“If Mark Twain were with us today, he would probably be engaged in endeavors comparable to [Brent] Green’s films.” Art Forum

“The whole point of this kind of cinema is that this is a live experience that will never happen again—it’s a celebration of the moment and the ephemeral and being present.” Sam Green

They aren’t related but one Green makes narrative shorts while the other Green makes documentaries.

Self-taught animator Brent Green and Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker Sam Green pair live music and narration with screenings of their best short films. Foley sound artist Kate Ryan and a band comprising Brendan Canty (Fugazi), James Canty (Nation of Ulysses), and Becky Foon (Silver Mt. Zion) perform live alongside the cinematic proceedings: flickering stop-motion Southern Gothic forays from Brent, engrossing documentaries about provincial dreamers and doers from Sam.

Previous Fringe Shows: Sam Green: The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller and The Measure of All Things.

$20 (general)
$14 (member) Join before you buy!
$15 (student and 25-and-under)

About Brent Green

Working in the Appalachian hills of rural Pennsylvania, Brent Green is a self-taught visual artist and filmmaker. Green’s films have screened, often with live musical accompaniment, in film and art settings alike at venues such as MoMA, The J. Paul Getty Museum, The Walker Art Center, The Hammer Museum, The Boston MFA, The Wexner Center for the Arts, The Indianapolis Museum of Art, The Rotterdam Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival and even extending to rooftops, warehouses and galleries throughout the globe. Often, his sculptural work and large-scale installation are displayed alongside his animated films, most recently with solo exhibitions at the ASU Art Museum, Site Santa Fe, 21c/Art Without Walls, Andrew Edlin Gallery, the Kohler and the Berkeley Art Museum. Green’s work has been supported by Creative Capital, the Sundance Institute and the MAP fund.  His work is in some fine permanent collections including the Progressive Collection, the Hammer Museum and MoMA.

About Sam Green

Sam Green is a New York-based documentary filmmaker. He received his Master’s Degree in Journalism from University of California Berkeley, where he studied documentary with acclaimed filmmaker Marlon Riggs. Green’s most recent projects are the “live documentaries” The Measure of All Things, (2014), The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller (with Yo La Tengo) (2012), and Utopia in Four Movements (2010). With all of these works, Green narrates the film in-person while musicians perform a live soundtrack.

Green’s 2004 feature-length film, the Academy Award-nominated documentary The Weather Underground, tells the story of a group of radical young women and men who tried to violently overthrow the United States government during the late 1960s and 70s. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, was broadcast on PBS, included in the Whitney Biennial, and has screened widely around the world.

Green is also a prolific maker of short documentaries, including: The Rainbow Man/John 3:16, lot 63, grave c, Pie Fight ’69 (directed with Christian Bruno), N-Judah 5:30, and The Fabulous Stains: Behind the Movie (directed with Sarah Jacobson). He has received grants from the Creative Capital, Rockefeller and Guggenheim Foundations, as well as the National Endowment for the Arts.  www.samgreen.to

Interview with Sam Green

FringeArts:  What makes the pairing of Brent’s work with your work interesting to you?

Sam Green: Anyway who knows our films knows that we are super different: I’m a very deliberate and I would say journalistically-based documentary filmmaker; Brent is a self-taught weirdo animato—he signs his work in a protean manner.

Sam Green and Brent Green

Even in the soundcheck I will be wondering how the hell this thing is gonna come together, but when we get on stage and the lights go down, it just happens. It’s still kind of a mystery to me, but I think what it is is that Brent’s pieces make mine more serious and artful, and my work makes his funnier and lighter.

FringeArts: What are some of the artistic qualities of the form that short films appeal to you?

Sam Green: This is actually less about short films, and more about the experience of live cinema. I’ve made lots of short films, and Brent has too, but I’ve never approached this show with that as important element.

We are trying to embrace the idea that cinema is fleeting, that any experience of it is unique. We are playing with that idea and infusing energy and humor and pathos into these films—the feeling of other people in a room with you, strangers, laughing or gasping.

Further Reading

Movies That Spill Beyond the Screen by Dennis Lim, The New York Times

Excerpt: Each performance of Mr. [Sam] Green’s live documentaries — which he does not plan to adapt for conventional screenings or home viewing — is a singular experience, and a collective one, with the potential for human connection and human error. He said there have been occasional flubs but no major blunders, although one viewer was apparently so soothed by Mr. Green’s congenial tone that he interrupted the performance to ask a question. Read the full article.

Brent Green Interview by Chris Chang, BOMB Magazine

Excerpt: The one thing I’ve always loved about performing the films and showing the films is that I still love every one I’ve made. Every part of them. And when I watch them, I think I was just trying to say something that was sincere… trying to state a clear, sincere epiphany. These things have a different meaning when you’re twenty, than when you’re thirty, forty, or fifty—but they always mean something, even if it’s just: I remember when I thought like that. But the meaning evolves as it goes. They never feel old to me. I don’t know if that means there’s something wrong with my brain. Read the full article.