Award-winning `Song Hunter'finds its way to the Boston area
When musicologist Alan Lomax died in 2002, Dutch filmmaker Rogier Kappers was two years into making a documentary profile, ``Lomax the Song Hunter" (2005).
``He was ill when I began, but I wanted him to be in the film," says Kappers by phone from Amsterdam, where he lives and works. ``This -- how do you say -- transitoriness is the basic theme of the film. Lomax himself was always struggling against the transitory by recording music that was vanishing. And now he himself was vanishing away."
Starting in the 1930s, Lomax recorded music where he found it -- in swamps and fields and dusty villages. He recorded Lead Belly, Muddy Waters, and Jelly Roll Morton, and traveled through Appalachia to collect ballads and prison songs. When Lomax died, musician Pete Seeger told the Globe that Lomax had been ``my mentor. He showed me there were thousands, not hundreds but thousands, of songs in our country which the radio never played."
Lomax also collected songs in Europe, which is what Kappers focuses on in his film. Kappers traveled to many of the places that Lomax had visited 50 years earlier to find the people whose voices had been put on tape for posterity.
For Kappers, one of the highlights, which appears in the film, was a late afternoon in Galicia, in northern Spain. He approached an elderly couple, and the woman, it turned out, remembered Lomax's visit.
``I put the headphones on her and played her what Lomax had recorded, and she slowly recognized the voices," says Kappers. ``Then she started dancing a little bit in the middle of the street, with the headphones on." They went to a small supermarket, and within a few minutes the music was on a boombox and the store was full of people. ``People started dancing, and a guy came in with bagpipes, and it went on and on and became a little party," Kappers says. ``It was one of the most beautiful moments we had."
``Lomax the Song Hunter" won the best documentary award at the Netherlands Film Festival last October. It gets its Boston-area debut tomorrow at 7 p.m. at the Coolidge Corner Theatre as part of the Coolidge's Summertime Blues program. Before the film, Brookline's Bennett Hammond will play a live set of Appalachian guitar and banjo music. Information is at 617-734-2500 and www.coolidge.org.
JUST LIKE AMERICAN IDOL: WGBH invites the world to help rate the finalists for a $2,500 grant to make a short film. Filmmakers submitted proposals, and WGBH narrowed the field to 10. WGBH will pick two winners, and online voters will choose the third. Voting is open until Friday. All the pitches, which include proposals for films about basketball player Len Bias, the 1960s Brazilian band Os Mutantes, and pickup soccer games in Boston, are online at www.wgbh.org/producingfortv.
WGBH also is inviting filmmakers to apply for a nine-month residency at the station. Those selected will get a stipend, work space, access to editing equipment, and staff support. The residency is from September 2006 to May 2007. Priority is given, says WGBH, to New England filmmakers and media makers. Deadline for entries is Friday. Information is online at the same Web address .
SCREENINGS OF NOTE: The Boston Public Library starts an ``Originals/Remakes Summer Film Festival" this week. On Mondays at 6 p.m. the library will screen an original film, and on Thursdays at 6 p.m. it will screen the remake. This week's films are the 1966 and 2004 versions of ``Alfie." The series runs through the end of August and includes originals and remakes of ``Desperate Hours," ``Dr. Doolittle," ``The Italian Job," ``The Ladykillers," ``Lolita," ``The Manchurian Candidate," ``Ocean's Eleven," and ``Romeo and Juliet." Screenings take place in Conference Room 5/6 of the main library in Copley Square and admission is free; details at 617-536-5400 and www.bpl.org/news/upcomingevents.htm.
The Harvard Film Archive's two-month program of double features providing a snapshot of film history continues. Among this week's highlights is Douglas Sirk's 1959 ``Imitation of Life," with Lana Turner, Sandra Dee, and Juanita Moore, who received an Academy Award nomination for her performance, Tuesday at 8:30 p.m. and Wednesday at 7 p.m. (617-495-4700 and www.harvardfilmarchive.org).
Also: ``The First Time I Was 20," Lorraine Levy's 2004 French film about a Jewish teenage girl in a 1960s Paris suburb who wants to join her school's all-male jazz band, today at 4 p.m. and Thursday at 5:45 p.m. at the Museum of Fine Arts (617-267-9300 and www.mfa.org/film) ; ``A/K/A Tommy Chong," about the comedian's 2003 arrest and nine-month imprisonment for manufacturing bongs, at the Brattle Theatre today through Thursday (617 - 876-6837 and www.brattlefilm.org) ; and a reissue of G. W. Pabst's 1929 ``Pandora's Box," featuring Louise Brooks' s legendary performance as Lulu, next Friday through Monday, also at the Brattle.
Leslie Brokaw can be reached at lbrokaw@globe.com. 
