“She sat down, stubbed out a cigarette, tossing her long hair and from then on I watched her expecting something — I didn’t know what. Apparently she did not eat, nor did she clap for any of the other speakers. She smoldered and smoked.”
That passage is First Lady Lady Bird Johnson’s description of Eartha Kitt at a White House luncheon — a meal that would come to define both women’s legacies — from her White House diaries, a meticulous account of Lyndon B. Johnson’s five years as president. As shown in “The Lady Bird Diaries,” a gorgeous and haunting new documentary from Dawn Porter (“John Lewis: Good Trouble”), the First Lady was right to expect something.
Recreated thanks to an uncanny combination of Lady Bird and Kitt’s own voices, footage filmed at the event, and evocative illustrations from Molly Schwartz, we see history come to life as...
That passage is First Lady Lady Bird Johnson’s description of Eartha Kitt at a White House luncheon — a meal that would come to define both women’s legacies — from her White House diaries, a meticulous account of Lyndon B. Johnson’s five years as president. As shown in “The Lady Bird Diaries,” a gorgeous and haunting new documentary from Dawn Porter (“John Lewis: Good Trouble”), the First Lady was right to expect something.
Recreated thanks to an uncanny combination of Lady Bird and Kitt’s own voices, footage filmed at the event, and evocative illustrations from Molly Schwartz, we see history come to life as...
- 11/14/2023
- by Mark Peikert
- Indiewire
The thing that strikes you first is her voice.
Lady Bird Johnson recorded 123 hours of audio tapes recounting the ins and outs of her husband Lyndon Johnson’s administration. The recordings form the spine of Dawn Porter’s illuminating new documentary, “The Lady Bird Diaries,” but they don’t just give a chronological sequence of events. These recordings are an artistic achievement in their own right, primary-source history executed with insight and wit, and as a kind of diaristic blank verse. It helps that Johnson had worked as a journalist; she has a way with words that’s deceptive because she’s not (overly) flowery, though her vocabulary is immense. Instead, she’s direct, spare in her descriptions, with her Texas drawl giving musicality to her prose. The space between the drama of her saying “I want to know what is going on, even if to know is to suffer...
Lady Bird Johnson recorded 123 hours of audio tapes recounting the ins and outs of her husband Lyndon Johnson’s administration. The recordings form the spine of Dawn Porter’s illuminating new documentary, “The Lady Bird Diaries,” but they don’t just give a chronological sequence of events. These recordings are an artistic achievement in their own right, primary-source history executed with insight and wit, and as a kind of diaristic blank verse. It helps that Johnson had worked as a journalist; she has a way with words that’s deceptive because she’s not (overly) flowery, though her vocabulary is immense. Instead, she’s direct, spare in her descriptions, with her Texas drawl giving musicality to her prose. The space between the drama of her saying “I want to know what is going on, even if to know is to suffer...
- 11/13/2023
- by Christian Blauvelt
- Indiewire
The final frame of “Art & Krimes by Krimes,” after the credits roll, is packed with logos from foundations, associations and institutions. It’s a fitting end to such a thoughtfully composed work about the place of art in a broken culture.
It feels optimistic that a gifted female filmmaker like Alysa Nahmias (“The New Bauhaus”) received support from a range of organizations for a documentary about marginalized creators. But as the movie itself makes clear, the struggle is immense and remains overwhelmingly pervasive.
Her subject is Jesse Krimes, who began life as the fatherless son of a teenage mother, losing his stepfather to a drug-related suicide as a child, and then arrested for selling drugs in his teens. He was incarcerated for six years, and spent most of that time escaping into art. After studying as much as he could about other creators and philosophers, Krimes began his own projects,...
It feels optimistic that a gifted female filmmaker like Alysa Nahmias (“The New Bauhaus”) received support from a range of organizations for a documentary about marginalized creators. But as the movie itself makes clear, the struggle is immense and remains overwhelmingly pervasive.
Her subject is Jesse Krimes, who began life as the fatherless son of a teenage mother, losing his stepfather to a drug-related suicide as a child, and then arrested for selling drugs in his teens. He was incarcerated for six years, and spent most of that time escaping into art. After studying as much as he could about other creators and philosophers, Krimes began his own projects,...
- 9/29/2022
- by Elizabeth Weitzman
- The Wrap
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