About Us

Michael Blackwood Productions is an independent production company that has produced over 150 documentaries on the arts and its contributors, with a focus on architecture and architects, art and artists, dance and choreographers, and music and composers. The collection features over 1,000 participants or subjects, and spans over six decades of documentation, beginning in the 1960s and including earlier material, through the second decade of the 21st Century. The films serve as primary documents for educational and archival purposes, as well as informative and special interest pieces for the general public. A growing number of educational institutions, libraries, museums and various media outlets are acquiring the films around the world. The company is dedicated to preserving the underlying material, and digitizing its analogue portfolio. The collection itself is one of the largest and most significant of its kind.

Our History

Independent documentary filmmaker Michael Blackwood has produced and directed more than 150 films during the course of his career, which began at NBC television in 1959.  In 1966, he founded his own film company, Blackwood Productions Inc., with the goal of creating a permanent record of some of the leading figures in the cultural landscape, in the fields of art, architecture, music, dance, history, science and literature.  Coming out of a background of cinéma vérité in the 1960s, Blackwood’s films use narration very sparingly, if at all, which allows the subjects to speak for themselves. This approach makes these documentations meaningful primary source material.  In 1972, Christian Blackwood joined the company and played a significant creative role as cinematographer, editor or director. Nearly a dozen of our titles were created solely by Christian, several others were co-created between the two brothers. In 1982, Christian left the company and started Christian Blackwood Productions. By this point, the company had produced over 55 films – half in the field of art, and the balance in music, dance and history, including the history of film, science and literature.

In 1983 the company expanded its focus to architecture, beginning with the film “Beyond Utopia”, but continued to cover subjects in art, music, dance and history. From 1983 to 1999, Michael Blackwood Productions produced over 50 new films, half in architecture alone.

In his own words, Michael Blackwood describes a significant point about his style of documentary filmmaking, which is that it does not compete with the art itself. He provides the audience with intimate access to the artist or subject, in an uncompromised fashion, providing a truly insightful glimpse into the reality and context of their work, life and mind.

In the words of René Rozon:

Blackwood’s austerity is worth many useless effusions. His sharp vision, at once analytical and synthetic, is that of a man who tries to record on film the art of the twentieth century. His production is the chronicle of a lucid film-maker, concerned about leaving a cultural testimony to posterity.

Rozon, R. (1981). Michel Blackwood and the Filmed Chronicle of Modern Art. Vie des arts, 25(102), 56–96.

Until the late 1960s, these kinds of documentations simply did not exist on a meaningful scale. To this day, this collection of films capturing over 1,000 artists, architects, musicians, choreographers and other notable figures in history is one of the most significant bodies of work employing such a disciplined, systematic approach. As quoted in Michael Blackwood and the Filmed Chronicle of Modern Art:

“I am not attempting to make a work of art of my films which will be in the same level as the filmed works of art. I am not trying to make an art film but simply a film on art, even if it is detrimental to cinematographic art. My documentaries are a fusion of images and journalism, as advocated by John Grierson.“

 

“There are no film portraits in existence of the artists of the early century, but barely a few haphazard meters of footage on such great figures as Rodin, Renoir and Kandinsky. What a pity! On account of this, it seemed urgent to build up a documentation of the New York art scene as it developed around me. I therefore set out to record on film, with synchronous sound, the artists, their work and their ideas, on the spot and at the height of their careers.”

~  Michael Blackwood

Rozon, R. (1981). Michel Blackwood and the Filmed Chronicle of Modern Art. Vie des arts, 25(102), 56–96.

By 2014, the collection grew to over 160 films, and the company began a long-term process of digitizing and restoring film material which is ongoing today.

Awards and Honors

In 2010, Michael Blackwood became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences under section IV:5 – Visual and Performing Arts. In 2014, he received the Arts and Letters Award in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2017, he became a fellow of the Society of Architectural Historians.