Don Barry: A Quixotic Exploration – written, directed, and produced by Paul Smart – is unlike any other film. On one level, it’s a documentary about Barry Gerson, avant-garde filmmaker and longtime Hudson Valley resident. It’s also a fantasy in which Gerson impersonates Cervantes’ tragic hero, Don Quixote. In the role of his faithful sidekick, Sancho Panza, is a beguiling Mexican physicist, Genda Monter, in her screen debut. Text from Don Quixote, Volume 2, is recited. The film is also a love letter to Guanajuato, the bohemian college town in Mexico where Smart has lived the last four years. Don Barry ends with a dreamy animation sequence created by Monter.
Barry Gerson, born in 1939, came to prominence in the early 1960s, with contemplative works like Translucent Appearances, a 21 minute silent film of waterfalls shot through a blue filter. Gerson’s filmic artworks are collected by the Museum of Modern Art and the Pompidou Center in Paris. Paul Smart is himself a Hudson Valley legend, having written for the Woodstock Times, the Mountain Eagle, and numerous other local publications for decades – and serving as the innovative editor of the Phoenicia Times for its entire fabled nine-year run. (Full disclosure: I wrote a fictitious gossip column for the Phoenicia Times.) He is also the author of Overlook: A Rock & Roll Fable and With Different Eyes: A Covid Waltz In Words And Pictures, with artist Richard Kroehling. Don Barry is Smart’s first film. It has been licensed by Amazon Prime.
Smart is a music connoisseur, so the soundtrack of Don Barry, featuring banda, a type of contagious Mexican disco music, is impeccable. Segments of Barry Gerson’s minimalist near-abstract films, paired with jumped-up songs in Spanish, suggest a flaming new pan-American renaissance.
Don Barry will be shown at the Byrdcliffe Theater in Woodstock on August 20, free of charge. Smart will be available for a question-and-answer session.
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