Spring Night Summer Night

For a film revolving around incest, Spring Night, Summer Night is surprisingly restrained, captivating, and ultimately beautiful. The characters, writing, and production are all far better than I expected, and really remarkable for a film made in the late 1960s.

The filmmakers were quite brave for taking on this subject matter. This film could easily have turned to trash in less adept hands. Yet they somehow managed to tell this story in away that feels authentic and is almost entirely non-sensational. The entire film feels like a documentary really. The dialog and acting come across as real in a way that few films ever successfully pull off, especially older films. The film never explains anything to you, and the characters rarely can explain themselves, and yet you still walk away feeling like you know all of the characters and even the town itself.

The cinematography is also wonderful. Often intimate, it makes you feel like part of the scene. This isn't common in films of the era and it's done really well here. The bar scenes are the highlight for me. There are also some excellent creative shots that are beautiful yet not overly showy.

The audio design also stands out. There is no background music and audio is often jumbled. A family dinner for example is appropriately noisy, with family members talking over each other combined with the sounds of the meal itself. Sometimes part of a conversation will be drowned out by a passing car. Again, this all makes you feel like part of the scene instead of passively viewing it.

Overall, this is just a remarkable film: sometimes beautiful, other times thought provoking, and always captivating. It's like nothing I've seen from the era and I highly recommend it, even if the plot description turns you off.

This is really no more than a modest little film, made by young enthusiasts, about a poor farming family in rural Ohio with the added ingredient of an unorthodox love story. It is, however, a stunningly beautiful and engaging film with another tale to tell. Back in the 60s the film was mistreated and ignored, finally being re-edited as a sexploitation movie for the drive-ins, retitled, Miss Jessica is Pregnant. With the help of Nicolas Winding Refn the original has now been reassembled with a 4K restoration and amazingly has absorbed a couple of the sexploitation movie inserts to aid clarity of story. Watched today this is most impressive with arty photography combined with naturalistic acting. Indeed apart from John Crawford nobody here had done anything in film before or likely to do much after. With only the ambient sounds of birds or bluegrass music spilling out of the bar for a soundtrack and those wondrous misty landscape views as a background, the close-up and most convincing antics of the various participants sustains the viewer as the slight but dramatic and personal tale unfolds. Poetic.

Joseph L. Anderson's "Spring Night, Summer Night" is another sixties exploitation movie to be rediscovered and restored by Nicolas Winding Refn but this one really is something of a lost classic. Anderson filmed it almost entirely with non-professionals and shot it on location in Canaan, Ohio. It's a study of a close-knit Redneck family and of what happens when the oldest son gets his half-sister pregnant and it reeks of authenticity, helped considerably by the stunning black and white cinematgraphy of Brian Blauser, David Prince and Art Stifel.

There isn't a great deal in the way of plot and the performances have a ropey, if real-life, feel to them but it's clearly the work of someone who knew his movies and whose influences were as much European as American but who went on to make only one other film before disappearing. Unmissable if you can track it down.

When I was a grad student at the Ohio University School of Film (M. A.1992), this was a "lost" myth of a movie from a quarter century earlier. Many of my peers were ambitiously making short films, but mustering the funds and means to make a credible feature was improbable. At the time, no one knew about any extant prints of rare feature, so I'm glad it has been restored (and the image quality is excellent).

Athens, where O. U. is housed, always seemed to resist the Appalachian culture that surrounds it. Here that culture is on full display, within a poignant story that was really quite daring for its time. Those sensational aspects can overshadow the film's meditation on the decline of small towns in the '60s after the postwar boom subsided, and the restive torment that plagued youth as a result.

Some aspects could have been "better" if you want to compare it to Hollywood films of the era, but as a capsule of social strife and family intrigue, this accomplished a more distinctive and authentic portrait of American life than the industry could have ever rendered.

Here's a film richly deserving of wider exposure. Can't someone pick it up for distribution? It's been described as "the missing link between THE LAST PICTURE SHOW and SHADOWS", which isn't quite on the mark. I think a better pair comparison could be made between the early semi-documentary films of Willard Van Dyke and Pare Lorentz and SHADOWS, due to the casting of unknowns and non-actors in all roles.

Seen nationally in 2005 as part of the Rural Route Film Festival (under the title SPRING NIGHT, SUMMER NIGHT), this film manages to focus on the taboo topic of incest without being sensational in the slightest, and that's only one of its amazing facets. A stark, black and white drama set (and filmed) entirely in southeastern Ohio, amidst the farms, gas stations, bars and simple homes of the area, it's filled with beautiful and memorable photography. This is not a "verité"-type outing of the "DAVID HOLZMAN'S DIARY" variety at all, but an extremely nuanced, melancholy tale of two lovers who may or may not be brother and sister (depending on which story they believe from which parent) with stunning set pieces on foggy hills, in musty barns, dimly-lit dinner tables, on dusty roads. Intensely moving and superbly acted, it feels nearly perfect and is a total anomaly for late-1960s independent cinema, so often considered an urban-based art form.