Ellsworth American, Filmmaker Strives to Help Preserve It, December 15, 2009 by Letitia Baldwin, front page Arts & Leisure

Portland Press Herald, Has Camera Will Travel, October 11, 2009 by Bob Keyes, front page Audience Section

WERU-FM “Café Des Artistes” Radio Interview with Richard Kane with Host Anthony Anderson, August 16, 2008

Click PLAY to hear the interview.

www.NewEnglandFilm.com interview with Richard Kane by Scott Casely
Learning From the Masters
Fri, 08/01/2008
• Kane-Lewis Productions reveals both the unique and universal elements of the artist’s journey
through the Maine Masters series; the story of Stephen Pace premieres this month.
By Scott R. Caseley



Despite growing up as an avid fan of Ingmar Bergman, Richard Kane never considered film a career pursuit. He was passionate about things as varied as theater, law, and politics, so he assumed those interests would lead him to law school. It wasn’t until his sister got a job with a documentary film company in New York that he saw film as a viable plan. Following a brief period as a journalist in San Diego, he began two years of graduate studies in film at Temple University.

He was working at an Indiana public access affiliate when he met two people that led him to the making of his first film, Tough, Pretty or Smart: Dillon Bustin, a folklorist and singer/songwriter, and Melody Lewis, who would later become Kane’s producer and wife. Bustin introduced Kane to six fellows from coal mining backgrounds, aged 18-80, who had formed a string band. Tough, Pretty or Smart documented their performances at the Kentucky Old Time Fiddle Festival. The film went on to win Best Documentary Short at the Cork International Film Festival, which made it an automatic contender for the 1981 Academy Award.

Kane learned a lot from the process, including the art of grant writing, what it was like to work with an academic, how to document different cultures, and notably -- how to film with a 16mm _clair ACL camera. But it was the personalities that resonated with him above all. “I have long focused on ordinary people, or lesser-known people doing extraordinary things. I might have a larger audience if I’d chose a subject like Bob Dylan, but I’m attracted to what is common and finding the beauty and truth in that,” he said in a recent interview with NewEnglandFilm.com.

(Click here to read the interview)

www.NewEnglandFilm.com review
Stephen Pace: Maine Master
August 31, 2009


Stephen Pace: Maine Master is part of a series of documentaries about Maine artists. Pace, who spent extended summers in the fishing village of Stonington, Maine, spent 50 years as a second generation abstract expressionist in New York after WWII where he met Gertrude Stein and Pablo Picasso. On the GI Bill in Mexico he met and became a protégé of American painter Milton Avery. Upon moving to New York City he found himself in the swim of the art world making friends with Franz Kline, Jackson Pollack, and Hans Hofmann amongst others. The Whitney Museum accepted his work in their Biennials seven times.


This film chronicles Pace and his wife Pam’s last days in Maine closing his studio and summer home while being celebrated by neighbors and the community that loved them most.

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www.Gratefulness.org Speech on M.C. Richards by Richard Kane, reprinted

M.C. Richards
Artist & Philosopher (1916-1999)
by Richard Kane

Mary Caroline Richards had a richly diverse life, which began in Weiser, Idaho on July 13, 1916. She was raised in Portland, Oregon and later went to Reed College to earn a degree in literature and languages. She wrote poetry, and when she became part of the faculty at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, she taught writing and produced plays. At Black Mountain she also danced, studied pottery, and became increasingly interested in innovative teaching methods. She helped create a commune in New York in the 1950s, taught and gave pottery workshops in the 1960s, and later worked in Camphill Village in Pennsylvania, an alternative educational community based on the teachings of Rudolph Steiner. In the last decade of her life she began to paint as naturally as if she had been doing so her whole life. Her art-of-many-genres wove together all her concerns, including community, agriculture, craft itself, and spiritual ideas. Always a poet, she regarded the end of her life – as physically limiting as it was - as another fulfilling adventure, “living toward dying, blooming into invisibility.”
- Margaret Wakeley

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Mountain Xpress Review of M.C. Richards: The Fire Within April 28, 2004

M.C. Richards: The Fire Within (NR) ****
Genre: Documentary
Directed by: Richard Kane
Starring: M.C. Richards, Marjory Bankson, Julia Connor, Merce Cunningham, Arthur Penn, Robert Turner

This short documentary (62 minutes) on painter, poet, sculptor, writer, philosopher and visionary M.C. Richards is of local interest because of Richards' connections to Black Mountain College – that bygone experimental school that she preferred to a tenured position at the University of Chicago.

Her coming to BMC was a bold move; as M.C. Richards: The Fire Within points out, there was little money and no security in doing so. She became part of BMC during its latter days, when the school was moving away from its communal-styled roots and more toward a definition of itself as an artist outpost. BMC was then on the verge of an artistic explosion, home not just to Richards, but also to Buckminster Fuller, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Willem de Kooning and others who would profoundly impact our culture.
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Grand to Preview New Maine Masters Film on Lois Dodd
Ellsworth American, August 9, 2007

By Ellen Hathaway
Ellsworth – Artist Lois Dodd walks up to a flower, caresses it and tips it toward the camera. Her eyes twinkle as she talks about her art, what inspires her, what she sees.

"What is in front of you, what I pass, what I notice is what I paint," she says.

Dodd is the subject of the latest installment in the Maine Masters film series. On Monday, August 13, at 7:30 p.m., artist Robert Shetterly and filmmaker Richard Kane will be presenting four episodes of the Maine Masters series at The Grand in Ellsworth. The highlight will be a special preview of the episode on Dodd.
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