FILMS BY JOHN COHEN
Visions of Mary Frank (2014): A Film by John Cohen | 55:18
John Cohen- filmmaker, photographer, musician, ethnographer- visits with his friend Mary Frank in her Chelsea studio, talking about her life and her art. "A rebel and iconoclast: Mary Frank remains true to her vision, not artistic fashions- and it is a vision that hovers between the natural world and the world of the imagination."
Puno en Mountain Music of Peru (1984) - A Film by John Cohen | 8:34
The High Lonesome Sound (1963) By John Cohen | 30:36
A founding member of the folk band New Lost City Ramblers and an accomplished still photographer in the tradition of Walker Evans, John Cohen also made a number of excellent documentaries on American and indigenous Peruvian music, crafts, and folklore. High Lonesome Sound is a classic of the genre—as essential as the work of ethnomusicologists John and Alan Lomax and Harry Smith—documenting mountain music in the hardscrabble coal country of eastern Kentucky during a period of dire poverty. The film is a haunting record of the Appalachian ballads of miners and farmers, of riverside baptisms and revivalist church meetings and Roscoe Holcomb on his back porch and Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys on main street, which Cohen (assisted by James Agee’s son Joel) made some 13 years before Barbara Kopple documented union strife in the same region in Harlan County, USA. Cohen shot with the same 16mm camera that Robert Frank, Danny Lyon, and Albert Maysles used on their own films. [MoMa Film Department 2024]
Recent Screening: MoMA, Nov 2024
The End of an Old Song (1969) By John Cohen | 27:21
Roscoe Holcomb from Daisy, Kentucky (2010). A Film by John Cohen | 29:00
Roscoe Holcomb was one of America’s greatest banjo players, a musician whose haunting vocal intonations, Old Regular Baptist in tradition, gave Bob Dylan and Eric Clapton the chills and gave John Cohen’s 1963 film High Lonesome Sound its name. Drawing on footage he shot in 1962 and 1974 in Daisy, Kentucky, Cohen made this incredibly moving portrait of Holcomb, for whom the holy spirit always rose up plain and true: “Sometimes, you know, you feel like playing certain songs. I feel like playing the old banjo, I feel like playing some religious songs. I sit down, I feel lonesome. I could play you some of these old religious songs and it just fits me plumb through. Or I could pick up the guitar—the guitar is mostly for the blues. It’s just according to what a man feels, what he’s got on his mind.” His body ravaged by a life in the coal mines and sawmills, Roscoe Holcomb died in 1981 at the age of 68. [MoMA, Nov, 2024}
Recent screenings: MoMA, Nov 29, Dec 2, 2024
Musical Holdouts (1975) By John Cohen | 49:17
Post Industrial Fiddle (1982) By John Cohen | 22:48
Gypsies Sing Long Ballads (1982) By John Cohen | 28:16
Pericles in America (1988) By John Cohen | 1:08:26
This musical portrait of immigrant clarinetist Pericles Halkias and the Epirot-Greek community explores the aspirations and ambivalences of Greek-Americans. Moving between Queens, New York and northern Greece, it presents the traditional music of Epirus, showing how the music unites the Epirot community around the world. The film defines America not as a melting pot, but rather as a place to make a better living. The Epirots who earn their living here have their hearts planted firmly in the mountains of Greece.
Recent screenings:
2024 Photometria Photography Festival, Greece
Josef Albers teaching at Yale (c. 1955), by John Cohen | 11:33
This is the only film of Albers teaching in the classroom. Albers aimed to lead students to a more sophisticated use of their vision, believing that the fundamental building block of art education was to learn to see more acutely.
FILMS ABOUT JOHN COHEN
John Cohen Photographs | Kentucky Life | KET | August 10, 2013
New Yorker John Cohen first came to Eastern Kentucky in the late 1950s with a still camera and an eye for capturing the region's landscape, people, and music. In 2012 his iconic photos were displayed at the University of Kentucky Medical Center.
John Cohen & George Pickow on the Making of "Ballads and Bluegrass", 2010
John Cohen & George Pickow identify a few people (among them Carla Rotolo and the woman who recorded Bob Dylan's first Carnegie Chapter Hall concert) in the 1961 film "Ballads Blues & Bluegrass," available on DVD from media-generation.com - trailer here. George Pickow remembers Bob Dylan's attendance of (some of) these filming parties and not being allowed to film him.
Library of Congress - Treasures from the Archive Roadshow
Featuring the Downhill Strugglers & John Cohen, September 25, 2015
The Down Hill Strugglers and John Cohen played traditional American music they have learned directly from the amazing collections at the American Folklife Center (AFC) at the Library of Congress. For more information, visit here.
John Cohen "Walking in the Light" | Steidl, 2015
Walking in the Light is John Cohen’s photographic journey towards and through gospel music. From 1954 to 1964 he photographed in the black churches of East New York, on the streets of New Haven, in the home of blind Reverend Gary Davis, as well as in the darkness of a boxing gym and the blackness of coal shovelers at an industrial site. Of all these images, those of worshippers at a small church in Harlem form the emotional centerpiece of Cohen’s journey, where music leads to spiritual release in trances and dances. The last destination of this odyssey is Johns Island, South Carolina, where Gullah children connect to African ancestors through games and play. Cohen’s photographs of musical performances in religious settings reflect the inner sound expressed on the face of a singer, a soulful expression, the quality of light that illuminates the face of a child, or the intensity of a prayer. Sound, song and religious feeling are permanently rendered in black and white.
John Cohen’s 80th Birthday at his home in Tompkins Corners, New York, August 4, 2012 | Stuart Alexander
John Cohen's party at his farm at Tompkins Corners, New York. Many musician friends gathered and performed. August 4, 2012. At the time of the party John was working on his film on the artist Mary Frank.
Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival celebrates the life and work of John Cohen, 2010
The 34th annual Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival will celebrate the life and work of John Cohen, prolific scholar, photographer, musician, and filmmaker through seven-film series showcasing his varied works. From the indigenous cultures of Peru to the musical traditions of Appalachia and the Greek coastal mountains.
Different Johns (trailer), 2020
Spanning over fifty years, Different Johns is a rich account of John Cohen’s many talents as an exceptionally gifted folk musician, photographer, musicologist, filmmaker, and anthropologist as well as a founding member of the New Lost City Ramblers, the American contemporary old-time string band that formed in 1958 New York City during the folk revival.