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May 31, 2005 19:30

Trying to ease back into LJ - feels like I should be posting, but I'm doing the same stuff as C & K and they both get there first, and my other pursuits are obscure ( Read more... )

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royaltoots June 1 2005, 12:08:44 UTC
Lomax the Songhunter

Dir: Rogier Kappers
Netherlands, 2004
Screening 7pm Wednesday 2nd June
at the Ritzy Cinema, Brixton
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Alan Lomax (1915-2002) was a song collector. For a big part of his life,
he travelled around the world with his recording equipment, hunting for
the prettiest folk songs...

In radio programmes, Lomax warned us that we were squandering
age-old music traditions at rapid speed. He recorded ordinary people,
who gave their heart and soul in front of his microphone. Kappers portrays
him using accounts by associates, relatives and friends, and incorporates
old footage of interviews with Lomax. The director had access to the
many recordings in sound and image of traditional music that Lomax and
his associates made and filmed in the American Library of Congress,
for which Lomax recorded Afro-American music in prisons.

Travelling around and shooting from his van, and with Lomax's travel
notes in voiceover, Kappers manages to find people whom Lomax
recorded decades before. On a remote Scottish island, he locates a woman
who knows almost four hundred songs by heart. And in a small Spanish
village, upon hearing the old recordings, the villagers take out bagpipes
and start singing again. A film that is music for your heart, don’t miss it.

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