"I often listen to Simon & Garfunkel now and think they’re terribly produced, but they’re certainly a band who are perfect performers on record. There’s something to be said for their restraint; on a lot of tracks you think there might be a drummer but it’s just so quiet in the mix. When you think about what The Beatles were producing at the same time it’s kind of crazy actually - but it doesn’t matter, because their voices were always there when you needed them and that was all you were listening to essentially. They would supply the harmony for each other, as well as the melody and the words. “’Wednesday Morning, 3am’ has got this absolute perfection to it. Fleet Foxes get pretty close in terms of recording multiple voices, but it’s not somewhere people tend to go. I loved it so much, because you could sing with it and you didn’t even have to sing either of their parts; there was always room for more. I always liked choral music growing up, but I felt that this was what choral music should be doing. “I’ve always loved this particular song: just the sadness in it, the description of his girlfriend and the description of having to go because he’s committed a crime. It’s a really weird angle about these few hours he’s got left and it makes me sad every time I hear it. There’s loads of stuff that I didn’t understand in it too: a ‘hard liquor store’ for example. I had no idea what that meant! But they went to dark places. “By the time I’d heard something like ‘7 O’Clock News/Silent Night’ the whole collage thing had been done so much and it didn’t seem that powerful to me. You’ve seen a hundred films that do it now and having sample speech in songs isn’t that crazy. But I bet when it first came out it would have been pretty amazing."

"The last one I think might be the most unusual one and this is footage shot by Zora Neale Hurston, who we know as a writer, a novelist, the author of Their Eyes were Watching God (the basis for the eponymous film), which is her best-known work. [She] was also a playwright, short story writer, and screenwriter for a while in her career. Really a Renaissance woman. When she was a student, she was studying anthropology with France Boulez at Columbia, and she was doing her fieldwork as an anthropologist on the kinds of communities that she grew up in, in Florida. In the late 1920s, she had a car and a 16-millimeter camera and she drove down to Alabama and Florida and she shot footage, ethnographic footage, as a part of her research. We featured some of this material on the Pioneers of African-American Cinema box set that I co-curated that was released by Kino. The footage is not narrative and it’s not exactly documentary either, in the sense that she never put together a work that then she was sharing with other people — it was for her research purposes. But she shows men who are logging, for example. My favorite passage of the footage was when she shows children playing games. The can game, and games when they’re in a circle or square and trading off movement and those kinds of things. We can see she’s capturing information that she’s going to use to talk about these cultural practices in her academic writing. It’s also really clear in the attention she pays the children and the attention that she pays to the movements of women, the way that she captures, even in the silent films, the rhythm and the musicality of church service. We can see visually the style that she’s developing that then she folds into her writing practice. We can say, because we know about this work that Zora Neale Hurston seems to be one of the first African-American women filmmakers, and so it gives us a deeper sense of her creative practice and her intellectual practice as well."