Stages & Screens – Peter Davis, Villon Films and Friends

A multi-screen film and archive presentation by Peter Davis exploring culture and counter-culture in the UK and America through the 60s.

Cycle I September 3rd - September 25th
Cycle II September 27th – October 16th

Preview: Thursday 2nd September, 6pm - 9pm

For over five decades British-born filmmaker and producer Peter Davis has been at the forefront of directing, producing and distributing works of socio-political documentary film. In two separate film cycles - each accompanied by documentation, archive materials, commissioned texts and slide show rotations - Davis draws from his own film collection, Villon Films, highlighting period works made by himself and others in order to present a personal journey through the 60s. 

In total, sixteen films make up the programme. Offerings by Davis himself such as Anatomy of Violence (1967), which details the Congress of The Dialectics of Liberation, an international gathering featuring Allen Ginsberg, Stokely Carmichael, Herbert Marcuse and R.D. Laing, will be presented alongside works by other directors such as The Russell Tribunal (dir. Staffan Lamm, 2004), a powerful short concerning Bertrand Russell’s 1967 war crimes tribunal featuring Tariq Ali, Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and America Against Itself (dir. William C. Jersey, 1968), a documentary about the events surrounding the infamous 1968 Democratic Party convention in Chicago).

To download a copy of Davis' 'Stages and Screens' essay click here.

Special thanks to the Black Film Center/Archive, Indiana University