Program 5 The Everyday Turn
The Chair
- 1962 / B&W / Digital File (Original: 16mm) / 58 min
Executive Producer, Correspondent: Robert Drew
Filmmaker, Correspondent: Gregory Shuker
Filmmaker, Editor: Richard Leacock
Editors: Ellen Huxley, Joyce Chopra, Patricia Powell
Assistants: Gary Youngman, Silvia Gilmore, Nicholas Proferes
Narration: James Lipscomb
Correspondents: John Macdonald, Sam Adams
Source: Drew Associates
Perhaps the purest example of Direct Cinema’s “crisis structure”—documenting a real-life, high-stakes situation that rises to an intense climax—The Chair depicts the anxious moments when a black man awaits a court decision: life imprisonment or the electric chair.
Happy Mother’s Day
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1963 / B&W / Digital File (Original: 16mm) / 26 min
Directors: Joyce Chopra, Richard Leacock
Source: Pennebaker Hegedus Films
In the 1960s the birth of quintuplets was world-wide news. Chopra and Leacock arrive with a flock of reporters, but in the course of filmmaking discover that the media circus was their real subject.