A Flood of Memories

CASSETTE: A DOCUMENTARY MIX-TAPE (2016) (B) - A low-budget paean to the audio cassette, the genius at work here is the pilgrimage to the Netherlands to interview Lou Ottens, the Dutch engineer at Philips who took the old reel-to-real idea and condensed it into a compact case in the early 1960s. Ottens, who also was part of the team at Philips who invented the compact disc that helped shelved cassettes, shows no nostalgia but rather an appreciation for the evolution of ideas and technology. The Philips archives provide a wealth of supporting documentation here for the three-person production team.

Elsewhere, some of the usual suspects do wax nostalgic about the golden era of the mixtape, including Henry Rollins (not annoying at all here) and some rap and hip-hop old-schoolers who convey how crucial the distribution of mixtapes was back in the 1970s and '80s. Informative and charming.

THE GREAT FLOOD (2012)  (C+) - The wonderful guitarist Bill Frisell noodles his jazzy blues licks over archival footage of the massive Mississippi River flood of 1927. Bill Morrison, who would perfect his visual technique in "Dawson City: Frozen Time," creates a visual poem from the degraded nitrate stock that survived 85 years later. Lots of rushing currents and sand-bag crews. Morrison uses the project to make a point about racial inequality, letting the images indicate the unequal impact on blacks from Illinois down to Mississippi. The essentially silent film is surprisingly static, though. Frisell's songs tend to blend together, and the stray images too often feel scattered, even though Morrison curates them into categories. A final segment showing early blues masters -- including footage at Chicago's old Maxwell Street Market -- really suffers from a lack of audio; instead, we get a lazy cover version of "Old Man River."