But as he faces the final stage of an incredible life, Rabbi Israel Dresner looms very large in my mind. I grew up in a small town, Springfield, New Jersey in the 1960s. Like most American Jewish families, my parents had been scarred by the depression. Quite a number of other Jewish families in town suffered far worse as survivors of the Holocaust. Most came to this suburb outside of Newark to provide a life that was far safer and offered more opportunities for their children than they ever had.
Temple Sha’arey Shalom was a Reform synagogue, founded just a few months before I was born in 1957. I remember my family as being among the original members, but I can’t be sure of that. The next year, the temple hired the very young, very charismatic Rabbi Dresner. He had a beautiful deep voice, with a Brooklyn accent. But as melodic as his speaking voice was, the Rabbi was not the best singer in the world — something he would often make fun of himself during the services. But his would still be the most enthusiastic and loudest voice in the room. He was committed to G-d and committed to making the world a better place. His booming voice filled the room with sermons about the injustices of the world and how we must go out and help. Many people were saying that, but…
Tikkun olam. I had totally forgotten that phrase until I saw this broadcast but it was one that he used so many times in his sermons. To repair the world. I never realized until now how important that phrase must have been to the members of my congregation, who had just in the previous decade, faced the horrors of Nazi concentration camps.
“Never again” was another phrase that was often used in those days in temples around the country. A promise to ourselves that Jews would never face another holocaust. Rabbi Dresner took it even more seriously. For him, it meant that he would do all he could to fight for anyone facing oppression. In the 1960s, of course, that meant Black oppression in the South. Rabbi Dresner was a Freedom Rider who formed alliances with religious leaders of all faiths. He marched, and was arrested repeatedly, most famously with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (who visited our temple twice).
Anything I write here will not be anywhere as elegant as what the Rabbi’s son Avi Dresner wrote last week in The Forward, so please take a few minutes to read this lovely article before I continue.
https://forward.com/news/479641/my-rabbi-dad-last-meal-katz-deli-sy-israel-dresner/
Tikkun olam. To repair the world. I marched in the 1970s — sort of in a Marlon Brando in the Wild One version of "What have you got?" — anti-nukes, saving the whales, LGBTQ rights, police brutality, among other things. I was arrested a few times and spent a few hours each time in jail. I never connected my protesting to Rabbi Dresner, perhaps because I had divorced myself from my childhood or more likely, because it was so inconsequential in comparison. My jail mate was never Dr. King nor did we ever get into the textbooks as the “Athens 12” (or how many of us were arrested at the time). I gave up my protesting days as I got older, I’m ashamed to admit.
But while working on the release of a Milestone film, I came upon this photo.
It was a very moving moment to discover this photo of Rabbi Dresner (far left) standing next to the amazing and courageous young Kathleen (Conwell) Collins, future director of Losing Ground.
I don’t want to write too much more. You are all smart people and you can connect the dots between my religious upbringing and our work in restoring films “outside the mainstream” here at Milestone. Amy has an equal part in our company’s story and has her own influences and mentors.
However, that one phrase just keeps repeating in my mind this week: tikkun olam. Three years ago, Amy and I accepted lifetime achievement awards at the Arthouse Convergence. You can read our acceptance speeches here, but to save you time, there was a singular paragraph that I centered my speech upon. I was very proud of this line, thought it was totally original, and have used it a number of times since, to describe my emotions on restoring a movie,
“this feeling of film restoration as rejuvenation of one’s own soul.”
It turns out that it wasn’t so original. Thank you Rabbi Dresner for teaching me about tikkun olam all those years ago. I hope you will go out in 2022, inspired by this remarkable man, and in your own small ways, help repair the world.
— Dennis Doros, January 3, 2022
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When I first became a Pathways fellow through the Association of Moving Image Archivists, I wasn’t aware of the precarity of videotape. Extremely unstable, the Library of Congress has deemed that most footage captured on videotape in past decades will soon be unviewable. This on top of the fact that in its time multiple companies were frequently coming out with unique types of video which required equipment that was equally unique, and that is now mostly obsolete. Those who still have retained such equipment and understand the technical aspects of videotape are few and far between, not to mention reaching a retiring age. All of this was striking to me, realizing that being born in 1994 most of my generation’s childhood memories were captured on these formats before we, as teenagers, switched to born-digital in the 2000s. Not to mention that archiving born-digital content has proven even more difficult due to sheer volume, and who knows how different file types will hold up on hard drives or in the cloud several years from now?
Much of my specific interests in Black culture have revolved around my idea of “Party as Praxis” as it relates to expression in Black life. Professor Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman begins to flesh this out in her essay “The Black Ecstatic”, in which she states that certain communal moments of Black joy “reckon with the ruinous now as the site of regenerative capacity and renewed political agency.” This film is meant to express these moments of rupture across the diaspora through quick repetition of encoded gestures, and through this, displaying the inherent queerness of Black expression. It is unclear to the viewer whether they are in a queer space, a church space, a collegiate space, a club space, etc. The through-line in all of these environments is, as Karen Clark-Sheard states in part of the opening to the film is to “open up your big ole Black mouth”, that is, to shout and express life in whatever form it comes out, that it may open up different possibilities of futurity.
I made this film as my final project for Regina Longo’s “Memory, Identity, and the Archival Paradigm” course at Brown University. I sourced the project almost entirely through Youtube, with two original film additions from the archive at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. I also made this film to demonstrate the need to actively seek out and preserve materials from this time period, both videotape and born-digital, especially as it pertains to marginalized and less represented communities. I am currently completing a Summer Practicum at the South Side Home Movie Project, and as founder Jaqueline Stewart states, many middle-class Black American families could afford 16mm film, and even more could afford 8mm and super 8mm. It isn’t until videotape, however, that we begin to see the rapid and widespread commercialization of recording devices that would allow poorer, lower-income families to be able to record their own home movies, to depict their own lives from their own perspectives. This is evidenced even more when we come to born-digital content and the ways that the Black culture has proliferated visual culture via the internet. This film is a call to action on ensuring that these memories are not undervalued and lost to time.
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So I consulted my online ‘copy’, and saw that the BAM Cinématek was doing a series called “One Way or Another: Black Women’s Cinema 1970–1991.” I looked at it half-heartedly, expecting that it would be a festival made up of the usual suspects — Julie Dash, Kathleen Collins, maybe Zeinabu Irene Davis, Ayoka Chenzira, or Monona Wali — but I doubted very much that my films would have been included. I’d opted out of the scene years before, and no one seemed to notice I was missing.
That’s not altogether true.
Serendipitous circumstances had it that my nephew, Devon Whitmore, had done the stills for Davis’s film Compensation”and one day Zeinabu had a meeting with Devon at my sister’s home. In the course of chitchatting, my sister happened to mention that she had a sister who was a filmmaker, too. Zeinabu asked who that might be. My sister mentioned my name and was very surprised to find out that Zeinabu not only knew who I was, but told my sister that there were people who wondered what had become of me, that I should get in touch with Women Make Movies because they’d be interested in distributing my films.
So it is thanks to Zeinabu, and, indirectly, my sister, that my films had a home. And, by the way, this is a good example of the ethos of camaraderie and mutual support that made the LA Rebellion movement the powerful movement that it was. In my experience, there was none of that in the black film scene on the East coast. It was much more competitive, and much more each man/woman for him/herself.
Getting back to the NYT article by Manohla Dargis, it wasn’t until the last paragraph that I realized why my friend was so excited. My films had, indeed, been selected for the series, and not only that, but the last paragraph was given over to my films. I couldn’t believe my eyes.
In the following days, more and more laudatory reviews came out about the festival, in general, and about my two films — Killing Time and Fannie’s Film in particular. The most beautiful, thoughtful, understanding and generous analysis being Richard Brody’s review of the series in his The Front Row column for the New Yorker. I was touched and stunned that he was able to empathize so deeply with the plight of black women filmmakers of that era.
Still from Killing Time
It was very strange, not to say a bit destabilizing. Suddenly from my little lair in “remote” Ribaute, France [pace B. Ellmann], I was catapulted forward, backward and sideways in time. I was an artist, and I use that word loosely, who had never really been discovered — I’m speaking solely of critics and the media, the people who have the power to make or break one’s career — yet was now being re-discovered.
I wanted to run around telling everyone about it, but in my immediate surroundings, there was no one to tell for whom it would have any meaning. So I jumped and danced around joyously in my office, and tooted my horn to my friends “back home.”
There wasn’t a soul who wasn’t happy for me, and glad to tell me as much, but I think we all had that feeling, why now, why so late? And what are you supposed to do with this???
Friends asked if this sudden recognition had inspired me to get back to filmmaking. It hadn’t. I would tell them, if I had something to say, I would make a film, but I don’t have anything to say. However I did feel incredibly blessed that I was alive to witness this moment. Poor Kathleen Collins had long been dead. Wouldn’t she have loved to know that her films were finally being given the attention and praise they deserve?
Still from Fannie’s Film
I thought the re-discovery would end with the BAM series, but in November of that same year, the Cahiers du Cinema featured an interview with Jordan Peele, whose film Get Out had, of course, been a global success. (Why, it was even shown at the local cinema in Lézignan, our little market town.) The Peele article was accompanied by an article titled “Looking for the Pioneers”. The list of “pioneers” was long and grand, and I couldn’t believe that I was a part of that illustrious list, sandwiched, chronologically speaking, between Kathleen Collins and Camille Billops & James Hatch.
I was pretty thrilled. Never in my life would I/could I have imagined that I’d get a mention in the venerable Cahiers.
I thought it would end with that, but some months later, I had a call, out of the blue, from one Hugues Perrot. He had written the “pioneers” piece in the November Cahiers, and while doing his research, he found out that I was living in France. Could he come to interview me for the Cahiers?
My film career was so long ago, and now suddenly people are interested??!! We’re talking about 40 years and 19,979,520 feet from stardom here. I truly didn’t see why he wanted to bother, but I said yes.
I was ill at ease. Being written about at a distance is one thing, having someone in your house interviewing you is quite another. You feel so much more exposed, I guess the word would be, so much more under pressure to perform, too.
Hugues showed up, unexpectedly, a week after we’d just had to have our adorable, beloved, young cat, Pipa, put down. I’d never had to make that decision before. I was a total wreck and didn’t really feel up to talking about my “illustrious” film career. But he’d taken the trip down from Paris, and I couldn’t very well turn him away.
Luckily, he was a bit awkward, not at all imposing, so it was sort of like talking to a friend. However, the more I talked, the more bored I got with the trajectory of my own life. I thought I came off as completely incoherent at times, but his article, which was published in the March 2018 issue of Cahiers, proved me wrong. In fact, a bit like what happened for some of the women in 20 Feet from Stardom, that glorious documentary whose title I’m paraphrasing here, whose careers were resurrected by that film, Hugues’ article seemed to have sparked interest in my films here in France and beyond.
In April of 2019, I was invited to take part in the Institut Jean Vigo’s annual film festival. This one was devoted to what they called “rebel women.” I was thrilled to finally have my films shown in my adopted land, and so excited to be invited to talk about them.
The thrill was soon replaced by horror and misgivings. This was a real reckoning with and rude awakening to what I had become in those years when I was as invisible as my dear Fannie, an old woman!
The first pictures that were taken by the press for the festival were so hideous that I wanted to bury myself. The last thing I wanted to do was to appear in public, but appear in public I had to. My sense of myself had been completely shattered. I suppose in an attempt to ameliorate the situation, my husband said to me, “but you look in the mirror every day.” “Yes, I said, but that’s not what I see!” He tried to reassure me that “in real life,” I didn’t look as hideous as the photo made me look. Some help that was. Then I remembered, you’re old, no one’s paying any attention to how you look. Relax!
The films were very well received, but during the Q & A session, those niggling questions began again… why did you stop making films? ...what was it like to be a woman/a black filmmaker in those days… why did you leave America?
I didn’t have pat answers. I found it difficult trying to recapture the spirit, zeitgeist, really, of that time without sounding either bitter or pathetic, or both. And also I realized just how much I hate being the center of attention. Hate it!
That same week, I’d been invited to the Courtisane Film Festival in Ghent.
The welcome couldn’t have been warmer and the films were so well presented and so well received. It began to feel like someone had remade my films. What else could explain why they now seemed to resonate with so many people??
Then came that damn Q & A part… why did you stop making films??… etc. etc. How do you explain to a primarily white, European audience, mostly made up of people who could be your grandchildren, what it was like to work in a profession that was known for its sexism and racism and, furthermore, to make films at a time when you could almost guarantee there wouldn’t be distribution, let alone a sizable audience for those films? From the perspective of today, it could sound a bit like madness to persist in making films in those conditions, not to say masochism. But then again, how touching that these young people were genuinely interested in what I had to say.
By the time I was invited to take part in a third festival, the Festival des 3 Continents in Nantes, I had promised myself that this time round, I would not grow attached to anyone involved in the festival. I would maintain a professional distance — respectful and courteous, but no overtures of friendship.
As it was, I was already weaving a friendship with at least three or four people from the Institut Jean Vigo festival, especially Hellali, the delightfully bright young student who did the French subtitles for both films. I was totally charmed by Stoffel Debuysere, one of the co-curators of the Courtisane Festival, as well as several of the filmmakers whose works were also being shown. In the immediate afterglow of the festivals, the contact was somewhat intense. Come to think of it, it’s a bit like doing summer stock. A new production comes in. Everyone becomes like family. The show ends. The family goes away, and you’re left feeling bereft, until the next show comes along and the same intense bonding happens again.
It was the bereft part I was experiencing a bit too much after each festival, which is why I needed a “correction.” Needed to take hold of myself before I got to Nantes.
So much for that exercise. As soon as I met Jérôme Baron and his wonderful 3 Continents team, I threw caution to the wind. How can you take hold of yourself in the presence of so many charming, interesting and interested people? I just gave in, and continued collecting new friends as if they were abandoned puppies in need of my attention and affection. I tried to collect up Charles Burnett, Larry Clark and Ben Caldwell, who were there, too, but they wouldn’t be collected.
When I was a confused, ambitious, younger woman embarking on my filmmaking career, I went to a psychic who I was hoping would tell me “one day you’re going to be a famous filmmaker.” Alas, there was no mention of filmmaking, let alone fame, I had to content myself with “yours will not be just any old name in the phone book.” At the time I was disappointed, not to say terribly disappointed with his lackluster prediction. As it turns out, he was right, and now I’m thinking this late recognition is good enough for me. 19,979,520 feet from stardom is not such a bad place to be.
Photo by Katherine Carey
With thanks to Amy for allowing me to share my musings about being “re-discovered.”]]>
But the title of Ronald’s student film has always intrigued us. Now, thanks to Dan Streible, intrepid NYU professor and founder of the Orphan Film Symposium, we have some great info!
Initially, Dan asked Ronald about the film’s title:
Ronald K. Gray wrote to me: My father was a professional singer who appeared on Broadway years ago. I first heard “Transmag” when I was 13 years old. My father sang with his peers at a show in the “Y” in Harlem and two of his friends sang the song. When my first film was finished, I had to title the film. Initially, the title was Cacophony , then it was Can I Get A Play. My sister suggested that I use Transmag as my title, so I did! The song I heard years ago was more like scat singing, so I used it. The title was a throwback to a loud noisy family that I was raised in and my memories of me hearing my father and his peers sing. Two of the men were Eubie Blake & Don Redmond!
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Alice Guy-Blaché, the first woman film director, and the Gaumont Studio in Flushing, NY, circa 1907
In this time of sheltering at home, one can fall into the most interesting rabbit holes.
Recently, as I was sitting at my computer, Alice Guy-Blaché's name popped into my mind for no particular reason.
I had seen Pamela B. Green’s wonderful 2018 documentary, Be Natural, about Alice – the world’s first woman film director, who began in 1896 at Gaumont in France – and I recalled that when she came to America in 1907, she made films at the Gaumont studio in Flushing, Queens, before moving her own production company, Solax, to Fort Lee, New Jersey.
Since I grew up in Elmhurst, which is not far from Flushing, I began to wonder where exactly the studio had been located. Queens today is home to several major film studios – the Kaufman Astoria Studios, which began in the 1920s as Paramount’s East Coast production center; and Silvercup Studios, which, since the 1980s, has been home to both film production (The Devil Wears Prada) and television (Mad Men, 30 Rock). But Gaumont, and Solax, dating from cinema’s earliest days, had faded from memory.
A Google search unearthed a clipping from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, dated Sept. 23, 1909, citing a new Gaumont building at Congress Avenue and Park Place:
Many street names in Queens were changed in the late 1920s, and neither Congress Avenue nor Park Place exist today. Further Googling, however, located a website that lists all the old street names in Queens and the new ones that replaced them. There I learned that Congress Avenue and Park Place corresponded to today’s 137th Street and 34th Avenue. (https://stevemorse.org/census/changes/QueensChanges1a.htm).
A residential condominium stands on the site now. The Gaumont studio property had survived there for more than a century, its history completely forgotten:
The cross street of 34th Avenue has been renamed Latimer Place, in honor of Lewis Latimer, an African-American inventor who was involved in the development of the light bulb, among other projects. His home is now a museum in a park down the street.
Alice Guy-Blaché on location, setting up a camera shot
—Joseph Kennedy
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The event began at 6:30pm at the Dredgers’ boat house. The attendees and I boarded canoes and paddled south for 10 minutes until we reached the designated “theater,” an inlet alongside a weathered building that would become our movie screen. We tied the front and back of our canoes to floats to prevent us from drifting and to maintain the appropriate social distance. As we waited, we were treated to pre-movie content: a snippet of Jean Painlevé, footage about the Gowanus Dredgers, and the beloved snipe Let’s All Go to the Lobby (1957). There was even a canoe selling concessions!
As the sun went down, the music and movie began. The film begins by introducing the main characters. It saves Filibus – and her three guises – for last: masked cat burglar, wealthy woman with a fur shawl, and a mustachioed nobleman. A sample of Seaton’s lyrics during the opening: “Descending from a cloud, disappearing in a crowd. Tiptoe, tiptoe silently, closer, closer can see? Could it be that Filibus?”
I had already caught Filibus during its run at Anthology Film Archives last fall so I was able to focus on the affective qualities of the outdoor, on-the-water screening: the gentle sway of the canoe, the surprisingly chilly temperature, Sosin’s piano and Seaton’s vocals intermingling with chirping crickets and the occasional splash caused by the canal’s underwater creatures. I also focused on the image’s texture as it appeared projected on the building’s aged façade, especially during the occasional moments when the restoration maintained the decay of the original extant nitrate materials. I was also often struck by the image’s mirrored reflection onto the water below. The only comparative letdown of the experience was that the vivid purples, greens, and yellows of the restoration’s beautiful toning was muted.
As the film wrapped, the audience gave Sosin and Seaton an enthusiastic applause. We then canoed back to the Dredgers’ boat house, the women on one canoe even singing Seaton’s memorable enunciation of Filibus (“feel-ee-boo-s”). An enchanting evening for an enchanting film. Long live Filibus, the air pirate!
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Dear Reggie,
Forgive me if this is a bit disjointed... I have some ideas floating around that may not have quite settled down.
I think that canons are created to identify individuals of importance and value. That is true if the canonized are saints, novelists, painters, or philosophers. But that raises some important questions:
Red Vineyards may be the only painting sold during Van Gogh’s lifetime.
It is so easy to get blinded by hype and assumptions. But we do need to ask why we think big budget movies with identifiable stars and expensive music are worth more than student films, independent documentaries, home movies, and experimental cinema. Are films that win awards “better” than those that don’t? Better for whom? Better why? And as folks who restore films, better when? I love that the passage of time offers us a chance to look back and reconsider whether we overlooked treasures that we can now appreciate.
While the canons may originally have been designed specifically to market Hollywood films, identify overlooked filmmakers, or teach students about cinema techniques, they tend to get repeated and reaffirmed again and again until they feel monumental and eternal. And the folks who are left out of the lists start to become literally personae non grata... without worth. Not worth talking about, or hiring, or watching.
And if you do not see people like yourself (queer, immigrant, nonwhite, female, trans, poor, rural, non-European/American, uneducated, etc.) making movies or in movies, how can you imagine making them yourself? We need to be grateful for those who do dare to imagine and to try!
I recently read an article in Black Camera journal by Sheila Petty “Close-Up Senegalese Cinema: Unsilencing History: Reclaiming African Cultural Heritage in Kemtiyu—Séex Anta” that made me stop and wonder what would a film canon created by writers, thinkers, filmmakers, novelists, and philosophers deeply rooted in pan-African history, political theory, theater, dance, fiction, and cinema would include. I’d like to explore the unknown (to me) work of those filmmakers!
And this is just a kind of afterthought, reading books by “non-writers” (I’m going to recommend True to Life Adventure Stories edited by Judy Grahn) and watching films by amateur or independent filmmakers allows us to get glimpses of people’s lives and worlds that are invisible in the rest of the culture. For me that is a political act. Rich and powerful people are not better, more beautiful, or more interesting than the rest of us. Honestly, I never need to see or read about another “self-made” genius billionaire.
I feel enormously lucky to be able to make these kinds of priorities and choices in my work. I realize that this may be the greatest privilege of all.
I hope this wasn’t too much.
Amy Heller
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Summer break is a time to go outside and enjoy the warm weather; to leave the technology alone and experience nature at its peak performance. What did I do this summer, you ask? I watched over 60 hours of film to create more than 25 movie trailers. Now, I’m sure you’re now wondering, “why would anyone stay cooped up inside all day when it’s sunny and 75?” Well, I couldn’t think of a better reason to have done it — I’m a summer intern at Milestone Films, and at the beginning of the summer, Amy and Dennis gave Josh Goldstein, another intern, and myself a list of 13 films that needed trailers for the Vimeo page. Soon, that list grew to over 100 films that Milestone was looking to put on their streaming site. Together, Josh and I watched a total of 52 films. Some films were shorter movies that were less than an hour, while other films were more than 4 hours long. Amy and Dennis wanted to give their audience an option to be able to stream films online, and in order to upload a video onto the streaming site, a trailer needs to be created.
Creating the trailer was quite a difficult task at first. I would watch the film and while I was watching it, I wrote down times of scenes or audio clips that I wanted to include in the trailer. I have pages upon pages of time codes that I would then have to re-watch and ultimately decide if they should be included in the trailer. I then cut the audio and video clips that I wanted and placed them into DaVinci Resolve, an editing program that was used to create all of our trailers. Next, I would move the clips around until I felt of the important plot points of the film were addressed while at the same time not giving too much away about the film.
I faced many challenges this summer while working at Milestone, and the first one occurred when I first started working here at the beginning of June. Amy and Dennis asked me what experience I had in editing things. I hadn’t had much professional experience, so I reassured them that I was a quick learner. Little did I know that I would soon become very well acquainted with DaVinci Resolve and other programs like Audacity. Dennis suggested that me and the other interns watch a few YouTube tutorials that explained how DaVinci worked, and after watching some, I took off and ended up making around 20 trailers over the course of 3 months.
After understanding how to use DaVinci like a real Michelangelo (ha, get it?), I had to start somewhere, so I came up with the notion of keeping notes of different scenes or important credits I wanted to include in the trailer. Sometimes it was quite difficult to remember to include these. With the time codes written down, I kept a list with everything I thought would work well in the trailer, and these handwritten — and sometimes less than legible — timestamps enabled me to begin working on the trailer almost immediately after watching the full film. I could just go back and re-watch the second clips I wanted to have in the trailer and make sure it fits with the rest of the project.
My very messy notes of timestamps for a few of the films.
One might think that creating a trailer for an already made film is pretty easy, but I can assure you that it isn’t as easy as it sounds. Some films were more difficult than others, and one exceptionally hard one was The Sorrow and the Pity. Generally speaking, the films I watched did not really surpass the 2-hour mark. There was one outlier though, and this was The Sorrow and the Pity. This film is a 4-hour French film about World War II and it was fantastic to watch, but very overwhelming to pick out scenes that I deemed important. How could a person narrow down a 4-hour long piece of history to something less than 2 minutes long? I was about to find out.
Because the film was so long, I made sure to keep detailed notes on where important scenes occurred. After looking through the more than 40 timecodes, I created a trailer with valuable historical information. I thought that Amy and Dennis would want the trailer to reflect the factual tone of the film but boy was I wrong. After watching my first trailer, Amy told me to go back in and find more emotional pieces from the film. After this suggestion, I agreed, and thought that taking an emotional angle rather than a strictly narrative one would be a better idea for the trailer. It took me longer than I had anticipated to find the emotional pieces, but the result was well worth it. After another few days of editing, cutting, and re-editing, I finally liked my final product —and Amy and Dennis did too. This project took me about 2 weeks to finish, and the final trailer ended up being one minute and 41 seconds.
The more I enjoyed a film, the more fun I had creating its trailer. Some of these films were, The Moon and the Son, Captured on Film: The True Story of Marion Davies, The Edge of the World, and The Wide Blue Road. I’m so thankful to have been exposed to these great works of art that are often and unfortunately overlooked by syllabi at schools across the nation and popular media.
The self-assurance I gained and the many positive affirmations heard by Amy and Dennis helped myself and fellow interns, Angeli Reyes and Josh Goldstein, learn so much from our time here at Milestone. We all have learned not only about editing and post production, but also about how a business is run. I’ve known that I wanted to have some sort of career in the film and television industry for as long as I can remember (it started off as a dream to be a Fallon-esque talk show host, but that dream quickly faded when I realized I could barely audition for my 8th grade play out of sheer terror), and Amy and Dennis have helped me see a whole other side of this industry I did not know much about. Here at Millstone, I was able to watch a plethora of films that I wouldn’t have been exposed to otherwise, and realize that I actually enjoy watching silent films, among other genres I hadn’t experienced in depth yet. The lessons that I have learned from my summer at Milestone will undoubtedly help me in my future career, and I can’t thank Amy and Dennis enough for taking me on as a part of their internship team this summer and for all of the wonderful opportunities they have given me.
You can check out the great trailers created by Faith, Josh, and Angeli here!
]]>We didn't really know Penny and Chris (and Frazer) that well, but we loved seeing them around and working with them on Project Shirley. They were incredibly kind to us and loaned us very rare films he did together with Shirley Clarke. Penny never expected anything in return, but one day, he asked us if we ever ran across "Christopher and Me," a film he worked on in 1960 that Shirley had produced and edited. He was extremely proud because it had the one and only song he ever got published and he got into the songwriter's union with it. He sang "The Little Boat" to all of his children as they were growing up and he wanted to get them copies. We had never heard of the film so he asked us if we could find it. It took two years, but we finally found the Ed Foote family in New Hampshire who produced it and they still had two prints. We put it out on THE MAGIC BOX and his kids all got DVDs. There will be many, many tributes by people who knew him better than we did, but we hope you will love this song as much as we do.
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Courtesy of the Walker Art Center
Instead of Smashing Icons, Film Restoration F*cks with the Canon
When I was 12, I discovered the word “iconoclast” and fell in love with the idea of smashing idols and bucking traditions. In college and grad school, I studied working-class history (with a few film courses to lighten the reading load). Fleeing academia, I found jobs distributing documentary, foreign, and independent films.
Nevertheless, in my mind “restoration” was tied to the work of European men: master paintings, stately manors, and cathedrals. Even the first restored film I ever saw was Abel Gance’s Napoleon.
Fortunately, I married a film restorationist who shared my politics and aesthetics. When my husband/partner Dennis Doros and I started Milestone Films in 1990, we were undercapitalized, naïve, and stubbornly committed to restoring films from the historical, geographical, and cultural periphery of cinema. Over the years, we worked with labs and archives to introduce audiences to early cinema from Persia, Tahiti, and Antarctica; Jane Campion’s first feature; silent films directed by women; animation; Czarist dramas; and other gems.
Our distribution focus sharpened when we acquired the rights to Charles Burnett’s 1977 film Killer of Sheep. Working with Charles, we saw the power and importance of his low-budget masterpiece. And we realized that much of the work of postwar American independent filmmakers was lost, unavailable, unrestored, and forgotten.
Independent films can be hard to locate, expensive to restore, and challenging to release. But our company’s relative unprofitability proved to be an asset: if we were not going to make money, we might as well do what we believed in. We sought out films that reflected the lives and work of African Americans, women, LGBTQ people, and Native Americans. Rather than smashing icons, we decided to work to radically reshape and enlarge the pantheon. We are still at it. And we are amused to learn that many film programmers have adopted our Milestone motto: “We like to fuck with the canon!”
That mandate has evolved through choice and chance. Dennis had the idea of restoring the oeuvre of New York filmmaker Shirley Clarke, which started us on a multi-year odyssey, working with heirs, producers, and archives around the world. For her Portrait of Jason, the Academy Archive and Milestone collaborated on a digital restoration (our first), and digital tools were able to synch non-matching elements, saving us weeks of editing. With the celebration of the 50th anniversary of Stonewall, Portrait of Jason is being rediscovered as a groundbreaking LGBTQ+ film.
Other times we just lucky. When the Cineteca di Bologna restored the work of radical filmmaker Lionel Rogosin, Milestone was able to premiere his devastating On the Bowery and Come Back, Africa. We acquired Margot Benacerraf’s Araya, a gorgeous film about the fisherman and salt harvesters of Venezuela, after a small nonprofit distribution company closed it doors.
With the flexibility and lower cost of digital restoration, we are now working to find more filmmakers whose work has been under-appreciated—because we know it is powerful to get those films seen! These films change lives and culture… and history.
Since our release of the films of Kathleen Collins, HarperCollins has published two bestselling volumes of the late filmmaker’s writing. Native American filmmakers Douglas Miles and Pamela Peters have written about how much Kent Mackenzie’s The Exiles means to their work. Our release of Winter Soldier helped inspire the creation of Iraq Veterans Against the War. And Ava Duvernay (Selma, When They See Us) calls Charles Burnett a giant, a legend, and a true artist.
Later this year Milestone will bring out the DVD of Billy Woodberry’s heartbreaking Bless Their Little Hearts, written and filmed by Burnett. Next year, we start restoring the films of another talented African-American woman, Ayoka Chenzira, along with four great LGBTQ+ films from filmmakers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman. And this August 7–9, the Walker Art Center will be showing a restored Milestone film that spans my lifelong commitment to expanding both cinema and history. I first saw Say Amen, Somebody in 1983 when it was onscreen for months at New York’s 68th Street Playhouse. I lived on the Lower East Side and had no idea I would ever work in film, but I traveled uptown again and again to see this documentary celebration of African American Gospel music. The movie gave me goosebumps then, and it still does.
Fifty years have passed since I first embraced my iconoclasm… and there are still so many traditions to challenge, canons to expand, and artists to discover and celebrate.
]]>Well, we release films, of course... but for us, distribution is a process that also entails rediscovery, restoration, and a whole lot of research. And in recent years, we have added another layer to the process — going back and re-restoring films we premiered decades ago. Combining powerful digital restoration tools with even more study and information, we are now able to make some of the gorgeous films we have long loved, even more visually thrilling and powerful.
A great example of the Milestone process is the new digital restoration of Mikhail Kalatozov and Sergei Urusevsky’s masterpiece, I Am Cuba (USSR-Cuba, 1964). When we first released the film in 1995, it had played (unsubtitled) at two US film festivals, but was largely unknown around the world. Almost a quarter of a century later — thanks in large part to Milestone’s rediscovery of the film and the support of Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola — I Am Cuba has transformed the cinematographer’s art and is acclaimed as a cornerstone of international filmmaking.
First up:, the restoration.
Way back in the early 1990s, when Milestone first decided to try to license I Am Cuba, the questions was: How? Our friends at the Telluride and San Francisco Film Festivals had screened an unsubtitled print from Russia in 1992 and 1993. So it seemed that Mosfilm should be our first stop — but we did not even know how to contact the studio. In those pre-Internet days, a fax number could be a lifeline, so Milestone co-founder Dennis Doros paged through a stack of old copies of Variety until he found a listing. Next came protracted negotiations between Milestone and the Moscow-based production company — negotiations that were marked by some inevitable mutual mistrust and cultural misunderstandings. But persistence paid off, and so did we… after wiring more money than we could afford to Russia, we received a 35mm interpositive fine grain and 35mm mag tracks for the film from Mosfilm and the Russian archive Gosfilmofond (along with three 35mm prints). Those preservation materials proved to be key in the 2018 restoration.
In recent years we dreamed about starting a 4K digital restoration of I Am Cuba. We wanted to improve the image quality, reduce or eliminate an annoying flicker, and clean up bad splices, photochemical blotches, scratches, and various other problems typical of any film of that age. But the cost of the project kept delaying the start of the restoration. Sometimes cash flow can really slow down even the most passionate restorationist!
But then Milestone received an email from director Julian Temple, who was producing a new documentary Habañeros on the history of Havana. Temple had spent a small fortune for the rights to license clips from I Am Cuba from a European distributor of the film, only to find that the materials delivered were inferior and unusable. Temple’s production company and Milestone agreed to split the cost of a new 4K scan (to be done at Colorlab in Rockville, Maryland) from Milestone’s 35mm interpositive.
Milestone then took Colorlab’s 4K transfer to Metropolis Post in New York, where Jack Rizzo’s crew of Jason Crump (colorist) and Ian Bostick (restoration artist) spent hour after hour meticulously timing, cleaning, stabilizing, and de-flickering the original scan. Unlike most films that have traditional sets and cinematography, I Am Cuba’s wildly moving camera made it impossible to use the standard “automatic” computer programs to clean up scratches and dust. Most of that work had to be done manually by Ian, who spent many days working on the project. Milestone came in near the end to approve and fine tune the restoration.
Step 2, the trailers.
n 1995, we worked with post-production wizard Bob Warmflash to create a trailer that would introduce this unknown film to filmgoers in the US and Canada. His version worked so well that the film played in 120 theaters in the first two years of its release.
Planning the 2018 release, we turned to our friend and former intern, Adrian Rothschild, who has cut so many of Milestone’s best trailers. We met Adrian when he was a college student at Wesleyan University and have cheered on his many career successes — he is now a producer at Viacom. We”re so glad he still finds time to work on our projects. Adrian’s trailer highlights both the extraordinary visual beauty and the Spanish-only soundtrack of the new 4K restoration. In the 1995 release of I Am Cuba, the soundtrack featured a Russian overdub of the Spanish soundtrack. So you would hear a woman narrator recite “Soy, Cuba” and then immediately a male Russian voice would chant “Я, куба” (Ya, Kuba). It was weird and in some ways it added to the disorientation created by the film’s dizzying visuals. But for the new restoration, we were able to marry the Spanish-only soundtrack with the crystal-clear images. The final result helps the viewer focus on the film’s compelling narrative.
The original 1995 I Am Cuba trailer…
and Adrian Rothschild’s brilliant 2018 trailer for the 4K restoration:
Next, the press kits.
Right from the start, we have been obsessed with making Milestone’s press materials as insanely comprehensive as possible — New Yorker film critic Richard Brody has even urged us to publish them. But time has definitely allowed us to amplify our efforts. The original I Am Cuba press kit was a meaty 17 pages… but the 2018 version has grown to 50. And back in the 1990s, when press kits were distributed on paper (remember, this was before there was an Internet!), we were limited by our Black & White photocopier (yes, we had one in our one-bedroom home/office). Happily, we are now able to add color images… plus two decades of additional research.
Doug Miles instantly became a friend — and one of our heroes. Doug wanted us to know that he was creating art inspired by the film. As Doug described in a 2008 press release:
The stark vision of director Kent Mackenzie’s The Exiles serves as the template for the (often misunderstood) stark artistic vision(s) of Douglas Miles as he re-creates scenes from the long-awaited critically acclaimed film, The Exiles. As The Exiles film experiences a limited release and renaissance, Douglas Miles/Apache Skateboards teams up with The Exiles producers to promote its singular filmic vision of hard times in the land of plenty.
A film ahead of its time, The Exiles (1958-61) captures in gritty film noir tradition, the story of Native Americans in Los Angeles’s Bunker Hill District as they struggle to make a life for themselves during the B.I.A.’s “relocation period.” This was the B.I.A.’s last major attempt at forced integration of Native people into American society.
Using spray paint, exacto knives and found objects, film stills from The Exiles film come to life via Douglas Miles’s singular vision. His guerrilla art method provides the backdrop for the collision of two work of art/artists exploring the so-called native experience. A perfect combination. The results being a one-two punch that builds interest and respect for The Exiles film, director, music, and cast.
And when Doug learned that we had tried hard but unsuccessfully to locate the lone surviving cast member from the film, he took up the quest, going door to door on the San Carlos Reservation until he found someone who had contact information for Yvonne Williams. Thanks to his efforts, we were able to tell her that the film was opening around the country and to send DVDs for herself and her family. We owe him a huge debt of gratitude.
Over the years, we have stayed in contact and watched his art and activism grow. This year, he has collaborated with filmmaker Audrey Buchanan to create a powerful and moving short film The Mystery of Now about the meaning and mission of Apache Skateboards and the community it represents and serves. National Geographic chose the film as an official selection for its Short Film Showcase. We are honored that Doug has allowed us to share the film here:
Doug also sent us a wonderful interview in which he talks about his commitment to art activism.
Why is this film so important from a visibility perspective?
It’s no mystery that the history of Native American people in this country has been overlooked, misrepresented, and maligned to create a more heroic narrative for settlers, to sell books, land, and movie tickets.
This film pushes back at the invisibility that plagues Native people working in the arts and their communities. In the middle of this cultural clash of stereotypes and battles for agency, one thing that has never ceased, is Native creativity in the making of art. Simply stated, Native art is the voice of Native people. In our creativity, we recreate ourselves and in doing so, we create our world.
The current population of San Carlos, Arizona is about 14,000. The poverty level hovers about about 60% in this eastern Arizona town. For some (not all) Indian Nations, this is typical. In spite of this, what Apache Skateboards has done in its 17-year journey of creativity and skateboarding is nothing short of amazing.
What makes your skateboard brand unique?
Apache Skateboards started out as a father, making art for his son, but since then has grown into a movement sparking interest in skateboarding across Native communities for over 15 years.
The art I designed for Apache Skateboards paired young skaters with historical imagery encouraging them to remember Native heroes of the past, while in the present, utilizing skateboarding as a conduit for Native pride.
What's the message you want viewers to walk away with?
“Apache Skateboards is the power of the past, the key to the future and the mystery of now.” With this short phrase I wanted to encapsulate what the Apache Skateboard brand/movement means, where it’s at and where it’s going. “The power of the past” refers to the history of Apache people, their struggle and victories over historical oppression. “The key to the future” refers to the skate-team itself and the young people that work with Apache Skateboards. They are the “key” to the future of our community. “The mystery of now” refers to our everyday destiny and the blessing of our lives in creating art, fun, and joy together. I felt if I could create art, kids could use it and it would change the way we not only looked at art, but it would change the way we looked at our community, how we interacted with the world and how we viewed ourselves. I think together we’ve succeeded.
]]>Thank you to the Art House Convergence, Spotlight Cinema Network, and all of you here for this really incredible honor. I use that word, because I still can’t quite believe it. It has taken me weeks to come up with this short speech — I hope my words convey how much this means to me.
Back in 1985, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, I was a runaway grad student newly returned to New York City with absolutely no idea what to do next. A former boss sent me on to First Run Features where I began as an unpaid intern and met my first mentor in film, the amazing Nancy Gerstman, who remains my very dear friend. As Nancy’s assistant, I got all the glamorous jobs, like making cold calls (John Toner, I think you were my second ever call) and phoning for grosses. This was a simpler time, when there were no cell phones, no fax machines, no Internet… so if you wanted the box office numbers, you called. And the film I was phoning about, Michael Apted’s 28 Up was then screening all across the country — in 16mm only!
The thing is, I actually loved making those calls. I had previously worked in publishing, volunteered for progressive causes, and studied history, but while I was making those calls for grosses to exhibitors like Jim Emerson at the Market Street Theater, Anita Monga at Renaissance Rialto, Richard Herskowitz at Cornell Cinema, and Gary Kaboly at Pittsburgh Filmmakers I found my tribe, my community, you.
The next year, 1986, I moved on to New Yorker Films where I first worked as assistant to Dan Talbot and Jose Lopez. Here again, I was so lucky to be learning from some of wisest and kindest people in this business. Part of my job was coordinating with the managers of the Metro, Cinema Studio, and Lincoln Plaza Theaters, so I also got the opportunity to be part of the day-to-day work of exhibition. Later I moved over to work as a nontheatrical booker at New Yorker, where my customers and friends included Brent Kliewer in Santa Fe, Hart Wegner at UNLV, Eleanor Nichols in Sonoma, California, Dan Ladely in Lincoln, Nebraska, and Ann Brandman at the Honolulu Museum of Art. I am grateful to them all, and to so many more.Since then, my list of film friends and teachers has grown to include fellow distributors Wendy Lidell, Adam Yauch, Jeff Massino, Emily Russo, Dan Berger, and Dennis’s wonderful mentor, Don Krim. I have also had the privilege of working with so many great exhibitors, including Bruce Goldstein (the first programmer to book a Milestone series) and Karen Cooper at Film Forum, Peggy Parsons at the National Gallery, Connie White, Richard Peña, John Ewing in Cleveland, Toby Leonard and Stephanie Silverman at the Belcourt, Carol Johnson and her great team at the Amherst Cinema, Rachel Jacobson, Harris Dew and John Vanco at the IFC Center, Florence Almozini and Dennis Lim at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, and Dave Filipi at the Wexner. I promised a short speech, or I could definitely go on and on…
My film community has also grown to include archivists, scholars, filmmakers, and journalists from around the world. I am grateful to David Bordwell, Ian Christie, Jean Jacques Varret, Christophe Terhechte, Jedrzej Sablinski, Margaret Bodde, Ronald Gray, Dan Streible, Ally Field, Richard Koszarski, Charles Burnett, Philip Haas, John Canemaker, Eleanor Antin, Ava Du Vernay, Richard Brody, Bill Gosden, and Billy Woodberry. Former colleagues and interns including Cindi Rowell, Fumiko Takagi, Michael Bellavia, Isabel Cadalso, Megan Powers, Zach Zahos, Anke Mebold, Peter Miele, Nadja Tennstedt, Maia Krivoruk, Lauren Caddick, Adrian and Dylan Rothschild, Sarah Lipkin, Victor Vazquez, Austin Renna, Vincent Mollica, Angeli Reyes and my favorite, Adam Doros, are still members of our extended film family. And I would like to also thank my parents, who would have loved this, my beloved sister Karen Key, and my guys, Dennis and Adam. Friends like these at once make life bigger and more interesting and make the world smaller and kinder. I am incredibly grateful to them all.
Which brings me to this room and why we are all here today. Despite storms and delays, we all made our way here to Midway, Utah. Why? To be a community and to celebrate and strengthen the ties that make this community strong. And we schlepped here even though in 2019 there are so many other ways we could communicate. So why aren’t we all home now, tapping away at SnapChat, Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, LinkedIn, Signal, Pinterest, Tumblr, Reddit, or even just texting or emailing?
The answer is the same reason that we all work to get people into movie theaters. Because all these media absolutely pale compared to the power of actually being in the presence of another person and sharing space and experiences with them. However convenient it may be to post a birthday greeting on a friend’s wall, it can never be as meaningful as a phone rendition of Happy Birthday (in my case, off-key) or actually sharing a celebratory dinner (with cake and candles).
Looking back on my decades in film, I have a few thoughts I’d like to share.
First, for me, networking is okay but collegiality is better and friendship is much better still. Over the years, I’ve been able to work with so many people I esteem and love — and it has been a privilege and a joy.
Second, all camaraderie requires intimacy which requires contact. Honestly, I miss the days of talking at length with my exhibitors. I just haven’t found that texts and short emails generally lead to new friendships. I became friends with many of my customers because we talked on the phone for hours and got to know one another. I knew if they were fans of Abba, or were recovering from shingles, or once lived in Elmira, NY, or had twelve-year-old twins — and they knew about my life too. I met other film friends in person, here at the AHC, at film festivals, and at conferences of the Association of Moving Image Archivists.
Third, I have become very wary of social media. I think it is so easy to get lulled into confusing social media interactions for real human connection. Also, we need to keep in mind that these are for-profit businesses run by huge corporations for the purpose of aggregating data — our data. And we know that they have repeatedly misused that private information to the detriment of individuals and to democracy. And I worry about the ability of hackers and bots to manipulate social media to polarize and alienate us from one another. I think we have all seen that happen.
Finally, looking forward, I really want to keep growing my worldwide film family! Cinema is a universal art form that embraces everything — literature, theater, dance, photography, comedy, animation, history, mythology, science, music — and my cinephile community is international, diverse, challenging, funny, crazy, thought-provoking, and the just, the best.
One of our international cinephile friends is Yvonne Ng, who serves with Dennis on the AMIA board, lives in Prague, and works for Witness, a great nonprofit organization that uses audiovisual technology to support civic participation and human rights around the world. We are immensely grateful to the wonderful team at the Spotlight Cinema Network for donating $2500 to Witness as part of our Lifetime Award. This donation will help Witness’s programs to create and archive evidence of military actions in Syria, to teach young people of color in Brazil how to document police violence, and to monitor the abuse of immigrants in the United States. We love that Witness is employing same technology that brings feature films to our screens to make the world safer and more just. The work that Witness does is incredibly tough and we hope that members of the Art House Convergence will check them out and support them.
[This section I managed to omit... I dropped my papers and got flustered...] And to close, let me say how much I love and respect the work that you all do, every day, in the real world, to bring people from different backgrounds and experiences together to share a passion, a movie theater, and maybe some popcorn. That’s not just building diversity, that is creating community.
We’ve written these speeches separately, so please forgive me if there’s some repetition. Just assume you’re watching a Christopher Nolan film.
Thank you to Alison, Ronnie, the Spotlight and Conference Leadership, and all of you for this wonderful award. Now, one doesn’t get too many lifetime achievement awards in ones… well, life. It sort of says it in its name. This honor really took us completely by surprise. And like most every one of my age, I completely forgot how damned old I’ve become.
There is something uncomfortable that I want to reveal publicly for the first time – because I think it is more valuable to discuss the struggles and the people who helped -- than to talk about any achievements. And there’s a specific reason why I’m telling you because it has to do with cinema… The fact is that I was a child of abuse. It was a life of frequently harsh, violent physical punishment and equally harsh criticism. For most of my young life, my self-esteem was zero – something I still struggle with even standing here today. My childhood terrors were a struggle that I hid from my teachers, my classmates, and my friends. I barely hung in there in high school, and by college, my life was slipping away from me. My college friends had no idea, but I was broken in so many ways.
Dennis: 1975 in Florida
Then it happened… at the advanced age of 21. One day, by complete accident, I was chosen for no real reason other than I could operate a video camera, to be the president of Ohio University’s Athens Film Society -- exactly forty years ago this year. My fortunes and my life completely changed for the better. It was instant karma in the form of 16mm celluloid. I found an art form that I loved above all the others, I found a career that has rewarded me time and time again – especially tonight – and I found my beloved wife and partner Amy and gave birth to Milestone, and even more important our son Adam, the joy of our lives. They, above all else, are why I’m here today
From day one in cinema, I also found surrogate fathers, mothers, sisters, and brothers -- lifelong friends that I tend to call my cinematic family – that have helped me along the way. And they are from all phases of the industry, so please bear with me for a few seconds when I name a few of them. From the beginning, there was Dean Henry Lin at Ohio U and my first film boss Giulio Scalinger, followed by the animators Grant Munro and John Canemaker, the archivists Kevin Brownlow, Ross Lipman, and James Card, programmers like Anita Monga, John Ewing, Connie White, and Kyoko Hirano. The filmmakers Tony Buba (my personal favorite), Charles Burnett, Martin Scorsese, Thelma Schoonmaker, Jonathan Demme, Michael Powell, Bill Greaves, and Manny Kirshheimer. The media librarians Bill Sloan, Lillian Katz and Joe Yranski. The distributors Lee Krugman, Ian Christie, and the ever-wonderful Nancy Gerstman. Then there are the film critics like Scott Eyman, Ann Hornaday, Melissa Anderson, Manohla Dargis, Richard Brody, and Dave Kehr. There are also the lab people like Janice Allen, Russ Sunewick and Jack Rizzo. There’s Turner Classic Movies’ Charlie Tabesh. I know… he’s television… but he’s our brother-in-cinema and Milestone owes its continued existence to him. Then there are all my friends at the Eye Filmmuseum and my two closest cinematic sisters, Wendy Clarke – that’s Shirley’s daughter -- and Letizia Gatti of Reading Bloom, she’s our Italian side of the Milestone family.
And lastly, there’s Laura Rooney and the entire membership of the Association of Moving Image Archivists. Amazing people who I have loved and cherished these past twenty-two years and I’m lucky now to be in a position as President that I am able to serve them. They are the thousand people all over the world working without fanfare to preserve our moving image history.
And of course, many of you here In this room, I consider to be my cinematic family. And just to explain, I started to write this speech in the Netherlands after three glasses of wine, and I was shall we say… a little drunk, overly sentimental, and immensely nostalgic. And outside of the drinking which in retrospect probably would have helped get me through this speech, I’m about to get a little of all that once again.
My fellow old-timers probably noticed by now that I haven’t thanked somebody I worked for seven years — and are probably getting a little pissed that I’ve forgotten him. And many have, but I never will. Donald Krim has been left out of film history by too many. He was too self-deprecating, too sincere, and too honest to have books, articles, and theses written about him. So let’s flash back to 1983. It’s a long story but I hope you will be repaid in the end by listening to it.
I finally left Ohio University having been president of the film society and programmed their terrific Athens International film festival. I was in hell for two years working for the family business – selling Marlboros, Virginia Slims, Eve 120s and Newports in Irvington, New Jersey for a living.
So! In desperation and with fingers crossed and with lots of prayers, I sent out about 200 letters to just about everybody in the BoxOffice Distributors list of 1983 along with my resume and Giulio’s reference letter. Over the next few weeks, I got 176 rejection letters – I still have them all -- and two film production companies who wanted me to launder money out of Greece -- well they both assumed with my last name being Doros and coming from Athens (they skipped over the Ohio part) that I must be Greek… and since I was looking for I job in film, that I must be dishonest… I mean can you imagine telling somebody in the job interview that you’re hiring them to commit international money laundering?
Anyway, months after I had given up and resigned to my fate of smelling like tobacco for the rest of my life, I got a letter late in December 1983 starting off “pertaining to your letter of May 5th.” Don, I have to say, kind of worked methodically. It seemed his last nontheatrical salesman had to be fired for dishonesty – taking imaginary bookings but shipping real 16mm and 35mm prints to unsuspecting exhibitors. As you can imagine, that did NOT go over well with the theaters…
As shy as I was, he saw something in me. I was hired and a couple of weeks later, I had my own office on West 57th Street. It was a tiny company then -- Don’s wife Susan Krim and Paula Pevzner were the other two people there and I am still tremendously in their debt as well.
Don Krim
I should mention that when I joined Kino, my father stopped talking to me for a year. I had left Star Tobacco and went into the film world. I had truly disgraced the family. But Don’s kindness, his willingness to teach me the ropes, his taking me into his confidence about the business, and especially our lunches and walks together where he’d tell me the history of indie cinema in New York and the characters he knew are memories I hold dear. Even his criticisms when I didn’t live up to what he thought I was capable of were kindly. I can’t begin to tell you how much he meant to me. In the emotional vacuum that was my prior life, he became my substitute father, my mentor, and my lifelong inspiration.
So! How did I become a distributor and a film archivist? During my first year there, Don acquired two silent films from the Gloria Swanson estate, Erich von Stroheim’s Queen Kelly and Raoul Walsh’s Sadie Thompson. Von Stroheim’s film had been completed in haste by others less talented than him after he was fired, and Walsh’s masterpiece was missing its last reel. Don thought of bringing them out as historical oddities with an explanation at the beginning and end of the film. I asked if he thought of restoring them as close as you could using stills and scripts. I was inspired by Bob Gitt’s work on Lost Horizon done a few years before.
Now, this is commonplace these days where there are so many outlets for silent films, but this was absolutely unheard of in 1984. I should mention that Kino was always in debt. Kino was threatened almost monthly by the man Don bought the business from – and who was still owed a lot of money. Don and Susan were working nights and weekends trying to figure out how to keep the company alive. Besides that, only the well-respected Kevin Brownlow and David Gill were restoring silent films with the kind of budget I proposed, and they had Thames Television corporate money to back them. I mean, I was asking Don to spend a boatload of money on the idea that a 26-year-old kid with less than a year’s professional experience could pull this off. All Don asked was, “Do you think you can do it?” And, let me say here, I completely lied. I definitely didn’t have a clue what I was doing. I said, of course, I could. And he trusted me.
Oh my god, That was when I discovered film restoration. As broken as I had been as a teenager, the art of putting something together again, to fix it and make it whole, to make it look new again, was a revelation. I’ve never discussed this before and perhaps I didn’t even realize it until I wrote this speech. But I suspect I’m not alone in this feeling of film restoration as rejuvenation of one’s own soul.
For the next two years, I was working at Kino every day in the city. And every night and on weekends, I would take the bus an hour ride home, then drive up an hour to Janice Allen’s lab in Park Ridge, New Jersey so I could work on these two films late into the early morning hours. Janice, by the way, taught me everything I needed to know. I was living on coffee, fast food, and doughnuts that I’d pick up on the New Jersey Parkway. And every morning, I’d arrive at Kino before anyone else and Don and I would go over what I did the night before. We also talked about what I was going to do, and he helped with possible ideas and on writing the new intertitles we needed. We sweated daily to make them better. As I recall, the intertitle “A Serenade” took two weeks before we finally came up with it.
Don was there to hold my hand when I needed it. All together, it cost a lot of money to restore these two films, most likely money he had to borrow. Don never mentioned it, so I never had to think about it. Hell, I was probably too young and too self-involved to care. When by some miracle the first one neared completion, Queen Kelly was to premiere at the Berlin Film Festival and to follow was a huge opening in Los Angeles. There was a lot of excitement about the film and It looked like it was going to be a tremendous success. Don told me that I was to be credited as the archivist. I suggested that Don also would take a restoration credit. He said, no thanks, the Kino International logo was all he needed. That was his. And that was Don.
Now for my inspirational part of my part of the speech and the reason I told this long story. It’s the secret why Milestone, run by two short but adorable Jewish people out of their home in New Jersey is 29-years-old and has outlasted a lot of bigger companies. No matter how broke we were, we took some really big risks on films that really mattered to us. That could make lives better just by watching them. We went for the home runs because no one remembers the singles the next day. Our films may seem like obvious choices now, but I promise you that everybody thought we were crazy to spend $450,000 to release a film shot in 16mm about an African American working at a slaughterhouse in Watts — or to risk all our savings on a 141-minute 1964 propaganda film celebrating the Cuban revolution — or taking ten years to restore the films of the uncommercial and forgotten Shirley Clarke. We took these risks because we believed in the power of cinema, in the films themselves… and we believed in all of you.
Our secret was to build our company taking risks — to be honest, the more degree of difficulty the better… because it’s not just about today, it’s about building something of value to last for generations. Don taught us this.
So! let’s say down the road, you distributors and exhibitors alike, finding that you need to take a big risk on something really wonderful and worth fighting for … I want you to remember Don Krim. By the way, Queen Kelly netted over half a million dollars and played in over forty countries. Don took great risks not only on films and directors but also on a person that 176 other companies wouldn’t hire -- and here I am today with my lovely wife and this rather nifty award. This year, Amy and I are going to restore Queen Kelly and Sadie Thompson once again, this time in Don’s honor. This time, his name will appear in the final credits.
So in conclusion, when you hear me say — and I do so frequently — that I believe in the power of cinema to change lives, well, here I am.
Now, I’ll dry my tears over lost friends and I’ll get that drink with my amazing partner and wife, and here will be my toast, “Here is to all of you.” Thank you.
My first trip to the Association of Moving Image Archivists was in Bethesda, Maryland in 1997. My panel on the collegial work between archives and distributors did not go very well — one of the archivists suggested that in 20 years, the only place that anyone could go see silent films would be in an archive. It was a bad prediction (as it turns out) and it reinforced my suspicions that many archivists were dead set against cooperating on restorations that would see commercial release.
But I met a new friend there who convinced me to come back and try again. The next year’s conference in Miami changed my life forever and set me on a course I never expected. I found not only colleagues in the archival world... but a family as well. (And now, I'm proud to say that my own family, Amy and our son Adam, are also members!)
I served three terms on the Board of Directors and after a hiatus, I am now back— this time serving as President of AMIA. Below is a photo of this year's board, a collection of amazing people that I’m proud and grateful to call friends. They work tirelessly to better our field and help our members.
Casey Davis Kaufman, Lauren Sorenson, me, Andrea Leigh, Teague Schneiter, Yvonne Ng, John Polito, Jayson Wall, Melissa Dollman
In its 28 years of existence, the organization has helped abolish the boundaries between commercial and non-commercial, distributors and archivists, labs and archives, collectors and copyright holders, academics and studios. We have grown from our early days of sitting around a table to nearly a thousand members from 29 countries. Our conference takes up three floors of hotel space with panels, workshops, exhibition spaces, roundtables, screenings and much more! We offer scholarships, internships, and travel grants to all those interested in the preservation of moving images.
This year, the Board decided to produce a song to welcome the newcomers to AMIA. It was intended to be a silly song — to show that the board was willing to put its best (or worst) foot forward to make people feel at home. However, we did not count on the talents of Audio Mechanics' John Polito. The song was both splendidly retro and funny and his audio talents made us sound, well, good! I make, shall we say, a surprising contribution. “We are AMIA” was a hit at this year’s AMIA conference, and we want to share it with our Milestone friends!
I want, however, to say that AMIA is just not all song and dance. It is four days of spectacular continuing education, networking, and problem-solving. So many restorations have come from colleagues meeting other colleagues at the conference, that a festival featuring all those restored moving images would take years.
AMIA is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) and your donation can help to bring students and unsubsidized archivists to the conference from around the world. A gift to the AMIA travel fund is like the proverbial story of teaching a man to fish — you are not restoring a specific film, but you are helping to teach archivists who will go out and preserve and restore hundreds of films around the world.
To find out how you can donate, here's the link!
]]>Way back in May 2012 I wrote and posted a blog on this website entitled “Pay Up!” In that essay I argued that people should get paid for working. What a concept, huh? Revolutionary.
In that blog, I was reacting to an article that had just appeared in the New York Times about the phenomenon of unpaid internships. But then, for a while things seemed to be improving. In June 2013 a Federal District Court judge in Manhattan ruled that Fox Searchlight had violated federal and New York minimum wage laws by not paying production interns working on Black Swan. And for a few years, young people getting out of college (often with huge student loan debt) were actually earning some money at their first film industry jobs.
Of course, here at Milestone, we have continued our practice of paying interns. In fact, when I became an active supporter of Bernie Sanders, we began paying all college students and grads $15 an hour and our high school assistants $13 an hour.
So Dennis and I are truly dismayed to learn that many production companies, theaters, museums, and fellow film distributors have gone back to the old practice of allowing well-educated, hard-working young people to work for free.
In August, as our two wonderful summer interns Austin and Malu were preparing to leave and were looking for new internships or employment, we heard from them about how hard it is to find any that pays. Honestly, we were appalled to hear about companies and institutions that pay a $10 or $25 per day — or absolutely nothing at all.
As a former labor historian, I also want to take a moment to address an argument I sometimes hear — that unpaid internships are essentially an extension of the age-old apprenticeship model (and I am definitely not referring to a former television show!). So here is the thing: “the system of apprenticeship first developed in the later Middle Ages and came to be supervised by craft guilds and town governments. A master craftsman was entitled to employ young people as an inexpensive form of labour in exchange for providing food, lodging and formal training in the craft.”
Interns in 2018 have to house, feed, clothe, and transport themselves and they carry enormous debt burdens. The average loan debt of a student graduating in New York State in 2017 was more than $30,000. You can read more here.
Back in 2012 I wrote that Dennis and I were the only full-time permanent staff at Milestone and that we worked in the basement of our house, cleaned the cat boxes, packed orders, and did all the production, bookkeeping, and shipping. We still do. And we are making the exact same salary we were earning when I wrote that 2012 blog — that is, when our cash flow allows us to take pay checks.
FYI, we earn a little more than double what our interns do (and that is only if you presume that we work only 40 hours a week. We don’t). And it is interesting to note that the Economic Policy Institute reported this year that the average CEO pay is 271 times that of the typical American worker.
I understand that in addition to making hard choices that keep our overhead low (literally — tall interns need to duck in our subterranean office), Dennis and I are also lucky to be able to decide to pay our interns fairly. For one thing, we only hire interns for short-term assignments, and then only when we can afford to. For another, in our early years, we benefited from family financial help.
But think about this: the endowment of the New York’s Museum of Modern Art is almost half a billion dollars. And in the current listings on the New York Foundation for the Arts jobs page, MoMA’s PS1 is advertising an unpaid Live Programming Internship. Really.
Recently, Bernie Sanders introduced the Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies Act (or the “Stop BEZOS” Act) — legislation aimed at taxing companies whose 500+ employees earn low wages and receive federal benefits like food stamps, public housing, and Medicaid. Bernie is trying to get us to think about, talk about, and change current corporate practices that are making our country increasingly unequal in income and wealth. As he has said, “A nation will not survive morally or economically when so few have so much, while so many have so little.”
Now I cannot change the Gini coefficient (a measure of statistical dispersion intended to represent the income or wealth distribution of a nation's residents, and is the most commonly used measurement of inequality) of the USA.
Neither can you. But we may be able to do something — and we must try.
I’m trying by paying my interns and writing this blog. Maybe you can try something too! This world isn’t going to get fairer or kinder or more just unless we all try to do whatever we can. Think about it...
And finally, remember that it isn’t a fairy tale that once upon a time working people joined forces to try to improve pay and working conditions and to make the world more equitable and peaceful.
Yours in solidarity,
Amy
And here is a positive postscript! Thanks to the efforts of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, Amazon has announced that the company is raising its minimum wage to $15 for all US employees, including full-time, part-time, temporary and seasonal workers! You can read more here!
]]>Milestone summer interns Luyao Ma and Austin Renna
Having just graduated college and completed internships at The Criterion Collection, Janus Films, and The New Jersey Film Festival, I didn’t know what my next move was within the film industry. I learned a great deal at all three internships: from how to run a small-scale film festival, to seeing first-hand how a film becomes a finished product on DVD, to how to prepare for a theatrical re-release of a cult classic, but I didn’t quite know where I should head to next. I was fortunate enough to hear about Milestone Film & Video through some former colleagues and to my surprise they had a large catalog of incredible and unique films. I was disappointed in myself for never having heard of them before so I reached out to the company to see what opportunities were available and what I could do to help them out. I knew I wanted to do something different than my previous internships and different is exactly what I got.
As my internship here at Milestone comes to a close, I want to express my gratitude towards Amy & Dennis for bringing me on board and letting me work on some very exciting projects. The most intriguing thing I got to work on over the summer was rewording and restructuring the intertitles for a 1915 Italian silent film called Filibus. The film was recently restored under the supervision of Annike Kross at the EYE Filmmuseum in 2K from a preserved 35mm print that meticulously matched the original tinting and toning of the 1916 print from the Desmet Collection.
I also assisted in the research and writing of the press kit for the film. With that there was a lot of time spent translating a variety of documents from Italian and Spanish into English. The reason being was a lot of the details about Corona Films, the company that produced the film, and Mario Roncoroni, the film’s director, was only available in those two languages. With the help of some Italian books, and our friend Eduardo Sastre Gómez in Spain, I was able to add a wealth of information to the press kit about these two subjects.
Back to the main task; the problem with the intertitles in the current restoration was that they originally came from a Dutch print of the film that was distributed in 1916. The Dutch intertitles were then translated to English sometime in the 1980s. The issue with that translation was that it was a very literal, one that didn’t account for the nuances and complexities of the English language. The translation was also littered with several grammatical and spelling errors and very awkward sentence structuring. All of this is what led me to tackle the revision of the intertitles for the new version of the film that is coming soon.
In preparation for the project, I became acquainted with the style and flavor of the language of 1910s detective fiction. Dennis entrusted me with a nice copy of An Arsène Lupin Omnibus and I got to work reading a few chapters. If you don’t know, Arsène Lupin was a gentleman thief and master of disguise who was charismatic, charming, and above all, cunning. It’s fair to say that Filibus would’ve been a worthy rival to Lupin, as they both share the same sly characteristics. Being immersed in these stories really did help me figure out what exact language I should be using when writing the intertitles. One specific example came early on in the film. There’s part of an intertitle that says, “Detective Hardy requests all who have any indication or information to report at the office of notary Desmond.” When rewriting this specific intertitle, we decided to change “notary” to “magistrate” because it was a word commonly used in the crime stories of Arsène Lupin, and we believed it fit the tone of the film better.
Another thing that helped prepare me for the task ahead was my studies and practice of poetry at Rutgers University. I was always very interested in what words sounded best next to each other and how a specific combination of words could make a person feel a certain way. I’ve written a lot of poems about films I’ve seen, people I’ve met, and memories that I want to keep safe. While I haven’t written a standard poem in a long time, I’ve transitioned now into writing fictionalized diary entries from the point of view of two different characters. I’m still waiting to see what shape this project will take, but it’s helped me a lot with just expressing very intimate and personal ideas in a removed sort of way. Above all, what interests me most about poetry is how words and symbols come together to accumulate meaning. That’s the point of view I took with revising the intertitles as well. To me, it was clear we had to get the right combination of words to make the meaning really shine through.
When the time came for me to start on this project, I was fortunate enough to be working off of an early draft that Amy & Dennis had already wrote. This provided me with a nice foundation to not only double-check their work, but to also offer my own spin and suggestions on things. It’s funny working on a project like this with multiple people because everyone has their own idea and unique vision of how sentences and words should be structured. It definitely allowed for some great debates and deliberations at Milestone HQ; we even had Amy & Dennis’ son Adam, our other interns Malu and Zach, and Rodney Sauer (Director of The Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra), weigh in on certain phrasings and ideas. It was a great big party in some regards, even if the debate got pretty heated at times
Here are a few examples of what the intertitles originally looked like and what we decided to change them to:
This intertitle comes at a point in the film where Detective Kutt-Hendy is trying to frame Filibus for a crime with a tiny spy camera. Filibus is much too cunning for this, so she decides to use Kutt-Hendy’s trap to frame him for the same crime. The original intertitle doesn’t really do justice to the meaning of what’s actually happening in the film. It’s quite melodramatic and the word “fight” is kind of a leap from what Filibus is actually doing. We decided to change this intertitle to:
“I shall ensnare him with his own device!” This more accurately reflects what Filibus is doing and the verb “ensnare” makes much more sense than the word “fight” in this scenario.
Here’s another example:
This intertitle comes after the point where Kutt-Hendy finds that a mysterious object, with handprints on it, has been planted on him when the lights go out at a party. As you can tell, the main idea of the intertitle is there, but it’s shrouded in awkward phrasing and punctuation. We decided to change this intertitle to: “There is an excellent magician among us. Who is it? Please don’t feel insulted, but I would like to collect the handprints of everyone present.” With this we wanted to expand the main idea of the intertitle and make it more coherent. We decided “conjurer” wasn’t the right tone for this situation so we deliberated between “magician” and “pickpocket” before finally settling on the former. We also took out the ellipses and made the language much more straightforward and clear.
There’s definitely a fine line you have to walk when revising and editing intertitles. You want to make sure you’re not straying so far from the main idea of what it was originally trying to say. It’s important to note the style, tone, and nature of films released of that time period, and in that specific country, and honor the history and tradition that they set for themselves.
I can’t say I’ve ever really worked on a project like this before, but the experience felt similar to the process of editing a poem or piece of writing. For me, when writing a poem or diary entry, every word and every punctuation mark matters. If you were to ask any of my friends, they’d tell you that sometimes it takes me an hour or so just to write a short diary entry. This is because I’m always so concerned with the words and punctuation I’m using. I always want to be proud of the writing that I put out into the world. When I was editing these intertitles, I felt the same way. I knew there would be new audiences coming to see this film so I felt it was my duty to make sure everyone on the team was satisfied with the way the intertitles were worded and written. I believe it’s important to care about the work you do and the words you choose on a daily basis; this project felt like an extension of that very belief. It was a great honor and privilege to work on Filibus and it’s exciting that audiences will be able to see these revised intertitles, complete with a new text designed by Allen Perkins, and be totally immersed in the world of Filibus.
]]>I’d heard about Lotte Reiniger and seen stills and clips from her films, but I didn’t know the whole story of this fantastic animation pioneer.
So when I found out that this talented creator came from Berlin, the city I’ve lived in since 2005, I knew I had to suggest her for the Dead Ladies Show. The Dead Ladies Show tells the stories of amazing women from history live on stage, and I produce a monthly podcast from the events. Lotte’s famous film The Adventures of Prince Achmed debuted at the Volksbuhne, just a few blocks up the road from where I stood on stage telling her story. Afterwards, Rike Reiniger — a playwright and theatre director (who also works with puppets!), and a relative of Lotte’s through marriage — came up to tell me how much she’d enjoyed my talk. It was truly a rewarding moment.
I chose to tell Lotte’s story in the form of a fairy tale in five acts. I think she would have approved. But as I said in my presentation, fairy tales, especially those set in Germany, tend to be a little bit more Grimm than Disney.
Lotte’s painstakingly crafted silhouette films — some 80 in all — stemmed from her precocious talent, or what she called “an uncanny ability” for paper cutting. And while her basic tools were minimal, they led to the creation of the earliest surviving full-length animated feature film (Prince Achmed in 1926) and the animation desk and multi-plane camera that made the film’s intricate details and layered vivid depths possible, along with previously unseen special effects courtesy of wax and sand.
Making magic out of not much was a skill that followed Lotte throughout her days, especially before and after the war as she and her husband Carl fled from Germany around Europe to the UK and back in a flight from the era’s horrors. One of the most touching things I saw in my research was a British newspaper article talking about how Lotte created puppets from discarded laundry soap boxes. She scavenged cardboard and paper where she could — anything to continue her art.
And while she was little known for decades, it seems there in fact are many, many fans and friends dedicated to bringing Lotte and her work out of the shadows.
Lotte’s influence can be seen in the work of notable contemporary animation leaders including Michel Ocelot and Rebecca Sugar, and even a scene from Harry Potter, The Deathly Hallows Part 1 has Lotte’s fingerprints on it. And, there’s this year’s Lotte that Silhouette Girl, a 10-minute short film by Elizabeth Beecherl (director and animator) and Carla Patullo (director and composer) narrated by Lotte herself via a 1976 interview; it uses shadow puppets and a multi-plane camera based on Lotte’s own designs, and was named best short film at the American Documentary Film Festival.
I first heard of Lotte Reiniger and Prince Achmed from Milestone Films, via Amy, who I met and interviewed at the Berlinale a decade ago, in the course of writing a story on The Exiles for NPR. Amy and Dennis’s passion for film, along with their DVD of Prince Achmed (which includes a documentary and other extras) got me started on my Lotte learning curve, a trajectory that was quickly accelerated by Whitney Grace’s incredibly in-depth 2017 book Lotte Reiniger: Pioneer of Film Animation. Find Grace’s book if you want to read more. But of course the very best place to begin is by watching Lotte’s films.]]>You have to love a film to watch it more than 10 times while writing and recording a full-length commentary. Luckily that’s the case for me with Maborosi.
I’ve seen most of Kore-eda’s films, and they all fascinate me, to varying degrees. But Maborosi never loses its place as the top. Maborosi is the story of a young Japanese woman from the working-class, and her subtle process of facing traumas. This luminous film was shot on location, using only available light and some low-key lighting.
When Amy and Dennis asked me to record a full-length commentary, my first reaction was: “I won’t have enough to say.” But it turns out that I did! Of course I’m hoping everyone will watch the film for the first time WITHOUT the commentary (that’s for a subsequent viewing).
My goal, as I state at the beginning of the commentary, is to “accompany” the film with my words. The film is in the foreground; my words are an unobtrusive background. In fact, at first recording, I left some extended moments of silence in the commentary where I wanted viewers to focus on certain dramatic sequences or narrative ellipses. Afterwards I realized I had left out some information that was crucial. Milestone kindly allowed me to do a second short recording of about 15 minutes which we “glued” into the original commentary with the help of the excellent recording technician.
I admire people who can just “kibitz” (chat) as an offscreen commentary, but that’s not my style. At times I think I got the timing just right to match word with image. The film is based on a story by Japanese writer Miyamoto Teru entitled Maborosi no hikari (Illusory Light). In comparison to the film, the short story offers more insights into the protagonist’s world, and more dialogue stemming from that world. I drew the story into the film, and also I pointed out many details about everyday Japanese life, with invaluable details added by my Japanese colleague, Yuki Togawa (now Gergotz).
When I saw the new print (after doing the recording), I was amazed how much brighter it is than the original one I had been using as my source. I’m so glad to hear that Kore-eda-kantoku (director) approved this more-legible print. Alas, I then realized I had misidentified one scene! But all in all, I’m proud of my work and hope it adds to the viewing pleasure of a second viewing.
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When Milestone called and asked me to design the poster for Rocco and His Brothers, I was humbled and excited. The opportunity to work on a film of such magnitude with Martin Scorsese's name attached was a dream I wasn't going to turn down. Both Amy Heller and Dennis Doros know that my love for the dramatic holds no bounds...and this film was no exception.
Before attending design school at NC State University, known for it's architectural foundation and technological advances, I apprenticed with an oil painter for almost five years. All of my design fundamentals originate from the core of atelier or "in studio" painting. While learning from a master painter, I learned to love big brush strokes, bright pops of color, and constantly shifting textures.
During my time at NC State, I was able to incorporate some of my painting into my work as an undergraduate, but for the most part, my paints were set aside for Adobe software. Knowing this and looking back on my process to create the Rocco poster, it doesn't surprise me that I attempted to create a digitally rendered poster at first; I wanted to have the ability to change the narrative based on the decision of each brushstroke in minute detail - from color to shape to size, digital software allows for a constantly shifting story to unfold.
Painting Rocco was great challenge and one I won't forget for a long time! It was a graphic design puzzle and a truly humbling undertaking as an illustrator.
Completing this poster reminded me how much I enjoy storytelling through painting and thinking back on this experience encourages me to continue working and challenging myself creatively. I am so grateful for the inspiration that Milestone Film provides for me - an artist with an archivist's heart. While no assignment is ever dull, Rocco and His Brothers had everything I could ever ask for.
The 17th annual AIFF brought a wonderful selection of films, filmmakers, and cinema experts to town — including some old friends of Milestone… and some new! We were very happy to get the chance to hang out with pals Jonathan Marlow (filmmaker, musician, and self-described “purveyor of moving images’); filmmaker and activist Helen De Michiel; Claire Aguilar, programming director of the International Documentary Association; and Courtney Sheehan, the wonderful head of Seattle’s Northwest Film Forum. It was great to reconnect with artist and animator Stacey Steers, who we first met a few years ago in Houston, and to see how she is continuing to use silent film imagery in her gorgeous, hypnotic films. Other old friends we didn’t get to schmooze with, but were happy to see included Clemence Taillandier, Laura Thielen, and Betsy McLane.
We even “met” a wonderful British composer we first collaborated with many, many years ago — Joby Talbot, who wrote the wonderful score for one of the Evgenii Bauer melodramas on Milestone’s Mad Love DVD. Now living in Ashland, Joby and two wonderful musicians, performed his score accompanying Bauer’s The Dying Swan. And we were happy to meet festival juror Cameron Swanagon —nontheatrical and festival coordinator at Oscilloscope Films, which is Milestone’s partner for streaming and video distribution. It’s amazing how often we run into fellow NYC-area friends in far-flung festivals.
(George taking a photo of the audience at a screening).
A highlight of our festival experience was the amazing reception that the festival goers gave Milestone’s restoration of No Maps on My Taps and its effervescent filmmaker, George Nierenberg — who made it a point to shake the hand of every person on a line for a special screening for school kids. The crowds loved the joyful dance documentary and the tap dance demo by local hoofer Suzanne Seiber and her students.
(Dennis sitting far left next to Joby Talbot and others on a panel about commissioning and composing scores for films.)
Another great treat was discovering Saving Brinton, a documentary about a real-life cinema hero — Michael Zahs. The film brilliantly chronicles one year in Zahs’s decades-long quest to save and preserve a collection of pre-1908 films, lantern slides, wax-cylinder audio recordings, and papers from the estate of two Iowa promoters, Frank and Indiana Brinton. The documentary is wonderful and we were absolutely thrilled to meet Zahs and filmmaker, Andrew Sherburne. The film will be screening in New York at Cinema Village in May and at the Monica Film Center in Los Angeles in June. Catch it if you can!
Other new friends include Dan Miller and Suzanne Clark, the creators of the documentary, Citizen Blue: The Life and Art of Cinema Master James Blue, and Richard Blue, the brother of the filmmaker (who died in 1980). We also really enjoyed meeting trans activist, artist, and filmmaker, Zackary Drucker, who turned out to be a fellow fan of Portrait of Jason. Erica Thompson, the festival’s Filmmaker Liaison, was incredibly welcoming and lovely — she is one of those festival angels who keeps things going smoothly and does so with real grace and kindness. And her volunteers were also wonderful — we send special thanks to Vicki Augustine and Nicole Gullickson, who drove us around and made us feel like Oregonians. We look forward to keeping in touch with all these wonderful folks!
Finally, we had a blast at the closing night Awards Ceremony, which Courtney Sheehan MC-ed like a boss. And we were very moved when Thom Southerland, whose film Fort Maria won the juried award for Best Narrative Feature, came up to us and told us that his experience seeing Killer of Sheep and meeting Charles Burnett in 2015 had been a powerful inspiration for his own filmmaking — he even shot his feature in black and white in tribute.
Dennis and I were really thrilled to be honored by such a wonderful film festival and community. And, if you have time next spring, we heartily recommend planning to spend April 11–15, 2019 watching films at the Ashland Independent Film Festival... maybe you want to mark you calendar now!
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[Note from Milestone: This blog is by the our dear friend and intern, the inimitable Maia Krivoruk. We first met Maia when she was a five-year-old whirlwind of energy and opinions. She grew up to be a wonderful, caring, courageous adult. Her curiosity and compassion to learn about people have taken her around the world. We could sing Maia’s praises for days and days, but instead we invite you to read her wonderful blog about making hard choices, trying to live a meaningful life, and growing up.]
In the beginning of this academic year, I was sitting on the 23rd floor in the Cathedral of Learning at the University of Pittsburgh. I was one of twenty future social workers in this Models of Intervention course, a core class for the MSW that I was set to receive by August 2018. In the days leading up to the beginning of this academic endeavor, doubt was suffocating me. A part of me knew that this program was not what I needed or wanted to be doing. I was secured with a prestigious fellowship that gave me a specialized placement at the top outpatient clinic and a generous stipend. But it just wasn’t right. I was setting myself up to become something that I didn’t want to be. Having gone to Pitt for my undergrad in social work, it was a logical and rather easy move to enroll in the Masters program. However, there I was, in class, embarking on this journey knowing that I should have turned left instead of right.
I made what had to be the scariest and most intense decision of my life thus far — after just two weeks at the Masters program. I deferred my acceptance to give me more time to evaluate what I truly wanted for myself in the upcoming year. This decision was really frightening — and not in the romanticized type way, where you trust that you’ve made a decision that will open doors for me and lead to curious adventures. It was terrifying to pack up everything, leave a city I had called home for the past 4 years, and return home with only an orientation packet to show for it.
It is not that I have been afraid to make bold moves. When I was sixteen, I traveled to London with my Girl Scout troop to mentor younger scouts about what it means to be a female entrepreneur in a global economy. In 2012, I went to Romania with Habitat for Humanity to build houses with and for local families.
As a freshman, I got the idea of supporting an orphanage in Guatemala. I helped gather more than 800 medical and school supplies and the next year I led a team of six friends to Sololá. We taught the kids English and wellness activities and learned about issues of global poverty and neglect and about international adoption. Upon returning, my team and I created a club at Pitt so that others can experience what we did.
I spent most of 2015 in New Zealand, studying and working with the Maori people there. In 2016, I helped supervise a high school group from Minnesota that was visiting the Navajo American Indian reservation in Arizona, where we all learned about traditional practices and about the many injustices that American Indians still face today.
In December 2016, I toured Poland to learn about the history of Jewish people in Europe. In 2017, I represented the University of Pittsburgh at the annual Atlantic Coast Conference Leadership Symposium in North Carolina to discuss racial diversity and representation on college campuses. It was through all these experiences that I learned what a true sense of community feels like. Watching local and global citizens invest themselves into these communal goals is deeply humbling and inspiring. My service-learning trips enabled not only personal growth, but also provided me with amazing and unforgettable adventures.
In the days after I had deferred and returned home from grad school at Pitt, I felt like I was sinking. My brain was overrun with thoughts of whether or not I should have stuck it out. Some of my advisors, friends, and family members had told me that it would be better to have a Masters degree in a year than to go home in search of a maybe or a possibility. But it wasn’t right. I couldn’t sit in a seat that was meant for someone else.
I’ve spent the last couple of months weighing what I deem important. And to be quite honest, I still don’t have a clue as to what I want to be when I grow up. If someone were to ask me in my late fifties, I probably still wouldn’t know. But I am working on accepting that unbelievably scary truth. That life is fleeting and the decisions we make will shape the type of person we become.
When I was in Israel in May of 2014 on a Taglit-Birthright trip, my group stopped at a cemetery shortly after landing in Tel Aviv. Our group leader had told us the story of the first men and women who came to tend to the lands and turn what was once desolate and barren wasteland into prosperous and bountiful farmland. He explained the daunting and taxing process that these farmers went through everyday, sleeping on haystacks with little to eat — but how they also knew that they and their communities would reap the benefits of their hard work in the years to come. The last thing the group leader has said was, “think about your own lives, and think about what gets you up and off your haystack in the morning.” It’s been a little over three years now and that mantra has been stained into my memory. Now I am not an unreasonable or gullible person. I know that to have a job right after college that gets you off your haystack is not always feasible. But shouldn’t it at least be strived for?
And so after signing away a year of a guaranteed degree and fellowship, I challenged myself to reconcile with my decision and discover what I’m striving for. I know that in the future, I would like to receive a degree within in the field of public health. I want to influence population health safely and effectively. I want to ensure that healthcare is not a privilege for the few but rather a right for all global citizens. But before I invest in that professional degree, I need to get out there. I want to explore parts of this world that will challenge and educate me. I want to be the calculated risk taker who knows that traveling and working with new people is never the wrong choice. The decision to leave Pitt is not some reckless wanderlust move, it’s a much needed shift, lining up pieces for me to pursue my passions for service-learning, international education, and global health.
And now, after being home for several months, I am rather relieved to announce that I have found my next adventure. AmeriCorps, which is a voluntary civil society supported by the U.S. government, has a branch called AmeriCorps NCCC (National Civilian Community Corps). AmeriCorps NCCC is a full-time, residential, team-based program for young adults who would like to have hands-on experience in the fields of public health. I have been hired as the team leader and will be responsible for managing 10 other Corps members as we travel throughout the United States working on various disaster relief, emergency preparedness, and environmental sustainability initiatives. Current teams are primarily posted in Texas, Florida, and Puerto Rico to aid in the relief work from the past hurricanes.
Having just graduated, I know that I still need guidance, resources, and opportunities to help shape me into an ethical and purposeful public health leader. While I am still nervous about this next chapter, I do feel this program will give me an opportunity to further deepen my understanding of service-learning pedagogy and build new experiences designing and implementing public health missions. The knowledge and skills I gain over the course of the year will be invaluable. My hope is that my leadership position in AmeriCorps NCCC will help better prepare me to challenge the members to think critically, develop intercultural competence, and more fully integrate practice/service into their journeys to becomes leaders in their chosen field. I look forward to collaborating with people across multiple disciplines and interest areas in this next adventure.
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In 2008, I first saw Kent Mackenzie’s film The Exiles (1961). It is a neorealist film that showcases a true depiction of American Indians living in Los Angeles at a time when nothing was documented and when Hollywood cinema was generating stereotypes of Natives in Western films. I loved The Exiles because it gave a realistic portrayal of American Indians going through the U.S. Indian Relocation Program. It also provided a multi-dimensional representation of the characters and a glimpse into the gentrification changes to what is now called the Historical Core of Downtown Los Angeles.
Mackenzie, a film student working on a project called Bunker Hill, met quite a few American Indians in that neighborhood and was familiar with the Indian Relocation Act of 1956. Knowing that he wanted to shed light on Native American issues, Mackenzie made the conscious decision to give voice to the American Indians he encountered in Los Angeles. The urban Indian relocation program was set up to lure young adults who were jobless after completing their education. Most of these young Indians received vocational training, rather than an academic education, at Indian boarding schools across the United States, which followed Richard Henry Pratt’s philosophy “Kill the Indian, Save the Man.”
The young American Indians were further enticed by offers of paid moving expenses and more vocational training for those willing to move off the reservations to certain government-designated cities such as Los Angeles. The flyers were appealing, promising a path to what many believed was an American dream. Most who migrated into cities were young twenty-something single Indians or young married couples. My parents, like many Indian families, migrated to a city through the program. Yet many people today do not know about the migration of American Indians to metropolitan cities, nor the U.S. policies of assimilation through programs that enticed young Natives to leave their reservation homelands, in hopes they would never return.
The Exiles film inspired me to bring to light that we Indian people have a history in L.A. and to address U.S. policies of assimilation of American Indians. Clearly, people from many cultures have come to Los Angeles, such as Asian Americans, Mexican Americans, and African Americans. But while their stories have been told and acknowledged, the American Indian migration to cities has not been discussed on a larger scale. I want our history to be remembered and understood. I want to pay homage to that first generation of relocated Indians of the 1950s and 1960s.
As for the conception of Legacy of Exiled NDNZ, I specifically asked tribal members living in Los Angeles whom I knew personally, and who bore a resemblance to the characters in The Exiles to be a part of my project. I also reached out to a few UCLA students and, to my surprise, they agreed to do it. One of the students was a second-generation relocated Indian, whose mother I had known for a while in Los Angeles. When I asked the mother if her daughter would like to be involved in my project I was surprised to learn that she would love to participate. So, now I had seven young adults from various tribal communities, most of whom didn’t know each other. I had a shoestring budget, but I was optimistic.
The initial concept was just going to be a photography project. I decided to use black-and-white photography to showcase the nostalgic history of American Indians that is rarely viewed. I wanted to represent a counter-image to the damaging and dated representation of the American Indian in the public psyche as well as to capture inhabited history and culture from the past to the future. I wanted my images to evoke both an historical and contemporary sensibility, showing the reality of the vibrant, passionate, smiling Indians living in an urban world of yesteryear and today.
I also wanted to get behind-the-scenes footage of what I was capturing, so I hired a video-photographer. I generated questions for my young participants, asking what they knew about the U.S. Indian Relocation program, what brought them to Los Angeles, and about their connection to their respective tribal reservations. I wanted viewers to get a glimpse into who they were as young American Indians in 2013.
We filmed for two days. The first day we shot at historical places where The Exiles was filmed: Main Street, Grand Central Market, and Union Station. I also filmed in the alley that has been coined “Indian Alley,” off of Main Street. My young participants were not familiar with the area. Stephen Ziegler the caretaker who currently lives in the building that formerly housed United American Indian Involvement (UAII), shared with them the history of the location while we took some amazing photos. This site was important to me because it also represents a trail of where American Indians gathered in the early 1970s.
After funding from the Indian Relocation program ran out, many Indians ended up homeless. The United American Indian Involvement Center opened in 1973 to help Indians living with addiction on the street. As in earlier times, many were still coming to L.A. in hopes of finding a better life, yet unfortunately winding up addicted to drugs or alcohol and homeless. This is not uncommon when people struggle with poverty and depression in urban environments. UAII became a first stop for many Indians coming to Los Angeles — it was a place where they were able to reconnect with friends, loved ones, and family members.
Bunker Hill in the 1950s and 1960s was a hub for Native Americans to unite during the Relocation era. But by the 1970s and 1980s, 118 Winston Street, where UAII had been headquartered, was now Skid Row. This area — Indian Alley — has had a dark bleak history, but today it is commemorated by artwork created primarily by well-known Native American and non-Native American artists as a form of healing for everyone.
The Native population of Los Angeles has grown from roughly 12,000 in the 1960s to more than 25,000 in the 1970s. Today, more than 175,000 tribal members live in Los Angeles (the highest populated urban Indian community in the United States), many of whom migrated from Montana, South Dakota, New Mexico, and Oklahoma among other communities.
The second day of shooting was set up for recreating images I loved from the 1961 film The Exiles. I contacted Milestone before I started my project and shared my admiration for the film and how the film directly influenced me to generate a photography project. I also told Milestone that some of the young adults had not seen the film, so they provided screeners which I gave to my young participants to view and discuss in personal interviews on our second day of shooting. I initially was planning to showcase only an exhibition of black-and-white photography work reenacting scenes from the film, but after I listening to the interviews and viewing the behind-the-scene video, it grew into a short film project, which I entitled Legacy of Exiled NDNZ. My short film is shot in a neorealist visual aesthetic reminiscent of Mackenzie’s 1961 film. I truly feel it is a continuation of Mackenzie’s work.
Mackenzie didn’t like the Classic Hollywood cinema narratives or the portrayal of Indians in Westerns in the 1960s, and I feel the same way today. Even now, films with American Indian subjects, such as Pocahontas and The Lone Ranger, portray Indians as one-dimensional relics of an historical past.
Hollywood continues to invent Indian figures that no longer exist
— they turn us into ghosts, as if we are all dead.
When Indians are portrayed in current period projects, such in the Adam Sandler film The Ridiculous Six, they are often the targets of harmful mockery that perpetuates hatred and racism. Living in the mecca of Hollywood, I am determined to show that there is a dignified Indian identity and a great diversity in Southern California. For so long, when I have told people I’m Navajo, their first response is, “Oh, you don’t look Indian.” Their views have been shaped by the way non-Native filmmakers, history books, and the education system have all caricatured us.
Knowing this stigma in society, I am determined to change it. Thanks to Kent Mackenzie’s The Exiles, I was able to start my path toward changing the way that Indians are seen in mass media. My project, Legacy of Exiled NDNZ, showcases an indigenous aesthetic of real Indians today and gives voice to young tribal members living and thriving in Los Angeles. I call my work “Indigenous Realism.” From Legacy of Exiled NDNZ, my work has expanded. You can see my other projects, photos, and poetry at www.pamelajpeters.com along with my current project #RepresentYourTribalNation, which I am fundraising to complete at https://www.gofundme.com/IndigenousLA .
I am extremely grateful that I was introduced to The Exiles at UCLA. It has had a huge influence on me and in more ways than I am able to explain. I am also grateful to Milestone for the restoration of the film that is now one of my favorite of all time and influenced me to Kickstart the many projects I have been doing here in Los Angeles, California.
The reflections and voices of American Indians have long been excluded from mainstream storytelling. In my work, I employ an indigenous, neorealist aesthetic to examine how Native American relocation history is part of California’s legacy and how the strong ties American Indians proudly maintain to their tribal communities and identities can not only exist, but thrive in large urban cities like Los Angeles.
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We first “met” Sherman Alexie in 2007 — on the Milestone office answering machine. We had been preparing the press kit for Kent Mackenzie’s Native American film, The Exiles, and our colleague Cindi Rowell had suggested that he might be interested in the project. Dennis googled, found the booking agent for the popular writer, poet, performer, and filmmaker and sent off an email. We were all pretty sure that that our inquiry would fall into a dark bottomless hole.
So imagine our surprise and delight when we checked the messages the next morning and heard Sherman’s voice raving about the film — one he had loved for years! He even enthusiastically described a favorite scene early in the film when Tommy playfully shaves his pal’s sideburns in anticipation of a wild night on the town.
It was the start of a beautiful, albeit long-distance, relationship. Sherman went on to co-present The Exiles with filmmaker Charles Burnett (who turned out to be another one of Sherman’s favorites). We emailed back and forth, from time to time, and strategized about doing a joint film restoration project (which we still hope will happen someday). Meanwhile we continued to read and love Sherman’s great novels, short stories, and poems about being a human being and an Indian (his preferred designation he told us at the time – any use of "American" is an oxymoron).
This June (2017) the not-too-distant Word Bookstore was hosting a book signing with Sherman, so Dennis and I reached out to him in advance by email and them made our way to Jersey City. Meeting him and his wife Diane was a joy. Before going on to speak, Sherman was both excited and very nervous, but also incredibly warm and welcoming. He joked that he was dressed less formally than he usually did on tour, and felt more naked. I replied that seemed appropriate given how revealing the memoir (which I had already read) is.
You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me is Sherman’s struggle to think about, feel, and write about his very challenging, wonderful, and terrible mother. In the book he also writes frankly about his own frightening health problems, which include several brain surgeries (one in 2015), bipolar disease, PTSD, OCD, and as he says, an alphabet of syndromes.
As a writer and a man, Sherman is so, so, so much more than these diagnoses. And his wrenching memoir of how impossibly painful, wonderful, messy, and maddening it can be to love and lose a parent is more than just courageous, it is literally death-defying.
Sherman grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Washington State with two charismatic and hard-drinking parents. After a particularly raucous, drunken house party in the early 1970s, his mother Lillian promised her kids that she would stop drinking. As he writes, “My mother was a liar. She broke many promises over the coming decades. But she kept that greatest of vows. She was sober for the rest of her life. And that’s why I am still alive.”
But living with Lillian was often a test of survival, especially for Sherman, who shared his mother’s intelligence, sharp tongue, and bipolar mood swings. They were, he writes: “roller coasters on parallel tracks.” His memoir is both a love song and an indictment of his glamorous, brilliant, and terrifying parent.
In addition to trying to paint his mercurial mother’s portrait and tell the story of his own traumatic childhood, Sherman is also grieving aloud — and he employs all forms of narrative, including confession, philosophical musings, poetry, ethnography, and reporting on the facts of his mother’s illness, death, and funeral. The book contains 160 chapters; some are 25+ pages long; one is just eight words. Many are funny, all are painful. One is a poem entitled “Genocide.”
Chapter 28: “Eulogize Rhymes with Disguise” is a poem that tells the story of one night that Lillian locked the four-year-old Sherman out of the house for crying for his absent father, who was out on a binge. He writes that he sought shelter and warmth with the family mutts in the doghouse and refused to come in when she called him in “three minutes or three hours later — I don’t know which.” The poem ends:
“…I never stopped
Being afraid of her. I never left
That dark porch. I am still
Sleeping with those dogs.
Yes, I am always cold and curled
Like a question mark
Among those animal bodies.
As I wait for the glorious
Warmth of the rising sun.”
The warmth he awaited — needed, and needs still — was his mother’s difficult and unpredictable love for “the prodigal who yearned and spurned and never returned.”
The dilemma of whether to return home or stay away haunts him. When he was twelve, Sherman asked his parents if he could leave the tribal school to attend a non-Native school in a nearby town. “And my parents, knowing that I was betraying thousands of years of tribal traditions to go live among white people, said, “Yes.” My parents, as wounded and fragile as they were, had the strength and courage to set me free. I think they knew that I would never return, not in body or spirit, but they loved me too much to make me stay.”
In another one-page chapter, “Your Theology or Mine,” Sherman writes that if theists forced him to choose to believe in, “The Word” — he would pick the verb “return.” “Because I am always compelled to return, return, return to my place of birth, to my reservation, to my unfinished childhood home, and ultimately to my mother, my ultimate salmon.”
Sherman’s tribe, the Spokane, long worshipped the beautiful salmon who returned each year to spawn and die. When the Grand Coulee Dam was built, the ancient wild salmon were forever exiled from the upper Columbia and Spokane rivers and the people of the region were, like his parents, left “without salmon, spiritual orphans.”
He writes that “all of us Spokane and Coeur d’Alenes, after the Grand Coulee Dam, have been born into the Clan of Doing Our Best to Re-create and Replicate the Sacred Things that Were Brutally Stolen from Us.” After his mother’s death, he and his brothers and cousins realized none of them even knew the Spokane word for the fish.
“My name is Sherman Alexie and I was born from loss and loss and loss and loss and loss and loss and loss and loss and loss and loss and loss and loss and loss and loss. And loss.”
The losses he writes about are generational, historical, familial, personal and unbearable. Torture and rape haunted the Native American residential schools, the reservation where Lillian grew up, Sherman’s own elementary school, his own home. No wonder his dad once told Sherman he drank because of “the pain of being Indian” — and went on to drink himself to death at the age of sixty-four. In Chapter 85, “Litmus Test,” Sherman notes that some people ask him why his dad drank so much, “But some strangers, the ones who know the most about pain, hear my father”s tragic story and they ask, “Damn, why didn’t he drink more?”
Lillian Alexie was a quilter (and a singer, a social worker, an addiction counselor, and a basketball fan). And as his wife Diane told him after reading this memoir, Sherman also patched together squares to make a whole.
As quilts go, You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me is not much of a comforter. It is, perhaps, a garment for grieving. In my tribe, when you are at the Jewish funeral of a close family member, the rabbi pins a piece of black cloth on you, and then rips it, to signify mourning. The Internet informs me that the practice is called kriah, “the ancient practice of tearing clothes as a tangible expression of grief and anger in the face of death.”
Like Sherman, I am a “middle-aged orphan” (in my case, past middle aged) and I wore black ripped ribbons for my mother in 2003 and my father in 2010. Although I was in over 50 when I became an orphan, I was stunned at how disorienting it was to no longer have parents. And walking in the footsteps of Sherman’s grief, I am reminded of how hard and physically painful it was to move forward from the death of Ida Melnitsky Heller — another powerful brilliant, and (often) disappointing mother. I miss her terribly, but fortunately, not every moment, as I did in the first years after her death — years when I wept on the blacktop after school waiting for our son and reached for the phone to call her every day.
This summer, shortly after we were in the audience for his hilarious, heart-breaking, and (yes, I will use the adjective again) death-defying performance/reading/rant at the bookstore in Jersey City, Sherman Alexie suspended his book tour. He explained that he needed “to take a big step back and do most of my grieving in private.” Dennis and I were saddened, but not really surprised. We could see what a terrible toll his public (and naked) mourning was taking.
One anecdote Sherman told that day at Word Bookstore was about how, in a bout of paranoia, he had stocked up on a year’s worth of survival rations. He told the audience that anyone who could recite an Emily Dickinson poem was invited to Seattle for an all-emergency-food feast. While Sherman was signing our books, I recited a poem I know by heart. It is a fitting end to this blog, I think:
Endow the Living — with the Tears —
You squander on the Dead,
And They were Men and Women — now,
Around Your Fireside —
Instead of Passive Creatures,
Denied the Cherishing
Till They — the Cherishing deny —
With Death's Ethereal Scorn —
I look forward to that feast of dehydrated goodies, and even more to Sherman Alexie’s book.
]]>As Milestone audiences probably know, when we prepare to restore and/or release a film, we really “do our homework.” Frankly, research is one of the great joys of our work.
[And we do sometimes go to great lengths... our notes on Luchino Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers is 66 pages long! You can always access Milestone’s press kits for free here.]
Our home and office (and garage) are brimming with books on such sundry topics as Antarctic exploration, animation history, NYC’s Chelsea Hotel, ballerina Anna Pavlova, the LA Rebellion, Cuban cigar boxes, surrealism in cinema, and twentieth-century Persia. We even have an autobiography written posthumously by Rudolph Valentino!
But every now and then a book we consult for a particular film turns out to be so much more. That was my experience reading George Chauncey’s extraordinary Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940. For background, when I picked it up and starting reading, my goal was to learn some context that would help me understand the city that Jason Holliday (born, Aaron Payne) inhabited. Holliday, the solo star of Shirley Clarke’s Portrait of Jason, actually lived in New York some time after the book’s focus, and at first I thought I would skip Chauncey’s volume and just focus on post-war histories. Thank goodness I decided to go ahead and reserve all the books in my Bergen County library system that seemed even remotely applicable.
Gay New York is a revelation — or more properly, a series of revelations — about a world whose very existence was previously all but invisible. Chauncey did an extraordinary amount of original, far-reaching, and undoubtedly back-breaking research — exploring existing oral histories, less-referenced periodicals (including black newspapers), police records, sexual histories collected at the Kinsey Institute, cultural references (cartoons, songs, movies, plays), and interviewing survivors of the pre-war city. He uncovered and brilliantly describes a history that was more vibrant, complex, and fascinating than the sad underworld many earlier writers had described.
Right from the opening pages of his introduction, the author tells us that he is going to challenge three widely-accepted truisms of about lives of gay men and women in the years before World War II — the myths of isolation, invisibility, and internalization. Despite very real and powerful societal, legal, institutional, and religious forces allied against them, gay people found ways to form communities, recognize one another (and at times assert their identities publicly), and feel joy and self-confidence. Chauncey quotes one physician who, after interviewing working-class “fags” in the New York City jails in the 1920s, found to his dismay that many were “proud to be degenerates, [and] do not want nor care to be cured.” Another doctor reported that one “loquacious, foul-mouthed and foul-minded ‘fairy’ [was] lost to every sense of shame; believing himself designed by nature to play the very part he is playing in life.”
Chauncey also boldly asks the reader to recognize that the terms and categories we now use to describe sexual and gender orientation have changed over time. Consider this: the term “the closet” did not exist until the 1960s. When gay men talked about “coming out” in earlier years, they were often talking about coming out into the gay world.
You know who else “comes out?” Debutantes. And in 1931 the Baltimore Afro-American reported on a celebration using the headline below:
And check out the terminology the newspaper uses! In the past, the press, police, and other societal arbiters referred to gay people as “neuter gender,” “inverts,” “the third sex,” “fairies,” “faggots,” “pansies,” (and other flowers) “degenerates,” and in one Greenwich Village paper, “short-haired women and long-haired men.”
It is worth noting that these categories described classifications we might not recognize today. “Fairies” were effeminate men who wore unusual and distinctive garb (sometimes women’s clothing, but often eccentric articles like red ties or brightly colored suits) and behaved in a distinctively “feminine” manner, including holding their wrists limply and speaking in higher-pitched voices. These stereotypical behaviors signaled their identity and sexual availability to “queers” and “trade.” Non-effeminate men attracted to other men self-identified as “queer.” “Trade” were men who identified as “normal” (and often had wives or girlfriends) but had sex with other men. There was no concept that would correspond with our idea of “bisexual.” Men were not defined by their choice of sexual partner, and many “normal” men “alternated between male and female sexual partners without believing that their interest in one precluded interest in the other.”
The first home to “notorious degenerate resorts [clubs]” was the Bowery on New York’s Lower East Side. There, at the turn of the century, female prostitutes, “fairies,” working-class immigrants, and even slumming uptowners rubbed elbows... and more. Newspapers loved to bemoan the depravity in clubs like The Slide, on nearby Bleecker Street. One New York Herald headline trumpeted “orgies beyond description” and followed with descriptions of rouged and powdered men who lisped and minced. But interestingly, many of the area saloons and dance halls catered to both “fairies” and “normal” men and attracted members of the working, middle, and upper classes — all of whom mingled socially and sexually.
Starting in the 1890s, the city was also home to huge and elaborate drag balls. By the 1920s and 1930s, thousands of “straight” New Yorkers attended these galas, which were held at such ritzy venues as Madison Square Garden, Webster Hall (seen above) the Astor Hotel, and the Savoy Ballroom. The popularity of the annual Hamilton Lodge Ball in Harlem grew from 600 guests in 1925 to 8,000 in 1937. The festivities there included celebrities like Ethel Waters, crossdressing by men and women, and (according to the New York Age): “all the the panoply of pomp and splendor to give Harlemites who stood in wide-eyed astonishment at this lavish display a treat that shall never be forgotten.”
At the same time, life for gay men could often be dangerous. Effeminate men, who were often seen as less tough and who could not go to the police for help, were targeted and brutalized by gangs. When middle-class men began to self-identify as “queer,” they sometimes chose to live double lives — keeping their sexuality and partners hidden. But having a secret identity made these men vulnerable to societal rejection, blackmail, abuse, and even arrest.
Moral reformers, identifying an increase in “perversion” during the first World War, waged a crusade against homosexuality that included police raids of theaters, bath houses, streets, movie theaters, subway washrooms, restaurants, and saloons resulting in mass arrests and prosecutions. In the 1920s, groups like the Society for the Suppression of Vice also targeted burlesque shows with homosexual acts and Broadway plays featuring gay characters. The NYPD made more arrests for homosexual solicitation — the number convicted rose from 92 men in 1916 to 750 in 1920 — and surveilled known gay meeting places.
I am old (and lucky) enough to remember New York’s great automats and cafeterias and was transported back to them when I read Chauncey’s accounts of the importance of these eateries for gay society. These were public spaces where men could “let their hair down” and meet in relative safety. Some restaurants became noted for their gay clientele — a 1931 guide to NYC told readers that the Child’s cafeteria at Broadway and 48th Street featured “a dash of lavender.”
But meeting places — especially gay clubs, bars, and dance halls — were also subject to raids organized by anti-gay reformers. The police, fire department, state legislature, and liquor authority worked with the courts to close venues and prosecute gay men — often for such degenerate conduct as camping it up or same-sex dancing.
This persecution of gay establishments picked up steam in the 1930s and accelerated in the postwar year, continuing unabated for decades. In fact, when I got the chance to meet Chauncey he told me that he had a copy of the paperwork depriving Jason Holliday of his cabaret license in the 1960s — an arrest record for solicitation in the name of Aaron Payne. It is worth remembering that anti-sodomy laws existed late into the twentieth century. New York’s law was overturned in 1980 and gay sex was illegal in many states until a 2003 US Supreme Court ruling.
Journalists and others love to quote George Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” But for me one of the most powerful lessons of Gay New York is how often cultures, historians, legislators, and whole societies do forget the past. Or more properly, how often the past is obliterated — both deliberately and inadvertently.
People really do have difficulty with the concept of change. Have you ever noticed how surprised folks are every year on the first cold day of winter? Every year the temperature goes down, and every year it seems to astonish shivering individuals who forgot their coats. Part of our historical amnesia is like that.
We grew up knowing that our elders were vilified and punished for same-sex love, so we believed that this was always the case. It wasn’t so. In fact, as Chauncey writes that “gay life in New York was less tolerated, less visible to outsiders, and more rigidly segregated in the second third of the century than the first, and that the very severity of the postwar reaction has tended to blind us to the relative tolerance of the prewar years."
Our prejudices and assumptions are reinforced by our institutions. Chauncey notes that “at a time when the federal government denied funding to gay-related research,” his own work was supported by private foundations and research centers. Gay New York was published in 1994, a time that may seem halcyon by 2017 standards, but even then he wrote, “any historian writing about homosexuality cannot help being cognizant of the potential professional consequences of working on a subject that continues to be marginalized within the discipline.”
So now I step up on my soapbox, in the the tradition of so many outside voices.
At this moment there are so many forces — including our federal government — working to marginalize, disenfranchise, discredit, and erase our past. And as rights are stripped away, we risk forgetting that we ever had them.
In some states, it is all but impossible for women to obtain a legal abortion — for any reason. Schools, and neighborhoods are more racially segregated than they were a generation ago. The Supreme Court struck down key provisions of the Voting Rights Act and the present administration is obsessed with preventing nonexistent voter “fraud.” The Citizens United ruling establishes corporations as individuals even as real people are losing their civil rights. Police departments are armed with combat weapons and people of color live in fear. University tuitions are as high as $57,000 a year while the Department of Education just ended a program to oversee student loan programs. I am sure we all can go on and on, naming the terrifying changes we are seeing.
Yet we must go on. So what must we do now?
I urge us all to learn, explore and remember all our history. In 1980, Isaac Asimov wrote: “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States… nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’” Don’t believe it! Make it a point to discover the stories of people often left out of mainstream history: children, women, people of color, gay men, lesbians, transgender people, Native Americans, slaves, factory workers, hoboes, soldiers, prostitutes, suffragists, scientists, servants, tattoo artists, performers, and even politicians.
Support organizations that continue the work to research and preserve our past. This includes everything from the Association of Moving Image Archivists, the Zinn Education Project, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art to your town’s public library and historical society.
Preserve your own memories and mementos of past. Hang on to those photos, home movies, and diaries! Keep your concert stubs (you can see how old I am), books, political pins, video games. Check out and support Home Movie Day!
Talk about your past in an honest way. Try not to hide the good things you remember, nor sugar-coat the bad.
Here at Milestone, we hope that we are doing the kind of preservation and education that will offer a wider, bolder, and more inclusive view of the art of cinema and of our history. But we also want to foster a community of people who cherish the power and beauty of motion pictures and honor and respect one another. With that in mind, we invite all of you to consider contributing your thoughts to our blog page. If you have something you would like to share, please send it along!
]]>“If you think about film in the bare sense it is nothing but space and light and the placement of people inside these two illusions.” Kathleen Collins said in a filmed lecture to Howard University film students in 1984. To listen to Collins speak is to learn a great many things about life from a person who recognized the white world’s limitations in seeing her. “Their ability to asses me is entirely dependent on the packaging. You see because I am a packaged person to them.” A few years earlier the American Playhouse had commissioned a play by Collins. She felt that as the only black woman among seven white women playwrights, they were inclined to stage her play if it fit their quota not because of how the play made them feel, think, respond. “It is important to understand one’s role in society but also one's emotional role. For the role of the insider to have the outsider to project their sins on. Black people in America are classic outsiders.”
Whatever obsessed Kathleen Collins, she wrote about. The breadth of her work is expansive but always resides “in ideas, in how human beings evolve which is true to how they are in the center of their being.” As a young playwright, she began with where people lived and what their habits were. Collins was born in New Jersey; her maternal family dates back 300 years to Gouldtown, a settlement begun by an interracial couple. She held a BA in philosophy and religion from Skidmore College, attended Harvard Graduate School and in 1965 won a scholarship to study in France at the Paris-Sorbonne University. Her first film class in Paris required her to watch a film 15 times and analyze its relationship to literature. In her 1984 lecture at Howard, Collins said, there is a “false assumption that if you do good work people are going to pat you on the back.” Collins’ work was beloved among her fellow black filmmakers and academics, but not seen by the broader American audience. Her second film Losing Ground in 1982 never had a theatrical release in the United States, though it did play once at the Museum of Modern Art in 1983 as part of their Cineprobe series. To see Collins on film speak at Howard is to see a person undefeated by a world encouraging inauthenticity because it is easier to sell. We learn from her that she walks a lot and reads a lot; she doesn’t eat meat or white flour. She runs to clear the mind, and she meditates. She writes everyday in her diary. “The two words you should have down on your paper if you are an academic are real and symbolic.” To Collins, real was the conscious mind and symbolic was the unconscious. Both must be worked not just for writing but for living.
In one of its non-theatrical screenings, Losing Ground was shown at a retirement home in Harlem and Collins remembers everyone was over 80. There was a man who wandered in off the street. Moved by what he saw he spoke back to the film. Losing Ground is the story of Sara, played by the exquisitely voiced Seret Scott, and Victor, played by boyishly good-looking Bill Gunn. They are two people in a marriage, Victor looking out and Sara looking in. Their places in the end finally switch with Victor seeing Sara not as a symbol of wife or a subject to be painted, but as the real woman he has missed. The film had not found distribution because in 1982 upon its release the distributors who saw it incredibly told Collins “black people don’t speak that way.”
“Is he someone who dreams a lot?” Collins asks at Howard of a student describing a character he is at work on. At 19, she read the philosophical novel The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky to understand why certain people were oppressed. “Why were we outsiders?” Collins asked. The influence on Collins at 25 of Jean-Paul Sartre opens Losing Ground and it is not the questions themselves but the act of questioning. Sara questions intellectually and Victor instinctually. Sara is for Collins “Real” and Victor “Symbolic.” Both have their mentors. For Sara it is the academic and philosophical books that she reads. For Victor it is Carlos a painter friend who is an abstractionist and paints from images in his mind. Victor believes Carlos is pure, though he himself paints the world around him. In one scene Victor draws us. Standing on a street in upstate New York. Framed by a sign with yellow arrows going in two ways. He looks into the camera and sketches. At Howard, three years before she would pass away at the age of 46 to cancer, Collins said “The pleasure of writing is imagining people laughing or being amused at your work.” She had an internal audience of all her literary and cinematic influences “those are the ones you really write to.” Collins was not a symbol of a black woman filmmaker but a real person and, if we are academics, humans, artists, interested in questioning the split in our society of outside versus in, we must internalize Collins as part of our audience and continue to write back to her.
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We have been submitting our releases to Il Cinema Ritrovato DVD Awards for many years. Milestone is a company — it’s just my wife Amy Heller and me, to be specific — entirely devoted to the restoration and distribution of “lost” cinema: films that have been forgotten by audiences, critics, academics and sometimes even the archives themselves. Most are directed by women, filmmakers of color, those in the LGBTQ community, and usually of subject matter not represented by traditional Hollywood. We are restoring fifteen films this year, which is a lot for us and a large financial risk. We know there are very few organizations that promote the kind of work we do. Il Cinema Ritrovato, both in its festival and these awards, is the best of them.
We have already won an Il Cinema Ritrovato DVD Award in 2015 for Project Shirley Volumes 1-3, so I suspect this year’s entry has little chances of winning, but The Magic Box: Project Shirley Volume 4 is such a unique release that I wanted to enter it anyway. Shirley Clarke was not only one of the great independent directors of the 20th century, but also one of the most enigmatic. There are no biographies, documentaries, or any real investigation into her work. Luckily, with the help of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, we had complete access to almost every film she ever worked on — including a large number of never completed work and experiments — as well as her family’s home movies starting when she was nine years old. From Shirley’s daughter, Wendy Clare, we were able to borrow four volumes of family photos dating back to the 1890s when the Brimberg family was still in Russia. Therefore, we were able to not only create an almost complete overview of her brilliant work, we were able to create a personal and artistic diary of almost her entire life. With how many other filmmakers do we have this opportunity? This particular 3-disc volume took eight years to research, restore/digitize, organize, and produce. In many ways, it’s the best release we’ve ever produced. So yes, we definitely wanted to submit THE MAGIC BOX to the DVD Awards!
For the first time in many years, a sizable part of our income is coming from streaming, particularly from Turner Classic Movies’ Filmstruck. There are also hundreds of other companies around the world that are seeking the rights to our titles for SVOD. So the writing is definitely on the wall. However, we pride ourselves in doing the years of research for each film, finding the bonus features that put our films into context, and create learning tools for professors and their students to better understand our films. I think most of the companies that do this — such as Criterion, the BFI, Flicker Alley and the rest of our ilk — find this to be the artistic side of film distribution. So there are selfish professional reasons why I hope Blu-ray and DVD distribution will last. As a lover of great cinema and a collector of discs, there’s also selfish personal reasons as well. I love to see what is being produced by the other companies!
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Dennis Doros
Milestone Film & Video
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Ever dapper...
I only lasted about a year in that role of assistant (as Dan later observed, I seemed to have a problem with authority… and still do), but I stayed on at New Yorker for another three years as a nontheatrical film booker. During those years, I learned so much of what I know about film distribution.
And so when it came out in 2009, I was excited to read The New Yorker Theater and Other Scenes from a Life at the Movies, the memoir that Dan’s wife Toby wrote about their life together. And this month I eagerly turned to Dan’s article in the Spring 2017 Cineaste magazine: “Fragments from the Dream World: Reminiscences of a Film Distributor and Exhibitor.” And I also read Cynthia Rowell’s article: “The New Yorker Stories: Dan Talbot’s Life in Film” on the magazine’s website
In the Cineaste article, Dan writes brilliantly about his memories of the world of international and repertory cinema and about his relationships with of some of the great auteurs he has encountered. His descriptions of life at the New Yorker Theater, which he ran until 1973 (when I was still a NJ high school student) make me wish I had been in the audience for the incredible series and premieres. Truly, our cultural landscape would have been much emptier without his heroic — even herculean — efforts to introduce American audiences to such great filmmakers as Zhang Yimou, Ousmane Sembene, Alain Tanner, Louis Malle and so many others.
New Yorker Films honored those and other filmmakers, not only in the company’s gorgeous printed catalogs but also in a long line of photographs that stretched many yards down the right-hand wall of the company’s office when I worked there. These 8x10 photos were covered by long sheets of lucite that could be opened so that the order of the images could be rearranged. If Claude Lanzmann were coming by, his photo would quickly be moved to the number one spot.
The appreciation by Cynthia Rowell (a good friend, who worked with us at Milestone Films for years before joining New Yorker and now Cineaste) updates and contextualizes Dan’s great contributions to cinema in the US. She writes about how New Yorker helped fuel the flowering of film societies and independent cinemas because programmers could rely on the “New Yorker seal of approval.” And she rightly highlights the importance of Dan’s work in promoting films with strong political messages from around the world.
And although I really enjoyed these narratives, I came away asking one question:
“But, where is Jose Lopez?”
Because when I think about the New Yorker Films I worked at — and later worked with for decades — my very first thoughts are about Jose.
When I started at New Yorker, I worked as assistant to Dan and Jose — and as liaison between the distribution company and the three theaters that Dan owned or was partner in: the Cinema Studio, Metro, and Lincoln Plaza. The New Yorker Films office was on the top floor of a building at 16 West 61st Street between Broadway and Amsterdam and featured high ceilings, skylights and an open floor plan. In a previous incarnation, the space had been an automobile assembly facility. After being buzzed in the door, you faced a long reception desk and to your left was a cubicle featuring a desk, some filing cabinets and partition walls — which is where Jose worked. I sat at the assistant’s desk — just beyond the wall on the far side of Jose’s area. Facing me was Dan’s office, a separate room that featured a large glass window and a door.
When he was in the office, Dan had me working on contracts, correspondence, and sending telexes (Google this if you haven’t used one. And here is a photo of one.
This was before the Internet when international communication was a challenge. I was working at New Yorker when the company acquired its first fax machine, years later). But Dan came and went on his own schedule and even as his assistant, I often did not know when or if he would be in. In fact, that picture window into Dan’s office could be deceiving. It was not floor to ceiling, so several times I (and others) walked in to what looked like an empty office with the lights out, and almost stumbled on the six-foot-plus Dan Talbot, stretched out for a nap on the carpeted floor.
Jose was always, always there and always moving. When he stopped by my desk, I would assist him by writing marquee copy; contacting the theater mangers to make sure they had trailers, one-sheets, and 35mm prints; reporting box office; or proofreading ad copy. Then he would set off at a trot to check on problems in accounting or the office screening room or the shipping department or with the catalog layout. Very often, when we all left at the end of the day (there were eight or nine of us on staff at that time) he would still be at his desk or rushing off to the theaters to solve other problems. Jose lived on the Upper West Side and came in evenings, weekends, and holidays. He was the hardest working person I have ever known.
He was also funny and kind. Jose grew up in Cuba and although his English was excellent, he occasionally made mistakes that were both brilliant and hilarious. If you had to get over something, it was “water over the bridge.” My favorite was one that took me a while to figure out. When we started dating, my future husband Dennis was working at rival film company, Kino International. Jose heard about our romance and suggested that I might “pull a Camille.” It was only my familiarity with the films of Greta Garbo that allowed me to decipher that one. Jose was not suggesting I die of consumption, but was hoping I would take on the role of Mata Hari and learn a bit about Kino’s acquisition plans.
I am tempted to say that Jose was like the energizer bunny or that he was the heart of the company, but both those metaphors fail to account for how incredibly smart, competent and just encyclopedically knowledgeable he was about every aspect of film exhibition and distribution. Everyone relied on him all the time — for everything. Do you have a problem with the booking software? Ask Jose. Is there broken popcorn machine at the Cinema Studio? Jose will know how to fix that. Does a filmmaker need an advance on royalties? Jose will get a check cut. Is an exhibitor taking forever to pay? Ask Jose. Lab problems? Aspect ratio questions? Publicity concerns? Video production glitches? Everyone turned to him for everything.
Even years after Dennis and I had founded Milestone, we still would sometimes call Jose for advice. And he always welcomed our questions and really tried to help. That warmth and connection also made him a great boss and a great mentor.
When I was at New Yorker, I sometimes thought that in their partnership, Dan was the quintessential “dad” — both king of the castle and procurer of the household bacon (which for New Yorker meant attending festivals, meeting with filmmakers and sales agents, and acquiring new films). And Jose was “mom,” sensitive to the situations of all the kids/staff, constantly multi-tasking, incredibly hard-working, and somewhat unseen and under-appreciated by the outside world.
Well, decades later I am a mom — and co-owner of a mom-and-pop distribution company — so my perspective has evolved. I can see that both men loved the films themselves and that their dedication to cinema fueled their collaboration and gave their partnership tenacity. Dan’s role — representing the company and establishing it as a vital cultural voice and resource — was essential and suited his personality and many talents. I recognize too that Jose thrived on solving the million-and-one problems and challenges of keeping a business going.
I remember that despite his warmth and boundless energy, Jose is shy. I found exactly one photo of him online and it was taken another New Yorker alum, Reid Rosefelt (The photo above is a better image, also courtesy of Reid). I don’t really know if Jose will like that I am writing about him now
But as a working film distributor for so many years, I also know that what Jose did at New Yorker Films was absolutely essential to its excellence and success. And I know that I, and dozens of other working film professionals, owe him so much. I know that I can never fully thank him all his kindness and wisdom — but I offer this blog in partial payment.
I just finished mailing a handmade valentine to our wonderful friend John Canemaker and his husband Joe Kennedy — and in my email comes the gift of John’s new blog!
And believe me, this is a treasure that will brighten your day... and many days to come.
If you haven’t discovered John’s amazing films, books, lectures, paintings... you are in for a glorious treat. John is an Oscar-winning animator (for The Moon and the Son), a great historian of animation, and a painter of some of the most graceful and joyful images I have ever seen.
John’s website provides an opportunity to explore his multi-faceted creativity, and now it also offers a chance to hear his invariably kind, astute and wonderful thoughts about a whole range of topics. His first entry covers two beloved institutions, Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor, NY and playwright/screenwriter/filmmaker/artist/writer/cartoonist Jules Feiffer. I won’t spoil your pleasure, go read it for yourself!
]]>Dennis has previously blogged about his “other love,” filmmaker Shirley Clarke. Over the last 8+ years, he has worked tirelessly to research the work and life of this brilliant artist — along with restoring her groundbreaking and transgressive feature films and a bonanza of amazing shorts (now available as The Magic Box). As a film fan, I have cheered on and supported his efforts (okay, I may have occasionally raised an eyebrow at the costs of his encyclopedic endeavor) and as a wife I was glad that my competition was cinematic rather than sinful.
Now, Dennis has a new sweetheart — glorious ballerina Anna Pavlova, star of Lois Weber’s 1916 epic, The Dumb Girl of Portici. I believe he has amassed some two dozen books on Her Loveliness, as well as other assorted ephemera. And if I have to have a rival, I am glad she was such a transcendent artist that Australian chefs created a luscious dessert in her honor. I’m not chopped liver, but I have yet to inspire a meringue and fruit extravaganza.
And Dennis too has a rival — and a living one at that. Like Dennis, my side guy, Bernie Sanders is brilliant, Jewish, moral, strong, passionate, articulate, and balding. I worked for the Sanders campaign, ran for Freeholder (a county-wide board) to insure he got a column on the primary ballot, and even represented Bernie as a member of the credentials committee at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia in July. And while I can joke about lovely ladies Clarke and Pavlova, I find I cannot be funny or glib about Bernie. My experience at the Democratic Convention was probably the most painful I had experienced since the death of my father.
But as difficult as I found Bernie Sanders’ defeat in Philadelphia, the election of Donald Trump has been a thousand times more devastating, heartbreaking, disappointing and frightening.
On the night of the Presidential election, Dennis and I were in Pittsburgh for the annual convention of the Association of Moving Image Archivists. Since he had a presentation the next morning, we had gone to sleep around midnight, guessing but not entirely sure of the outcome. At 2:30 AM our son called from his college dorm room, terribly upset. And whether it because he couldn’t fix things for our kid or because he was half asleep, Dennis fainted, hitting his head on a granite sink surround. Long story short: hotel security called the EMTs and we ended up in an ambulance to Mercy Hospital where Dennis’s head wound was glued and he was given a clean bill of health.
And strangely, this surreal night was actually a great reminder for me of what is most important. Because while I may be unable to change the course of our country (although I tried!), I do have allies, partisans, comrades with whom I can try to face the coming days — foremost, my husband/partner, Dennis and our son, Adam.
It was also inspiring to be among the great members of AMIA — folks who have dedicated their lives and careers to preserving precious records of the past and who are idealistic, quirky, and wonderful.
At Milestone, Dennis and I have tried to choose films that are great cinema, enjoyable entertainment and exciting history, but that also reflect our own ethics, politics, and values. So, come what may, we will keep pulling at that harness together to advance our company and all that we hope it represents and preserves.
And we want you to know that you, our friends, colleagues, and customers are part of that effort. So, “Vive la résistance!”
And while we are at it, “Long live cinema!”
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Okay, it's not what you think. I'm still happily married to Amy after 26 years and we still love being together and working together.
But today, my eight years on Project Shirley came to a conclusion. Amy liked to call Shirley Clarke the other woman in my life. I never met her, but through her diaries, stories from her daughter Wendy and from all her family still around, I got to know Shirley better than any director I've ever worked on or worked for. Her films have utterly fascinated us. Twenty years after her death, they still remain ahead of their time. When the world finally catches up to Shirley Clarke, she will be placed way up there in that cinematic canon that has far too few women. Especially courageous women who didn't care about conventions of their time.
So what did I finish today? Collected from those eight years are nearly eight hours of absolute fabulousness – an Oscar®-winning documentary (Robert Frost), a lost children's film (Christopher and Me), the incredible Pennebaker and Clarke-led Brussels Loops, her complete output of short films (dance, experimental, industrial and narrative), and dozens of unknown and/or unfinished work that will boggle the mind. Project Shirley has involved dozens of archives (with special gratitude to Maxine, Mary, and Amy at the Wisconsin Center for Film & Television), hundreds of deeds of generosity from esteemed archivists and lab technicians, countless composers, librarians, professors, and of course, Wendy, to guide me through hundreds and hundreds of questions. Not to mention the amazing, creative people we've met who worked with or knew Shirley. (Martha Clarke, your Angel Reapers is magnificent and we'll never forget it!) We have no regrets.
Through it all, I've held materials in my hand that would thrill any cinephile. One-of-a-kind 16mm prints that haven't seen the light of day since the 1950s, prints of films that were never screened, personal letters, diaries, an original button from the 1967 Portrait of Jason premiere (gifted to me by the darling Max), and dozens of items that bugged my eyes out. However, perhaps the coolest thing ever, was Wendy shipping me the family photo albums. Imagine having in your hands, the actual physical history of a great director from literally day one. These are photo albums that Shirley and Wendy kept for nearly a century. The photo of Shirley's wedding day (above) came from one album. Needless to say, I spent the entire week scanning them, took a great deal of time going over them with Shirley's niece Liza and other Shirley experts, and then sending the back as soon as I could!
So when will you all get to see these amazing discoveries? I've just sent the hard drive to our authoring and compression lab, the wonderful Luminous 7. There will be some weeks of them doing their magic to make sure they look their best when they are shown on your TV or up onscreen. We'll have to proof them a number of times disc by disc. (Both Blu-ray and DVD.) Our former intern now professional artist Lauren Caddick will be designing the cover and the brochure. Then it's all on to CDA in North Carolina (and Germany) to put it all together and get them ready to ship to our offices and our sub-distributor Oscilloscope will get them to the right retailers. Soon, Amy and I will be announcing the release date The Magic Box: The Films of Shirley Clarke, Project Shirley Volume 4. We hope to have them out before the end of the year.
So, am I really done with Shirley Clarke? Don't kid yourself. Definitely not. The WCFTR and Milestone digitized a huge number of Shirley's video output from the late 1960s through the 1980s and I'd like to help get them seen. Our friend Larry Kardish is also writing her biography and we'll be around if he needs us. We're also working with Immy Humes on a documentary on Shirley. Both projects will astonish the cinema world and give another boost to the rebirth of Shirley Clarke in history. And who knows? Perhaps Fred Wiseman will license The Cool World to us one day. (I hope so!) But for now, The Magic Box is our final treat; a brilliant gem that we have polished as much as we could. Is it the latest Star Trek? Of course not! But then, like Shirley, it's not about mass consumption and meeting expectations. That's too bleeping boring!!!
Shirley Clarke in 1919
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