Monday, December 7, 2009

John Cohen

text from The End of an Old Song
Ballad singer Dillard Chandler
Dillard Chandler in The End of an Old Song
still of Dillard Chandler

John Cohen's The End of an Old Song (1972) is clearly a movie made by a musician. The visuals in the film fit perfectly with the unaccompanied ballads heard throughout. Cohen never simplifies the singers, instead investing time to depict Dillard Chander, for example (above) as a three-dimensional person in a modernizing and complex Appalachian community.
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Documentary Starts Here by Nancy Kalow is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.