Movies: Jonathan Schwartz

Potential Northwestern fellow Tess Harper lasers through her best friend's wedding planning like the star doctor she hopes to soon become. In fact, Tess puzzles through any problem - provided it's not her own. When she meets divorce lawyer and groom'...

In order to beat inflation and subsidize their alimony checks, three suburban housewives plot to steal $1 million from a large plastic ball which is displayed in a local shopping center....

A visual essay about the progressive tradition of the United States as seen through grave markers and monuments....

Documentary on the 1953 musical "The Band Wagon."...

When a character moves off screen, we accept the fact that he is out of sight, but he continues to exist in his own capacity at some other place in the decor which is hidden from us. There are no wings to the screen. Facts are perceptions of surfaces...

It arrives, in a fog, with songs, through dance or majestic animals or faces (gliding on the street), and in shapes of light, maybe on a large bird of prey in flight - gesture skyward. Some origins can be difficult to pinpoint, others blink back - in...

From 'A Set Of Miniatures'...

a certain worry enveloped in the covering of the ground, illuminated around a face, light on something ferocious, touch upon something gentle....

Situated amid the in between of ascending and descending. It seems hard to land and when this happens something else might disappear....

Schwartz explores the effect of light as both mystery and revelation. Glazed water in erubescent evenings discloses the shadowed details of the streets of Istanbul....

Schwartz’s poetic 16mm work meditates on the sights and sounds of slowly crumbling glaciers, charting an interior dance between desperation and hope. The carefully deployed superimpositions, strident soundtrack, and contrasting tones of intensity and...

A poetic travelogue through the city of Jerusalem....

That fall it was not intentional to have a Galway Kinnell book on the table near where the caterpillar in the doorway, feeding on our offerings, became the butterfly, feeding on honey water, staying in our house until we let it go. Or it was not know...

A stark winter, children at play, and an elder in motion augment words - spoken and sung - of paternal ties and loss....

(Maybe) of finding neutral signs in a non-neutral place while tension sits, increases, is shared, builds, or possibly lessens–or maybe is placed elsewhere for a while. Some birds move easily across, from above. You can hear them all over and the bree...

A film with a hypnotizing sense of diagonal light and movement. The title refers to the 1917 Hermann Hesse short story, part of his collection of fairy tales....

Refers to Schwartz’s grandfather-in-law’s age during the making of the film–an anniversary celebrated with the gift of piloting a U.S. army light aircraft, the kind he used to maneuver in the Second World War. While he rises and falls, watched by the...

The camera remains static to capture the accelerated movements, shot frame-by-frame, of ice skaters in a sunny winter morning. They are not portrayed as living things–they don’t have the ability to speak, and they look like robots from another planet...

Light painting and nature imagery are captured in 13 shots of different points of luminescence, on the 13th anniversary of Schwartz’s mother’s passing, and as a homage to Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s personal 'In a Year with Thirteen Moons' (1978)....

Schwartz’s work exists as a dialectic all its own, with a kind of wry fascination with things and a tinkerer’s yearning to take them apart and put them back together again. A Preface to Red exhibits this attitude, while at the same time displaying a ...