Films
One of Green's earliest films,The Rainbow Man/John 3:16, focuses on the life of Rollen Stewart, who became famous during the 1970s by appearing at thousands of televised sporting events wearing a rainbow-colored wig. The film premiered at the 1997 Sundance Film Festival, where director of programming Trevor Groth described it as "a parable about alienation, the media, and the meaninglessness that often defines American life."
Green's feature-length documentary film The Weather Underground focused on the group of young radicals of the same name, who during the late 1960s and '70s attempted to violently overthrow the United States government. The film premiered at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for a 2003 Academy Award for Documentary Feature category. The award winning film interweaves extensive archival material with modern-day interviews to explore the story of the Weather Underground. The New York Times film critic Elvis Mitchell called the documentary a "terrifically smart and solid piece of film-making."
Sam Green's documentary Utopia in Four Movements (2010) also premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, in the category entitled "New Frontiers." In this "live" documentary, Green narrates the 75-minute film while a live band performs the soundtrack; the film examines various topics, including an American exile in Cuba, the world's largest shopping mall (located in China), the treatment of mass graves, and the history of the man-made language Esperanto.
Green’s most recent project is a live documentary entitled The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller, about theorist and designer Buckminster Fuller, which features a live soundtrack by the band Yo La Tengo. The piece combines in-person narration and live music alongside projected film clips and photographs. It was commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and premiered at the San Francisco Film Festival in May 2012.
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Famous quotes containing the word films:
“Television does not dominate or insist, as movies do. It is not sensational, but taken for granted. Insistence would destroy it, for its message is so dire that it relies on being the background drone that counters silence. For most of us, it is something turned on and off as we would the light. It is a service, not a luxury or a thing of choice.”
—David Thomson, U.S. film historian. America in the Dark: The Impact of Hollywood Films on American Culture, ch. 8, William Morrow (1977)
“Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)