A work in constant progress (and occasional regress).
Release Date:
August 30, 2023
Original Title:
Marginal Understandings (Dirt: Part Two)
Ratings / Certifications:
N/A
Runtime: 22
Marginal Understandings is a poetic exploration of the American relationship to space, the soil, and ownership. While the drama of the European invasion and occupation of the American continent was justified as being the “destiny” of white people, there have always been alternative ways of living on the land, practiced by people who have been pushed to the economic margins. A collage of poetic imagery, music, and abstracted, incantatory language, the film follows two men in an excavation of our cultural soil, using improvised dialog. Their words gives rise to unexpected landscapes, populated by bats, conquistadors, and flying fiddles. A postmodern video opera, Marginal Understandings bathes the viewer in music, language, and visual spectacle.
Most data and links to images for the Movies section come from TheMovieDB (TMDB).
Additional data for Film Titles come from The Open Movie Database (OMDb).
At least one plug-in comes from IMDb.
Data are -- hey, it's a plural -- subject to the limitations of their sources. (For example, TMDB search results currently max out at 20.) I am limiting myself to free data sources for now. (No, a "free trial" is not free.)
While much of the above data are retrieved directly from outside APIs and other such sources, data from American Film Institute (AFI) and British Film Institute (BFI) were manually entered the old fashioned way into a MySQL database. Re BFI I took the following liberties:
Regarding profile removals and data corrections:
Filtering is applied here to film projects flagged as "adult" by TheMovieDB. Pending "popular demand" I am contemplating a login and profile system with preferences (such as whether to allow adult images to appear) and permissions (such as data entry).
Whereas the overall purpose of this website is to serve as a personal demo/portfolio/workshop of web and data skills, this Movies section is not meant to compete with or substitute for far more definitive movie websites.
Whether or not he still clings to an award which he won in 1986 as a film critic for his college's newspaper, Jeffrey Hartmann is not responsible for the texts of overviews and biographies supplied by external data sources.