Willard Van Dyke

Filmmaker Jonas Mekas films 160 underground film people over four decades.

A film collage tracing the story of the lives, loves, and deaths within the artistic community surrounding Jonas Mekas.

The blacklisted American documentarian Willard Van Dyke filmed this tale about tobacco workers in the heart of the Puerto Rican countryside. Heeding their wives’ advice, individuals join forces in a cooperative so they can sell their crop of tobacco leaves at fair market value.

Nominated for an Academy Award, this live-action short film playfully chronicles the construction of the Tishman Building at 666 Fifth Avenue in New York City.

An artistic short on the floral beauty of Puerto Rico set to folk music.

After Caroline Cram finds herself in an analyst's office, she starts groping for the truth about her hopelessness, fears, loneliness and anxieties. A fact and fiction documentary financed by the U. S. Public Health Service and endorsed by the National Association for Mental Health and the National Institute for Mental Health.

Marriage training film dramatizing a partnership too fraught with conflicts to survive. Produced as part of a post-World War II initiative to make marriages more sustainable in the face of postwar dislocation.

A short film about Pete Seeger and the birth of banjo music throughout the Southern United States.

A documentary/recruitment film originally intended for showings outside the United States to promote careers in public health and American methods in public health education. Directed by social documentarian Willard Van Dyke, and delivered entirely in the characteristic voice-over narration of that genre, the film centers around a young doctor, who during the course of his medical residency at the New York Presbyterian Hospital becomes disillusioned with the failures of the medical profession to address larger social and environmental health factors and discovers the field of public health. The young doctor moves to Baltimore to study at the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health and finds his professional calling fighting a diphtheria outbreak in the poverty-stricken streets and row-houses of East Baltimore.

Short subject commissioned by the National Youth Association to show their efforts at providing job training for unemployed poor youth.

A documentary examining the effects of industrial automation on a small American town.

Educating the children of Appalachia.

Polemic documentary extolling the virtues of suburban life and leaving cities as a place of industry.

This short Depression-era documentary describes the importance of the Mississippi River to the United States and laments the environmental destruction committed in the name of progress, particularly farming and timber practices and their impact on impoverished farmers.

A commercial for the Works Progress Administration. We see hands close up: working, playing, praying, whittling, and strumming. Hands use saws and hammers, lift stones, turn wheels, then write, type, apply a bandage, play a violin, use a compass, and hold a U.S. Treasury note. Hands put a shoe on a customer, shake a thermometer, and count out bills and coins into other waiting hands. A hand places an engagement ring on a finger, buys a movie ticket, and reels in a fishing line. There are multiple images repeating what we've seen. A chicken is basted; other chickens get grain. It's a national celebration.