The fifth edition of our annual Summer Music Festival comes to an end with a remarkable cinematic portrait of jazz pianist Thelonious Monk.

In one of their first films, renowned sibling documentarians Christian Blackwood and Michael Blackwood follow jazz legend Thelonious Monk from New York to Atlanta, capturing late-night performances and impromptu conversations. Shot in 16mm black-and-white film, the Blackwoods’ vérité documentary captures the larger-than-life musician at a high-point in his career.

Monk was filmed as the first installment in a two-part documentary made for West German television. Both Monk and its sequel, Monk in Europe, present the eponymous musician in a candid light. The Blackwoods film him in tip-top shape, zeroing in on his backstage antics and onstage finesse. The end result is a fine-tuned portrait of a musician whose erratic tendencies informed his freewheeling compositions.

“When I make a film I become part of the situation. I always have my camera on my shoulder, so after a while, if I don’t have my camera on my shoulder, people will look at me strangely or won’t recognize me because they only recognize me as someone who has a camera on their shoulder…. That’s what a documentary is all about, it’s either creating something, or observing something and, as I said before, writing that screenplay as you are listening to it.” CHRISTIAN BLACKWOOD

“New York in 1960 had become the Paris of the ‘20s, an artistic capital of sparkling creativity… It seemed urgent to build up a documentation of the New York art scene as it developed around me.” MICHAEL BLACKWOOD

Working with musicians, dancers, architects, painters, and all manner of artists, the Blackwoods carved out one of the most unique documentary careers in the United States between the 1960s and 2010s. Their close attention to the whims and interests of the people they filmed — everyone from Philip Glass to Zaha Hadid — imbued their work with an unreplicable vibrancy, as though their work poured straight from the souls of their subjects. Per Christian Blackwood, “we deal with our subject very intensely, we give them our personality so they can give their personality back to us.”

Michael and Christian Blackwood were born in Germany in 1934 and 1942, respectively. After moving to New York in 1949, the brothers moved to Munich in 1961 and worked for West German television until 1965. Back in New York, the duo founded Blackwood Productions Inc. (now Michael Blackwood Productions) and made over 150 documentaries about artists around the world for the next six decades. They often worked together, and assembled an impressive catalog of artist films that has been hailed by such institutions as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Society of Architectural Historians.

Text written by Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer.