Directing
Jon H. Else is an American documentary filmmaker and professor at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. He directs the documentary program.
Explore how one man's relentless drive and invention of the atomic bomb changed the nature of war forever, led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and unleashed mass hysteria.
Through interviews with Manhattan Project scientists and newly declassified archival footage, this documentary examines the life of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and his leadership of the Manhattan Project. The film traces the development and testing of the first atomic bomb and follows Oppenheimer’s later opposition to nuclear proliferation during the early years of the Cold War.
A documentary on the group The Radical Faeries.
A film about Arthur and Lillie Mayer, 89 and 86 years old and still young. Arthur can remember being taken to the first movie show in America, in 1895; Lillie was among the first American suffragettes. Arthur Mayer reminisces about his famous publicity stunts for Paramount, his Broadway horror film theatre, and beginning the importation of great European films with Rossellini's Open City. It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short.
California history unfolds along with the making of an opera in Jon Else‘s entrancing documentary. Returning to the work of composer John Adams and librettist/director Peter Sellars, the subjects of his film Wonders Are Many, Else peeks behind the curtain as the pair prepare their collaboration Girls of the Golden West for its 2017 San Francisco Opera premiere. Ostensibly a look at the nuts-and-bolts of production from informal rehearsals to glittering opening night, the documentary also investigates the Gold Rush era that inspired the show. Soprano Julia Bullock is mesmerizing, as the opera’s star and the film’s narrator, employing passages from a real-life diary to make vivid the boom-and-bust of a rapacious time.
An epic meditation on psychoanalysis, the Baader-Meinhof, feminism, and pre-revolutionary Russia.
Drawing upon recently declassified documents, archival footage and behind-the-scenes interviews, "Wonders Are Many: The Making of 'Doctor Atomic'" chronicles the creation of the monumental opera based on the mysterious and paradoxical “father of the atomic bomb,” Dr. Robert Oppenheimer, as his team prepares to detonate the world’s first atomic weapon.
With its four operas, seventeen-hour running time and months of rehearsal, Wagner's "Ring Cycle" is a daunting undertaking for any opera company. Jon Else goes backstage to show this rare event entirely from the point of view of union stagehands at the San Francisco Opera.
Concert film covering Neil Young's October 22 1978 concert performance at the Cow Palace with nearly 20 songs (including two versions of "Hey Hey, My My," his nod to the punk movement), acoustic and electric (with long-time companions Crazy Horse), dating back to his Buffalo Springfield days ("I Am a Child") and continuing through popular solo numbers like "Cinnamon Girl" and the extended "Like a Hurricane."