The Innerview

Richard Beymer has one of the more bewildering careers in Hollywood. At a young age he (co-)starred in several of the industry’s biggest prestige productions, most notably as Peter van Daan in George Stevens’ The Diary of Anne Frank (1959) and as Tony in Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins’ West Side Story (1961) – only to quit the movies a few years later, feeling unsure about himself and his craft. While occasionally appearing on TV, Beymer focused on filmmaking, mainly documentaries, including the civil rights classic A Regular Bouquet: A Feeling of the Mississippi Summer Project (1964), and later the unpredictable documentary meditation The Passing of a Saint (2010).

His art zenithed with the unclassifiable non-narrative, thought-spouting, idea-dense, free-style documentary-found-footage-essay-montage-stream-of-conscious assemblage The Innerview, which remains in a state of perennial becoming. For while the film was shown for the first time some fifty years ago, Beymer has constantly reworked it, which includes stunts like bleaching segments in the original 16mm footage or adding scenes shot in different formats (something he mentions having done in the late 70s). This version is the oldest known to exist and the closest to the film’s original form. Needless to say, Beymer is busy finishing yet another version!

– Olaf Möller

Digitally restored and remastered by Lightbox Film Center at University of the Arts (Philadelphia) in collaboration with Northeast Historic Film, the National Film Preservation Foundation, and Corpus Fluxus, with funding from Ron and Suzanne Naples.

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