The Eclipse Viewer - Episode 7 - The Actuality Dramas of Allan King [Part 2]

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This podcast focuses on Criterion’s Eclipse Series of DVDs. Hosts David Blakeslee and Robert Nishimura give an overview of each box and offer their perspectives on the unique treasures they find inside. In this episode, David and Robert are joined (at the end) by Josh Brunsting as they conclude a two-part discussion of The Actuality Dramas of Allan King. This episode will focus on the last two films in this five-disc set, released in 2003 and 2005.

About the films:

Canadian director Allan King is one of cinema’s best-kept secrets. Over the course of fifty years, he shuttled between features and shorts, big-screen cinema and episodic television, comedy and drama, fiction and nonfiction. It was with his cinema-verité-style documentaries, though’”his ‘actuality dramas,’ as he called them’”that King left his greatest mark on film history. These startlingly intimate studies of people whose lives are in flux’”damaged children, warring spouses, the terminally ill’” always done without narration or interviews, are riveting and at times emotionally overwhelming. Humane, cathartic, and important, Allan King’s spontaneous portraits of the everyday demand to be seen.

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