03-19T19:00:00-04:00
Location: Coolidge Corner Theatre

Schedule

Wed, 19 Mar, 2025 at 07:00 pm

UTC-04:00

Location

Coolidge Corner Theatre | Brookline, MA

New England has a rich history in documentary filmmaking that continues today. Beginning in the 1960s–'80s, filmmakers in the Boston area were pioneering technical innovations that allowed for radical new approaches to documentary that influenced the genre's directions. Their early cinema vérité work set the trajectory of documentary filmmaking in the US and created landmark works posing questions of politics, gender, and social norms and rituals.
New England Legacy Screenings, in partnership with the LEF Foundation, will highlight the variety of styles developed amidst this ever-evolving cinematic legacy, from the journalistic to first-person autobiographical storytelling. Each evening we will examine multiple artists whose stories created impact and whose artistic lens sparks dialogue to the present day.
Program:
PRIMARY (dir. Robert Drew, 1960, 53min)
Robert Drew's groundbreaking 1960 film PRIMARY is one of the most important and influential documentaries in the history of the medium. A pioneering work in the documentary movement that came to be known as cinéma vérité, PRIMARY follows the young charismatic senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy, as he goes head-to-head with established Minnesota senator Hubert Humphrey to win the Wisconsin presidential primary in April 1960.

THE COLLECTIVE (dir. Richard Broadman, 1960, 60min)
In 1970, thousands of young people thought of themselves as agents of change. They wanted to restore America's democratic vision; they wanted to end the war in Vietnam. This is the story of one collective—their successes and failures, and what they do and think fifteen years later.
THE COLLECTIVE: FIFTEEN YEARS LATER, released in 1985, is a portrayal of political activism, "reflecting on both the excitement and the disappointment of their political engagement, informants are, by turns, candid, rueful, and idealistic; they're unsparing in acknowledging their own mistakes both in analyzing and in organizing against a structure of oppression centering on, but extending beyond, militarism and neocolonialism." – Chris Wellin, "Documentary Film, Teaching, and the Accumulation of Sociological Insight: The Work of Richard Broadman", Teaching Sociology (2013)