Join Julia Reichert with Eric Hynes for a conversation about her documentary films, inspirations, and collaborations. Hynes is curator of film at the Museum of the Moving Image. He is also a reporter, film critic, and contributor to numerous major publications including the New York Times, Film Comment, Rolling Stone, and Reverse Shot.
The Expansive, Inexhaustible Curiosity of Julia Reichert
"A living master of observational filmmaking, Reichert’s cinema asserts that observation needn’t imply lack of participation," writes film curator and Film Comment columnist Eric Hynes. "It’s a cinema of attending to what matters, of attendance as assertion of what matters." In advance of his February 29 dialogue with the documentarian, he shares his perspective on Julia Reichert's five decades of filmmaking.
How Can Documentary Filmmaking Pop the Political Bubble?
Inspired by this month's Julia Reichert: 50 Years in Film Dialogue and retrospective, five voices, all working at the intersection of documentary, politics, and activism, offer perspectives on the documentary form. Together, they describe how storytelling has the power to redefine history, inviting us to consider a walk in different shoes—a proven strategy to influence powerful decisions, impact laws, and save and change lives.
"Jim Crow of the North has helped break the silence on the history and impact of northern segregation as the film has been carried across the community as a catalyst for convening, conversation, consternation, and change." Filmmaker and Twin Cities PBS producer Daniel Bergin on documentary's power in “restorative storytelling.”
Documentary Practices Can Give Visibility to Trans History
Oral history projects offer rich fodder for documentarians "who emphasize the voices of their subjects using their own words, no matter how odious they may be to power structures involved," writes Andrea Jenkins, a poet, Minneapolis City Council member, and transgender oral historian at the University of Minnesota’s Jean Nicholas Tretter Collection Archives in GLBT Studies.
Documentary Can Reveal an America Hiding in Plain Sight
"Documentary hails its viewers. In the words of Louis Althusser, it interpellates us, bringing us into the world we can see on screen, one often invisible, forgotten, left out of the picture." Author and English professor Paula Rabinowitz on the ways documentary films can burst our political bubbles.
Documentary Can Shift the Paradigm in Labor History
"Documentary film provided a means to bring the stories of past workers to the attention of contemporary workers." East Side Freedom Library co-founder Peter Rachleff on the power of documentary in the fight for fair labor practices.
Documentary Can Reflect the Complexities of Working-Class Life
Steve Bognar and Julia Reichert’s American Factory shows "how workers and managers inhabit a world of fragmentation, in which there is no single working-class tale nor even a unified story among those who manage and own the factory." Historian Elizabeth Faue on how documentaries can tell complicated stories of working-class life.
