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| Washington Square Park, April 9, 1961. Frame from Sunday courtesy of Dan Drasin |
Happy April 9th!
It's the 50th anniversary of teenager Dan Drasin shooting his documentary film of a protest in Washington Square Park (Greenwich Village), at which a few hundred folksingers and civil libertarians gathered to demonstrate against New York City's ban on . . . wait for it . . . singing folk songs in the park!
NPR's "Morning Edition" today broadcast a piece about the event and interviewed Dan Drasin.
LISTEN: http://www.npr.org/2011/04/09/135240040/how-the-beatnik-riot-helped-kick-off-the-60s
On the webpage there's a link to Drasin's own page, where he generously allows us to watch his 17-minute movie.
Sunday was originally distributed by Emile de Antonio, who then took Warhol to see it, which got Andy interested in making films himself. Sunday was preserved by the UCLA FilmTV Archive's Ross Lipman, with funding from The Film Foundation. The 16mm original was also blown up to 35mm, a print of which premiered at the 2008 Orphan Film Symposium at NYU.
See Sunday in 35mm at "Celebrating Orphan Films," May 13-14, 2011, at UCLA's Billy Wilder Theater (in the Hammer Museum). The celebrations are co-presented by the UCLA Film & Television Archive, New York University's Orphan Film Symposium (see also NYU Tisch School of the Arts and Department of Cinema Studies, Moving Image Archiving and Preservation program), along with Los Angeles Filmforum.
