!!Directed by THOMAS WHITE Starring THE LIVING THEATRE Original soundtrack by ORNETTE COLEMAN 1966, 73 min, 1:33, 35mm-to-digital, B&W. !"A lost masterwork! A cinematic thrill that deserves an honored place in the history books." – Richard Brody, THE NEW YORKER !“It’s almost Dalí.” – Salvador Dalí !Accompanied by a frenetic original soundtrack by the great Ornette Coleman, insane asylum inmates escape their confinement and hole up in a deserted Belgian farmhouse, where they cook large quantities of eggs and condemn one of their own in an impromptu court. The actors don’t have much need for words when they can dance around, light things on fire, and drip hot wax on each other instead. Ornette Coleman and the other members of his trio – David Izenzon and Charles Moffett – recorded their score for WHO’S CRAZY? in one go while the film was projected for them, and the result feels like a bizarre silent film with the greatest possible accompaniment. The soundtrack also features a young Marianne Faithfull singing what are probably her most experimental riffs – written for her especially by Ornette in an original track titled “Sadness.” WHO’S CRAZY? was long thought to be lost by jazz-on-film scholars and the Library of Congress. In early 2015, the only surviving copy of the film, a 35mm print struck for the film’s debut at Cannes in 1966, was salvaged from director Thomas White’s garage after sitting on a shelf there for decades. Ornette’s soundtrack exists as a hard-to-find LP, but audiences have never before had the opportunity to see what Ornette saw when he composed it. The cast consists of actors from New York’s experimental theater troupe, the Living Theatre, who also performed in Shirley Clarke’s THE CONNECTION; and speaking of connections, Clarke would later direct the fantastic ORNETTE: MADE IN AMERICA (1984). The 35mm print of WHO’S CRAZY? was repaired by John Klacsmann, archivist at Anthology Film Archives. Text by Grand Motel Films. !Restored by Grand Motel Films Restoration Producers: Vanessa McDonnell and Aaron SchimbergRestoration Supervisor: John Klacsmanngrandmotelfilms@gmail.com www.grandmotelfilms.com!!!

!CREDITS Directed by THOMAS WHITE Produced by THOMAS WHITE and ALLAN ZION !Starring actors from The Living Theatre Company:Wimme Andre Melvin Clay Tom Edmonston Carl Einhorn Peter Glaze Gene Gordon Diane Gregory Leroy House Nona Howard Steven Ben Israel Gene Lipton

Michèle Mareck Dorothy Shari William Shari Barry Shuck Esther Silber Marvin Silber Luke Theodore Steve Thompson James Tiroff Lester Waldman

!Original soundtrack composed by Ornette Coleman and performed by The Ornette Coleman Trio with David Izenzon (bass) and Charles Moffett (drums). “Sadness” written by Ornette Coleman, sung by Marianne Faithfull. Additional singing by Nona Howard. Additional music by Nino Ferrer. Spanish guitar by Ramon Ybarra. !Director of Photography: Bernard Daillencourt Camera operator: Michel Humeau Editor: Denise de Casabianca Sound Department: Jean-Pierre Mirouze, Jean-Pierre Turella and Jean-Pierre Goldenberg. Assistant Director: Pierre Cottrell Assistant Editor: Anne Dubot !Restoration Producers: Vanessa McDonnell & Aaron Schimberg, Grand Motel Films Restoration Supervisor: John Klacsmann Lab Services: Colorlab Special Thanks: Anthology Film Archives, Tommy Aschenbach, Spectacle Theater, Ivy Swope. Restoration World Premiere: Anthology Film Archives, March 2016 Screenings: Anthology Film Archives; Il Cinema Ritrovato, Bologna Italy; London Jazz Festival; American Film Festival, Wrocław Poland. !© 2015 Grand Motel Films www.grandmotelfilms.com

BY RICHARD BRODY!The story behind the rediscovery of “Who’s Crazy?,” a 1965 film directed by Thomas White that’s screening at Anthology Film Archives tonight through Sunday, is so unusual that it raised my suspicions along with my curiosity. The movie screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 1966, but it hasn’t been shown publicly since then and was widely believed to be lost. (Also, White never made another feature.) In its absence, the movie was famous for its soundtrack—in particular, for its music score, by the central jazz modernist Ornette Coleman and his trio.!!The producer and director Vanessa McDonnell, a fan of Coleman’s music, contacted archivists far and wide in search of the film, all of whom told her that they believed the film to be lost. But she wouldn’t take “lost” for an answer and began to call all the Thomas Whites in the phone book until she found the right one, the Thomas White who lives in Connecticut and told her that he had a print of his film in his garage.!!The weather-worn print was cleaned and repaired by John Klacsmann, of Anthology; a digital copy is what’s being presented. As a lifelong Colemaniac, I hastened to a press screening of “Who’s Crazy?” as if lured by catnip. But due to this age of archive fever, in which many rediscovered movies ballyhooed as lost masterworks turn out to be notable only for their rarity, I was dubious in advance. I figured that if the movie were as minor as I feared it might be, I could always just close my eyes and listen. As it turns out, “Who’s Crazy?” is—well, I hesitate to use the M-word, “masterwork,” because mastery is beside the point, but it’s a cinematic thrill, an artistic achievement that deserves an honored place in the history books. The film is true to the avant-garde passions that it embodies and reflects. It gets to the very essence of movie-going and transfigures the concept.!!

“Who’s Crazy?” was filmed—in raw and bleak black-and-white—in rural Belgium and features members of the New York-based Living Theatre troupe (minus its founders, Judith Malina and Julian Beck), as inmates in a mental institution who are being transported by bus. When the bus breaks down in a lonely place in the wintry countryside, an inmate runs for it. When two guards hustle to recapture him, the rest of the patients all escape and elude the guards. Making their way to a desolate and abandoned brick farmhouse, the uniformed patients find a way in, take shelter, and construct, in isolation, an antic yet earnest domesticity that summons the Living Theatre troupe’s wide and wild range of improvisational inspirations.!!Yes, there’s a tremendous amount of superb music by Coleman on the soundtrack. He and his cohorts in the trio, the bassist David Izenzon and the drummer Charles Moffett, recorded the score in a Paris studio while watching a screening of the movie. This trio (as heard in their 1962 Town Hall recording, and, most famously, in “At the Golden Circle,” the two-volume album recorded in December, 1965, in Stockholm) were instantly responsive to the leader’s sudden changes of tempo and tone, which is exactly what arose in the group’s performance for the movie’s soundtrack. Much of Coleman’s performance features him not on the instrument for which he was famous, the alto saxophone, but on the trumpet and the violin, which he had only recently taught himself to play. His technique on those new instruments was scant, but his expression was profound; he relied on them to break through musical form in quest of pure sonic experience, and the mood-rich sounds that he made were ideally suited to the needs of the movie. (His playing of the trumpet and violin are even more effective as a movie score than as concert music.)!!What goes on in the house among the escaped patients is no mere romanticizing of insanity as some higher or purer state. “Who’s Crazy?” isn’t a work of sociology or psychology, and it isn’t a literal depiction of mentally ill people (or a literal depiction of anything). It’s a depiction of people confined in an institution and forced to wear uniforms, who seek to be free and, upon gaining their freedom, quickly test and stretch that freedom with a kind of play that tilts their lives into art.!!From the start, the actors’ outburst of liberation is marked in cinematic terms—the prisoner who makes the initial run for it does so with leaps and flourishes borrowed from Charlie Chaplin, and the guards give chase in implausible slapstick lurches and blunders. The first liberation that the patients enact is itself artistic—the casting-off of the conventions of movie logic and realistic drama in favor of the improvised and freewheeling spirit of Mack Sennett comedies. (One superb shot—of two inmates who are playing a jack-in-the-box version of hide-and-seek, until interrupted by a perky dog—displays comic timing that Hollywood directors could envy.) White and his actors aren’t suggesting that insane people are sane, but that what’s taken for sensible artistic order, especially in the movies, often displays no creative sense.!!That’s true of social order as well. The escapees don’t talk very much. Maintained in ignorance, afflicted with anomie, desperate to connect, they imitate domestic life with a sense of a vast spiritual quest, a search for identity that’s no less urgent for its raucous comedy. “Who’s Crazy?” transcends the facile dichotomy of artifice and authenticity to locate a higher authenticity in stylized and artificial cosplay. The first thing that the inmates do in the farmhouse is get rid of their uniforms and don the clothing that they find in trunks upstairs—the women first, then the men follow along—and they continue with increasingly extreme tricks of makeup and self-adornment, of exuberant yet reckless parodies of the banal chores and needs of daily life.!!The playfulness of the loose theatrical improvisations exposes a burning core of mystical energy. When a dapperly dressed man goes into an open-eyed trance, his cohorts chant to bring him back with an increasingly frenetic howl that’s matched by Coleman, on the soundtrack, playing the violin ever more frantically. The increasingly elaborate occult games include fitful alchemical conjurings replete with bursts of flame, and the actors’ performances—and the cinematography, by Bernard Daillencourt—match their expressive flash. (The movie’s taut and free editing is by one of the greatest of editors, Denise de Casabianca, who cut most of Jacques Rivette’s early films, including “Out 1,” as well as Jean Eustache’s “The Mother and the Whore.”)!!

The primal energy of dancing and chanting, running and jumping, and exulting in a newfound freedom is amplified by the free and fast, mercurial and thrusting, stunned and wide-eyed camera work. Then, after the byways of a few loose dramatic scenes (including a kangaroo court around a long dining table), the churning and thrashing of the actors is transformed into scenes of ritualistic pressure: a mock-solemn wedding in tin-foil décor that nonetheless turns truly holy.!!I have a French bootleg of the trio’s studio performance for the film. As fine as it is, it’s even better as a movie score than as a freestanding recording, in large measure because White mixes it boldly into the soundtrack. He integrates sound effects, live sound, speaking, and chanting into the trio’s recordings, intercutting and overlapping Coleman’s music and other music (notably, by a rock/blues trio featuring organ, bass, and drums) and with the voices of other singers (including Marianne Faithfull, who performs the Coleman composition “Sadness,” which he recorded at the 1962 Town Hall recital). The result is a dense sonic collage that turns the Coleman trio’s free jazz into a crucial element of White’s own free cinema.!!The wedding ritual to which the movie builds is a vast set piece of narrow scope that leads to a tremendous frenzy. It features dark shadows and contrasty light in which men and women in priestly garb move with a trance-like slowness between frozen poses, making high offerings, delivering benedictions, igniting powder into flame and revelling in the burst of sparks while the camera captures bright mystical flares by staring into spotlights. Meanwhile, the rock beat builds with a slow and erotic throb that reaches a mighty crescendo amid loud chanting, splashing potions, ever-wilder dancing, and gyrating camera moves.!!White’s direction may be loose, but its purpose is clear. As he merges the slapstick of silent comedy with landscape painting of a stark intensity that captures the spiritual striving of the Nordic strain of art cinema (including a wickedly funny parody of the “dance of death” scene from Ingmar Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal”), he makes clear that the transcendence of the new freedoms will be physical—a calculatedly exaggerated outpouring of song and dance freed from familiar forms and conventions, an urgent liberation of the body without which there’s no freeing of the soul. “Who’s Crazy?” seems made to propel viewers out of their seats to exult along with it in a state of cinematic possession, to break the contemplative boundaries of viewership and to break the bounds of the movie screen, in order to turn the movie theatre into an actual theatre in which exultant and frenzied viewers are integrated with the action of the Living Theatre itself.!!The movie’s playfulness is easy to mock or demean (it could be called an accidental Monty Python) in exactly the way that advanced artistic modernity over-all, which deepens by simplifying (whether by Pollock or by Warhol, whether with Coleman’s fiddling or John Cage’s silence), invites mockery. Yet, like the works of the era’s other innovators, “Who’s Crazy?” exists not as a concept or a challenge but as an experience, one that’s invented for a particular place and moment, which is why the provocative, implicitly but essentially communal revelry of the film—though I hope it will soon be available widely for viewers everywhere, on home video—is urgently and essentially a movie-theatre experience on the very subject of the movie-theatre experience. It makes the screenings at Anthology this weekend all the more urgent.!!Read original article here.!!!!!!!!!!

BY J. HOBERMAN!There was a time in the late 1960s when artistic vanguards joined forces: Andy Warhol produced an album with the Velvet Underground, the rock star John Lennon teamed with the conceptual artist Yoko Ono, and Norman Mailer tried his hand at experimental films.!!More obscurely, Thomas White, a 33-year-old American in Paris, produced a semi-improvised movie featuring members of the avant-garde Living Theater and a soundtrack by the free jazz exponent Ornette Coleman. A half-century after it was filmed on the bleak Belgian coast, that film, “Who’s Crazy?,” has its belated New York premiere, this weekend at Anthology Film Archives.!!An anarchic rave with a wacky new-wave flavor, “Who’s Crazy?” opens on a bus that breaks down in the middle of nowhere. The passengers are psychiatric patients who, eluding their keepers, take refuge in a deserted building, haphazardly creating a new society complete with rituals that include a trial and a wedding.!!Mr. White, reached by phone this month at his home in Connecticut, said 10 hours of film were shot over 10 or 12 days. The scenario was based on the actors’ improvisation. “Nobody told them what to do,” he said.!!Left to their own devices, the performers engage in breathing exercises, dress up in funny hats, play instruments, mill around, stage group hugs, make a mess, cook food, play with candles,

stare into one another’s eyes, break into primal screams and declaim poetry in beatnik rants that might have been recorded at an open mike at Cafe Wha? The polyrhythmic cascade of honks and squawks produced by Mr. Coleman, abetted by his sidemen — the bassist David Izenzon and the drummer Charles Moffett — imbue these activities with tremendous energy.!!For decades, the lone print of “Who’s Crazy?” gathered dust in Mr. White’s shed. The movie’s digital resurrection follows the sleuthing of Vanessa McDonnell, a 35-year-old Brooklyn-based documentary filmmaker and jazz enthusiast. After Mr. Coleman’s death in June, Ms. McDonnell set out to honor his memory with a film series at Spectacle, a Williamsburg microcinema. She found a truncated Vimeo version of the movie online and tracked down Mr. White. “He wasn’t terribly surprised,” she said.! !

A sometime actor and musician with a rich social life, Mr. White worked as an assistant director on a Roger Vadim film; appeared (uncredited) as a “beatnik” in “The Sandpiper” (1965), a vehicle for Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton partly shot in Paris; and lived a bohemian existence in the city’s Montparnasse district. The courtyard next to his apartment was, he recalled, a gathering place for visiting musicians, writers and artists. Among them were members of the Living Theater, which staged a production in Paris in late 1964.!!“They were at loose ends,” Mr. White said. The troupe had arrived owing thousands of dollars in back taxes in the United States. That December, Julian Beck and Judith Malina, the married couple who founded the Living Theater, lost their legal appeal and had to return to America to serve brief prison terms; the rest of the company, some 25 actors and several small children, found temporary refuge in a North Sea farmhouse belonging to Antoine Allard, a wealthy pacifist and patron of the arts.!!

While waiting for Mr. Beck and Ms. Malina to return, the actors amused themselves by making “Who’s Crazy?” According to John Tytell’s 1995 book, “The Living Theater,” the winter of 1964-65 was a period of “great duress.” There was little money for food, and cold weather froze the water pump, although hardship was eased and communal esprit facilitated by an abundance of hashish, among other drugs. The shortages and the exhilaration are both reflected in “Who’s Crazy?” Asked about the conditions under which his movie was made, Mr. White replied “there was a lot of smoke in the room.”!!“Who’s Crazy?” is something more than a stoned frenzy. Still, when the Mr. Beck and Ms. Malina returned to Europe later in 1965, they were not impressed. As Mr. White recalled, Mr. Beck told him that the movie was insufficiently serious and did not come from “the same energy vector as the Living Theater.” Mr. White does not disagree. “This was shtick to them,” he said of the actors. “That’s what the Becks objected to.”!!After “Who’s Crazy?” had a poorly received premiere at the 1965 Locarno film festival in Switzerland, Mr. White decided to re-edit the movie and add a musical soundtrack. Several of

Ornette Coleman Credit Sam Falk/The New York Times

his musician acquaintances were involved, including the singer-songwriter Nino Ferrer; the classical guitarist Ramon Ybarra; and a young British folk singer, Marianne Faithfull. Then, as fortuitously as he met the Living Theater, Mr. White encountered Ornette Coleman, who was touring Europe with his trio. Drawing on their repertoire, including the ballad “Sadness,” sung in the film by Ms. Faithfull, the trio recorded a soundtrack. (One of the two sessions was surreptitiously documented by the British filmmaker Dick Fontaine, something Mr. White says he only recently learned.)!!Armed with an endorsement from the Surrealist painter Salvador Dalí, who saw “Who’s Crazy?” at a screening in Paris, Mr. White showed his film at the 1966 Cannes Film Festival market and at the Cinémathèque Française, but plans to open the movie in London fell through, and Mr. White was unable to get distribution once he returned to the United States in 1968. (He thereafter made industrial films and commercials and worked as a film editor, ultimately retiring to breed horses.)!!“Who’s Crazy?” fell into obscurity. But because Mr. White sold the soundtrack to a French record producer, the project enjoyed a phantom existence among jazz enthusiasts — the original album was bootlegged and later released in a Japanese collector’s edition. For the critic Adam Shatz, who has written about free jazz and the French new wave, “Who’s Crazy?” showcases Mr. Coleman at a particularly productive period. The music “feels rawer and edgier than Ornette’s classic quartet,” he told me. “It’s the sound of freedom, really.”!!In its semi-spontaneous revelry, even more than its theme, “Who’s Crazy?” expresses a kindred sense of liberation. Mr. White characterized making the film as “one of the best times I ever had.” The evidence is on the screen.!!A version of this article appears in print on March 24, 2016, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: A 1960s Film, Still Offbeat, Has New Life.!!Read original article here.!!!!!!!

Archival Press Materials !The following pages feature archival materials from 1966.

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Production and Restoration Notes !!Who’s Crazy? is a joyful lark that brings together two great sets of improvisers: the incomparable Ornette Coleman with his trio and actors from The Living Theatre, the free-wheeling pioneers of improvisational avant-garde theater. The film has not been seen in over 50 years since it debuted at Cannes in 1966 and screened at the Cinémathèque Française (Henri Langlois was a fan.) !The Living Theatre crossed paths with White in Paris during a period of exile in which the theater’s founders and directors, Julian Beck and Judith Malina, were in prison in the US owing to a scuffle with the IRS. Leaderless for the moment, the company was on its way to a free place to crash in a Belgium farmhouse. White and his original co-director Allan Zion (a partnership that did not last) went along, bringing their crew and a 30-page script which outlined a loose scenario: insane asylum inmates escape their confinement and occupy a Belgian farmhouse. From that simple premise, the actors proceed to dance, try on clothes, fry eggs, feed each other spaghetti, do weird breathing exercises and light things on fire. Their particular actions, obsessions and rituals gradually cohere to form an internal logic of glee and collectivity which invites us to ponder the question posed in the film’s title. !Ornette Coleman came into the picture slightly later, after an early version of the film screened to mixed reviews at Locarno (one critic suggested that the film should be thrown into the nearest lake) and the co-directors had parted ways. Coleman, together with David Izenzon (bass) and Charles Moffett (drums), recorded their soundtrack over a couple of days while the film was projected for them, and the finished film uses this recording almost entirely throughout. The result, which prioritizes physical action, slapstick and visual gags over dialogue, feels like a beat-era silent film with prodigious free jazz accompaniment, or maybe vice-versa. Who’s Crazy? was screened for Salvador Dalí in 1966 and his reaction was duly noted: “It’s almost Dalí.” !The film quickly fell into total obscurity. A London screening was cancelled because it “casts doubt upon the sanity of the police.” A 1967 letter from Louis Brigante at the Filmmaker’s Cooperative, an archive and distributor of avant-garde films in New York, suggests that the film would “do well in the college market” and considers pairing it with Shirley Clarke’s The Connection as a double feature. It never happened, though, and the film disappeared. !

Since then, White has shuttled a large cardboard box containing the only existing 35mm print of the film between apartments and houses; it most recently settled in for a long wait in his Connecticut garage. The film was considered lost by the United States Library of Congress and the few jazz-on-film experts who’d heard of it. !Last October, after Ornette Coleman’s death, I tracked down the director and, with Anthology archivist John Klacsmann, retrieved the battered 35mm print, complete with burned-in French subtitles from its Cannes debut. The print had been used for projection and as a result had areas of significant damage: scratches, tears, splices, and broken perforations. !The print was repaired, cleaned and scanned with a liquid gate at 2K resolution. Laboratory work was completed at Colorlab in Rockville, Maryland in 2015. !

-Vanessa McDonnell, Grand Motel Films !!!!! !!!!!!!!!

Grand Motel Films is an independent film production company and curatorial project based in New York City founded by Vanessa McDonnell. Credits include Aaron Schimberg's 2013 debut feature "Go Down Death" (Factory 25) and the feature anthology film "collective:unconscious" (SXSW, 2016) directed by Josephine Decker, Daniel Carbone, Frances Bodomo, Lauren Wolkstein and Lily Baldwin. McDonnell rediscovered and restored the lost 1966 film "Who's Crazy?" by Thomas White, which features an original soundtrack by Ornette Coleman. McDonnell is also a programmer at Spectacle, a Brooklyn microcinema, and Contributing Editor of Screen Slate, a daily resource for commentary on New York City moving image culture encompassing independent, repertory, microcinema and gallery screenings. !