Ten Minutes of Silence for John Lennon

Dix minutes de silence pour John Lennon

France

1980

10 Min

Color

French

Currently 3.2/5 Stars.
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The documentary is about the ceremony dedicated by American people to John Lennon after his murder. The 10 minutes of silence in New York’s Central Park allows a deep observation of the particularly immobile people.

No words, little sound but that of the helicopters. Thousands of persons standing still, bearing sad, thoughtful faces. That is all you’ll see for ten minutes before the name of the film appears on the screen, just in time for it to end. But it is enough to explain it all. This movie is Raymond Depardon’s take on the ceremony that took place in Central Park, New York, the people were paying their 10 minutes of silence in homage to John Lennon, mourning not only the death of a great musician but also of a whole era. The 60s and 70s were over, the dream was over, and these expressions caught on tape by Depardon described it all with incredible subtlety. —IMDb

Director

Raymond Depardon

Raymond Depardon is a photographer, a journalist and a filmmaker. He was born into a family of farmers in 1942 in Burgundy and went to Paris in 1958, wishing to be a photographer. He was first taken on as a messenger in an agency and was sent to take photos of an opening-night at the cinema: the movie was none other than Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless. He finally established his own agency, Gamma, together with three reporters, in 1966 ‘not for money but for the freedom’. He suggested to set up a cinema department: ‘we bought an Eclair- camera and tried to make news-films for television in addition to taking news-photograhs… It was then that I learned to hold the camera." When Depardon films people, he is silent. If one has the impression that he always keeps his eyes lowered in the face of the world’s miseries, it is untrue. Raymond Depardon looks as through a lattice and reacts like quicksilver, keeping his deepest, innermost emotion secret, and allows his pictures to speak for themselves… read more