Movies: Jonathan Schwartz

In order to beat inflation and subsidize their alimony checks, three suburban housewives plot to steal $1 million from a large plastic ball which is displayed in a local shopping center....

Potential Northwestern fellow Tess Harper lasers through her best friend's wedding planning like the star doctor she hopes to soon become. In fact, Tess puzzles through any problem - provided it's not her own. When she meets divorce lawyer and groom'...

A visual essay about the progressive tradition of the United States as seen through grave markers and monuments....

When a character moves off screen, we accept the fact that he is out of sight, but he continues to exist in his own capacity at some other place in the decor which is hidden from us. There are no wings to the screen. Facts are perceptions of surfaces...

Documentary on the 1953 musical "The Band Wagon."...

It arrives, in a fog, with songs, through dance or majestic animals or faces (gliding on the street), and in shapes of light, maybe on a large bird of prey in flight - gesture skyward. Some origins can be difficult to pinpoint, others blink back - in...

From 'A Set Of Miniatures'...

Situated amid the in between of ascending and descending. It seems hard to land and when this happens something else might disappear....

Jonathan Schwartz is a young American experimental filmmaker who has crafted a body of short, lyrical 16mm films over the past decade. Working with the legacies of anthropological and observational non-fiction cinema, and in the avant-garde tradition...

A film with a hypnotizing sense of diagonal light and movement. The title refers to the 1917 Hermann Hesse short story, part of his collection of fairy tales....

Schwartz explores the effect of light as both mystery and revelation. Glazed water in erubescent evenings discloses the shadowed details of the streets of Istanbul....

From the 33 1/3 Series (an album of eleven 'in-camera' 16mm films)...

That fall it was not intentional to have a Galway Kinnell book on the table near where the caterpillar in the doorway, feeding on our offerings, became the butterfly, feeding on honey water, staying in our house until we let it go. Or it was not know...

A poetic travelogue through the city of Jerusalem....

(Maybe) of finding neutral signs in a non-neutral place while tension sits, increases, is shared, builds, or possibly lessens–or maybe is placed elsewhere for a while. Some birds move easily across, from above. You can hear them all over and the bree...

Schwartz’s poetic 16mm work meditates on the sights and sounds of slowly crumbling glaciers, charting an interior dance between desperation and hope. The carefully deployed superimpositions, strident soundtrack, and contrasting tones of intensity and...

A stark winter, children at play, and an elder in motion augment words - spoken and sung - of paternal ties and loss....

Schwartz approaches light traveling through water in all its forms. His macro lens strives to get closer to the essence, to the transparency of things, and yet, the tenebrous and doomed cry of a church’s bell, and the ascending, unstoppable pitch tha...

a certain worry enveloped in the covering of the ground, illuminated around a face, light on something ferocious, touch upon something gentle....

The camera remains static to capture the accelerated movements, shot frame-by-frame, of ice skaters in a sunny winter morning. They are not portrayed as living things–they don’t have the ability to speak, and they look like robots from another planet...