A work in constant progress (and occasional regress).
Release Date:
January 1, 1973
Original Title:
Making Mixtec Pottery
Ratings / Certifications:
N/A
Runtime: 38
Over the course of 38 minutes, Allen Downs’s Making Mixtec Pottery intimately captures the process of creating clay pottery in Oaxaca, Mexico. Along with the Zapotecs, the Mixtecs are considered the most culturally and artistically advanced group of people of Oaxaca, dating from 2000 BC. The film begins by following a single man from start to finish as he shapes a red clay pot. He extracts the clay from a mountainside, combines it with water and mica (a binding agent), and slowly forms the vessel with his hands. Downs documented this process intimately, using extreme close-ups to meditate on the artist’s hands as he works. As the film progresses, various establishing and mid-range shots are interspersed before transitioning to footage of other men creating their own pottery with their own techniques. Downs’s gentle, personal portrait of the work of the Mixtec potters reveals the process behind an ancient art form.
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.