A work in constant progress (and occasional regress).
Birthplace:
Staten Island, New York, USA
Born:
January 1, 1956
John Gianvito is an independent film director based in Boston, where he also holds an Associate Professorship in the Department of Visual and Media Arts at Emerson College. He has taught at numerous major universities in New England and currently sits on the Board of Directors for the Robert Flaherty International Film Seminar. His extensive curatorial work also includes a five-year appointment as Film Programmer at the Harvard Film Archive. He made his debut as a director in 1978 with his short film The Direct Approach and rose to prominence with the subsequent feature The Flower of Pain (1983), a semi-autobiographical film about an adolescent relationship structured as a series of fragments, or “shards of memory” in Gianvito’s words. Commenting on the film to the Viennale, Gianvito described his attempt at “stripping away as much personal anecdotal material as possible, and concentrating on uncovering within each scene the disruptions, the unconscious and conscious mistakes.” Most recently, Gianvito has made Vapor Trail (Clark) which had its world premiere at International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2010. That same year, his documentary Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind (2007), inspired by Howard Zinn’s famous tome A People’s History of the United States, was named one of the fifty greatest documentaries of all time by Time Out New York. For his extraordinary and unique contributions to cinema, Gianvito received the French honorary title of Knight in the Order of Art and Letters in 2001. – Wen Zhuang
Animation:
2008 Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind
Cinematography:
1983 The Flower of Pain
2008 Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind
2020 Her Socialist Smile
Director:
1983 The Flower of Pain
1986 Address Unknown
1990 What Nobody Saw
2001 The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein
2008 Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind
2008 Puncture Wounds (September 11)
2010 Vapor Trail (Clark)
2011 My Heart Swims in Blood
2012 Far from Afghanistan
2015 Wake (Subic)
2020 Her Socialist Smile
2023 Fugue
2023 The Grave's Sky
Director of Photography:
1983 The Flower of Pain
1986 Address Unknown
1990 What Nobody Saw
2001 The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein
2008 Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind
2008 Puncture Wounds (September 11)
2010 Vapor Trail (Clark)
2011 My Heart Swims in Blood
2012 Far from Afghanistan
2015 Wake (Subic)
2020 Her Socialist Smile
2023 Fugue
2023 The Grave's Sky
Editor:
1983 The Flower of Pain
1986 Address Unknown
1990 What Nobody Saw
2001 The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein
2008 Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind
2008 Puncture Wounds (September 11)
2010 Vapor Trail (Clark)
2011 My Heart Swims in Blood
2012 Far from Afghanistan
2015 Wake (Subic)
2020 Her Socialist Smile
2023 Fugue
2023 The Grave's Sky
Producer:
1983 The Flower of Pain
1986 Address Unknown
1990 What Nobody Saw
2001 The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein
2008 Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind
2008 Puncture Wounds (September 11)
2010 Vapor Trail (Clark)
2011 My Heart Swims in Blood
2012 Far from Afghanistan
2015 Wake (Subic)
2020 Her Socialist Smile
2023 Fugue
2023 The Grave's Sky
???? Mission Hill
Sound:
1983 The Flower of Pain
1986 Address Unknown
1990 What Nobody Saw
2001 The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein
2008 Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind
2008 Puncture Wounds (September 11)
2010 Vapor Trail (Clark)
2011 My Heart Swims in Blood
2012 Far from Afghanistan
2015 Wake (Subic)
2020 Her Socialist Smile
2023 Fugue
2023 The Grave's Sky
???? Mission Hill
Writer:
1983 The Flower of Pain
1986 Address Unknown
1990 What Nobody Saw
2001 The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein
2008 Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind
2008 Puncture Wounds (September 11)
2010 Vapor Trail (Clark)
2011 My Heart Swims in Blood
2012 Far from Afghanistan
2015 Wake (Subic)
2020 Her Socialist Smile
2023 Fugue
2023 The Grave's Sky
???? Mission Hill
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.