User Reviews

The broadcast episode on George Gershwin that Alain Resnais directed in 1992 may not come as a surprise to those who recall his appreciation for American Tv series, comic strips, and popular songs (the latter part of his later film Same Old Song.) The program is not well known, and not easily accessible on video, probably due to the extensive use of several dozen music cues for which rights would have to be paid for further releases.And possibly due to the overall format of this French educational series, the show doesn't offer any of the avant garde style or puzzling mystification that often mark the work of the Left Bank auteur.But what it does, in its more straightforward way, it does rather well in presenting a lot of information in a tight time span and in conveying a sense of what made George Gershwin 's music different and special and important.The best scenes feature John Kander and Philippe Baudoin separately performing Gershwin on piano and analyzing what we are hearing, contrasting the pieces they play with works by Gershwin colleagues such as Jerome Kern and Irving Berlin.Resnais also affords his fellow directors Martin Scorsese and Bertrand Tavernier nice opportunities to articulate the appeal for each of Gershwin: in Scorsese's case, it is a nostalgia for an era of Broadway musicals before his time; for Tavernier it is the series of socially conscious shows, not the ones made into films, that Gershwin did in the Depression years, and also the way Gershwin's jazz influenced melodies were later recycled by jazz artists into new forms.If you can find the documentary, I recommend it as entertaining and well done.