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The celebrated San Francisco string group Kronos Quartet have shared their take on Pete Seeger’s “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” from their upcoming tribute album, Long Time Passing: Kronos Quartet and Friends Celebrate Pete Seeger, out October 9th via Smithsonian Folkways.

Kronos Quartet’s arrangement of Seeger’s 1955 song features a pensive push-and-pull between the cello, two violins and viola during the verses before all the instruments fuse together during the chorus. The song features vocals from Sam Amidon, Brian Carpenter, Lee Knight and Aoife O’Donovan.

Long Time...

There's a new genre in town. The first example of it I can name is Bill Morrison's Spark of Being (2010), which retells the story of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein using aged found footage. In this version, as Morrison puts it, the movie itself is the monster, assembled from pieces of the dead.I may be missing earlier and later examples of this form, but so far as I know Guy Maddin and colleagues Evan and Galen Johnson are the first to respond to that celluloid gauntlet, with The Green Fog, a remake of Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958) using footage culled from ninety-eight feature films and three TV series shot or set in the San Francisco area. I guess the movie is also in the genre of city symphonies, and has a nodding acquaintance with Thom Andersen's pirate-video documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003).The Madden/Johnsons have several advantages over Hitchcock:...

“Let mystery have its place in you; do not be always turning up your whole soil with the plowshare of self-examination, but leave a little fallow corner in your heart ready for any seed the winds may bring, and reserve a nook of shadow for the passing bird; keep a place in your heart for the unexpected guests, an altar for the unknown God.”

― Henri-Frédéric Amiel

Jack Palance recites the previous quote in Sudden Fear and it’s the manifesto for Guy Maddin and Evan and Galen Johnson’s new project, The Green Fog. The quote is one of a few lines of dialogue to appear in the film. It’s mostly ‘narrated’ with gestures, the breath between words and a score composed by Jacob Garchik and performed by Kronos Quartet. You hear nods to Bernard Hermann’s score of Hitchcock’s Vertigo throughout.

Commissioned by Noah Cowan for the...

It’s usually unwise to remake a masterpiece, but Guy Maddin has something different planned for “The Green Fog,” a meditation on Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo.” Unlike Gus Van Sant’s much-maligned 1998 shot-for-shot remake of “Psycho,” the Canadian director has revisited the 1958 thriller as an assemblage of old footage from San Francisco, the city where “Vertigo” takes place.

However, the project was never intended to have anything to do with “Vertigo.”

In “The Green Fog — A San Francisco Fantasia,” commissioned by San Francisco Film Society and set to close the San Francisco International Film Festival’s 60th edition on April 16, Maddin and co-directors Evan and Galen Johnson explore what Maddin has called “a rhapsody” on the Hitchcock movie. Set to an original score by composer Jacob Garchik that will be performed live by the San Francisco-based Kronos Quartet, the 63-minute “The Green Fog” reimagines the movie through an assemblage of...