A work in constant progress (and occasional regress).
Release Date:
January 1, 2008
Original Title:
The Death of Tom
Ratings / Certifications:
N/A
Runtime: 23
For this project Ligon originally intended to re-create the last scene of a 1903 silent film adaptation of the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin from 1852. In the film, white actors in blackface played the principal roles. Tom, the film's protagonist and a slave, dies in the final scene, and images of the future—including the end of the American Civil War and the emancipation of slaves—materialize behind him. After footage of his reenactment was processed, Ligon discovered that the film was blurred and the imagery had disappeared. Leaving the footage unedited, he added a commissioned score played by the jazz pianist Jason Moran. In the final work, a cinematic scenario deeply intertwined with the complex and painful history of representations of ethnic difference has been transformed into a series of abstract black, white, and gray traces.
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.