All Films

The Kingston Model Railroad Club was founded in 1937 and celebrated its 80th anniversary in 2017, when filmmaker Stephen Blauweiss honored them by creating a short film. Meet Bob Haines, who grew up in a train family—both his father and grandfather were engineers—as he provides a glimpse into his 50 years in the club, delving into the intricate art of building, maintaining, and running an impressive collection of model trains as well as detailed miniature reconstructions of buildings and street scenes. Tom Scrivani, a member since 1986, describes the club's various departments, his passion for the engine shop, and his addiction to finding new collections at expos and on Ebay. Learn about the club's museum of train artifacts and its longstanding tradition of opening to the public on November weekends, a favorite childhood memory of so many. Travel by model train through the created landscape in this intimate portrait of a hobby struggling to stay relevant in today's technological world.

Created for the Maverick Concert Hall's centennial in 2016, Stephen Blauweiss' short film Music in the Woods covers the history of the Maverick Concert Series in Woodstock, presented by curator Susana Leval, in association with an art exhibition held at the Woodstock Artists Association & Museum (WAAM) in partnership with Byrdcliffe. The film also covers Hervey White himself and the history of the iconic horse sculpture by sculptor John Flannigan, a memorable feature of the concert hall.

The 212 project ran summer retreats from 1967 to 1969 in the old Holiday Country Inn midway between Saugerties and Woodstock on Route 212. It was briefly home to professionals in the visual arts, music, performing arts, filmmaking and sciences. The collective fostered a collaborative meeting point and simplified time and space constraints for the participating artists. It encouraged them to experiment with the diverse new media and helped them to explore and synthesize the exploding potentials then being articulated through happenings, expanded cinema, environmental music, and multimedia theater, dance and sculpture.

In this day and age, as we easily record videos on pocket-sized devices, we stand on the shoulders of the Video Freex who led the way using large, bulky, and primitive analog technology. Before there was cable television, there was pirate television, which was pioneered by Video Freex, whose origins date back to the 1969 Woodstock Festival. The Freex settled in the tiny hamlet of Lanesville, just outside Phoenicia in Greene County. At a time when most people didn't have access to any video equipment, the Freex captured everything from the most mundane aspects of daily life to important national events. As member Bart Friedman commented while roaming around with their "Lanesville TV Newsbuggy" looking for action, "sometimes [you get] peanuts and sometimes shells." The group developed educational projects for children and created one of the first ever museum exhibitions of video art. They documented social events such as the May Day protests against the Vietnam War in Washington DC which took place from May 3–5, 1971 and led to the largest mass arrest (12,000 people) in U.S. history.

Lost Rondout: A Story of Urban Removal is a documentary film by Stephen Blauweiss and Lynn Woods that chronicles the destruction of the waterfront district in Kingston, NY by a federally funded urban renewal project in the late 1960s. Interviews with former residents, historians, and urban renewal experts bring the destroyed neighborhood back to life and illustrate the impact of urban renewal's problematic legacy that destroyed hundreds of similar working-class urban communities across America.

Rappin' For Godot written and performed by Mikhail Horowitz and Gilles Malkine, presents the breakthrough play of Samuel Beckett as it might be performed by a hapless pair of academic rappers. The entire three hour play is condensed into four minutes of nonstop hip-hop, with no intermission. Rappin' For Godot aired on PBS, screened at the LA Comedy Film Festival 2012, London Independent Film Festival 2013, NYC Downtown Short Film Festival 2013, Williamsburg Film Festival 2013, and appears on a special music video section of the Woodstock Film Festival website in 2013.