Screenings: The Family Album, Nobody’s Business, and Wide Awake, plus The Early Films of Alan Berliner
One of America’s most acclaimed independent filmmakers, winner of the 2006 International Documentary Association International Trailblazer Award, Alan Berliner has been cited as “the film world’s leading documentarian on the intricacies of ordinary life and family� (HybridMagazine). In addition to his work in film, Berliner has also produced a substantial body of audio/video installation works.
Berliner first achieved recognition with a group of innovative avant-garde films made between 1975 and 1985. An obsession with collecting other families’ abandoned home movies led to his first feature, The Family Album (1986), hailed as “the most intriguing film� of the 1987 Edinburgh International Film Festival by critic Roger Ebert. Berliner used a vast collection of anonymous 16mm home movies (belonging to more than 75 different families) from the 1920s to the 1950s to create a universal yet intimate composite portrait of the American family.
He went on to make Intimate Stranger (1991), an experimental documentary about his maternal grandfather, an Egyptian-Jewish-American with a fondness for Japan, and followed that up with his most acclaimed film, Nobody’s Business (1996), an unflinchingly honest portrait of Berliner’s reclusive (and stubbornly resistant) father Oscar; a film that finds humor and pathos in the swirl of conflicts and affections that bind father and son. Wide Awake, which received its world premiere at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival, reveals — in ways both hilarious and deeply personal — how insomnia has profoundly impacted the delicate relationship between his creative life and family responsibility.
