Watch the trailer at: http://johnfaheyfilm.com/The_Film.html
In Search of Blind Joe Death: The Saga of John Fahey will be a biographical documentary that will visually evoke the vision of a great artist. It will employ beautifully textured, non-linear, cinematic and thoroughly entertaining means to launch a wide audience into the universe constructed and inhabited by John Fahey. The film will rely first and foremost on the music of John Fahey. With the active support and cooperation of both The John Fahey Trust and Dean Blackwood of Revenant Records, the second of Fahey’s own recording companies, the film will access a rich and otherwise inaccessible Fahey archive of musical recordings, moving images, photographs, prose and paintings. The visual archive of Fahey performing is very rich. The collection of photographs is equally extensive. We will further augment this live action archive with short animated sequences that will evoke Fahey’s artistic, imagined universe.
In narrative terms, viewers will hear most frequently from Fahey himself, both in video and audio recordings made during his lifetime and in voice-over from his outstanding prose which will be read by a dramatic actor. The film narrative will further rely on a small handful of informants with intimate and highly nuanced appreciations of John Fahey’s life and times. These informants will include his former wife, the visual artist Melody Fahey, guitarists Terry Robb and Pete Townshend; Fahey’s partner in Revenant Records and friend Dean Blackwood; Grammy Award winning musicologist Rob Bowman; and the writer and author Li Robbins.
Inventive and highly cinematic video recordings from the film locations will visually support and evoke for audiences the natural and urban environments that inspired Fahey’s work. We will tape in the area of Washington, DC where Fahey grew up; in Mississippi Delta, where he pursued a quest to understand the origins of blues music; and in Salem, Oregon and the rain forest of the Columbia River gorge which nurtured the extraordinary, sometimes troubling, artistic out-put of the last 15 years of Fahey’s career and life.
We will not engage in hagiography, nostalgia or sentimentalism. John Fahey was a great artist… a genius to some. He was also a complex, imperfect man who had his demons. In Search of Blind Joe Death: The Saga of John Fahey will do visual, intellectual and artistic justice to the rich panorama of Americana and the universe encompassed in John Fahey’s mind.
In Search of Blind Joe Death
The Saga of John Fahey
A DOCUMENTARY FILM IN PRODUCTION
-Director/Producer /Writer
James Cullingham
-Producer (Oregon)
Doug Whyte
-Director of Photography
Igal Hecht
-Editor
Jessica Anne Cullingham
-Executive Producers
James Cullingham
JoAnn McCaig
-Contributors
Dean Blackwood
Rob Bowman
Melody Fahey
Tim Knight
Terry Robb
Li Robbins
Ayal Senior
Pete Townshend
-Development Production Assistant and Researcher
Kristin Davis
-Additional Photography
Peter Richardson
-Intern
Jordan Goldstein
-Website
James Cullingham
Jessica Anne Cullingham
Kristin Davis
-Links
www.johnfahey.com
http://tamaracklodge.wordpress.com/
http://johnfahey.blogspot.com
http://delta-slider.blogspot.com/
Tamarack Productions
266 Bain Ave.
Toronto, Ontario
M4K 1G3
Still photography courtesy of The John Fahey Trust, Jessica Anne Cullingham, Igal Hecht, Stefan Grossman, Paul Kelly, Marc Minsker & Doug Whyte.
Produced with the support of The John Fahey Trust.
Read more at johnfaheyfilm.com
A film overdue since the minute Mr. Fahey passed away. How great is this.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the post!