(Kehr) 'Right On!' (Wednesday and Thursday) Presented in a new restoration based on the recently rediscovered original negative, "Right On!," Herbert Danska's rarely seen 1970 film, is an audacious blend of performance footage, documentary and black liberation politics.
Other ITV1 diamond jubilee-related programming over the weekend included Sunday's All the Queen's Horses: a Diamond Jubilee Special (6.30pm: 3.8 million/17.8%) and Monday's amateur footage documentary The Queen and I (8pm: 2.3 million/9.3%).
Andrei Ujica opens this found-footage documentary with smeary color images of that former Romanian dictator shortly after his arrest in 1989 and then cuts to stark, silent, gripping black-and-white images, shot from on high, of thousands of people massing, surging and running in 1965, when Ceausescu's predecessor, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, died.
In 2011, Jóhann wrote majestically dark-toned music for Bill Morrison's found-footage documentary "The Miners' Hymns," but "The Theory of Everything" is a more generic effort, parts of which could have been plopped into the parallel math-genius narrative of "The Imitation Game" without anyone noticing the difference.
Set in the early 1980s in a nondescript hotel, where variously geeked-out tech teams compete in a virtual chess tournament, the film is shot on vintage Sony video cameras and stock, coming on like a found-footage documentary before slipping into deadpan science fiction.
The 37-year-old Colgate University professor and director of Our Nixon, a virtuoso avant-garde found-footage documentary about the former president that aired on CNN in 2013, was anxious to present the film.
His presence elevates the footage from documentary to both fetish item and cautionary tale.
Using a blend of illustrations, photographs and aerial and newsreel footage, the documentary begins with the glacial formation of the bays and the evolution of whaling and fishing.
Taking the best of the Eva Braun footage, the documentary he worked on for Puttnam, entitled Swastika, was premiered at the Cannes Film festival in May 1973.
The segments, which are not attributed to individual directors, are conscientiously eclectic in strategy and form, mixing stock footage, firsthand documentary scenes, pop-media imagery and, in the case of Mr. Resnais's portion, actors and scripts.
The bonus DVD features live concert footage, a documentary, and two music videos.
