Films by Fred Marx

Four films by an Illinois-based film and video maker whose experimental and political interests pointedly inform and reinforce one another. Dream Documentary (1981), which is especially impressive, uses found footage, inventive editing, and an effectively selective sound track to comment on the ways that we look at the third world. Hiding Out for Heaven (1982), which l haven’t seen yet, is a two-film projection piece about grading student writers. House of Un-American Activities (1983) is a documentary that mixes personal and public history as it describes the 1956 persecution of Marx’s father–a Jewish refugee who fled Germany in 1939 and joined the Communist Party in 1945. Dreams of China was shot while Marx was working as an English teacher in China between 1983 and 1985 and was finished only recently; the portrait of China that it presents is highly personal, full of fascinating details, and, for the most part, given Marx ‘s leftist background, unfashionably negative. Marx will be present at the screening. (Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, Friday, August 11, 8:15, 443-3737)

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