Film Screenings / Programs / Series
LEVITT/MADDOW/MEYERS/STRICK
December 15 – December 19
Last spring, Anthology presented an extensive series devoted to the New York social documentary filmmaking scene of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, with a focus on the pioneering figure Leo Hurwitz, but encompassing films made by a whole host of filmmakers who collaborated on films throughout that period. As a follow-up to that series, we have organized a program calling attention to another group of frequent collaborators: Helen Levitt, Ben Maddow, Sidney Meyers, and Joseph Strick.
Meyers and Maddow, like Hurwitz, were intimately involved with the successive filmmaking cooperatives – the Workers Film and Photo League, Nykino, and especially Frontier Films – that contributed so vitally to the development of the progressive documentary in the U.S. Meyers in particular was a figure who was deeply respected and beloved by his peers, even as his importance within the history of non-fiction filmmaking was (and continues to be) underestimated by film historians at large, partly thanks to his own self-effacing modesty. He was in any case a profoundly influential figure in the lives and careers of Helen Levitt, who worked only occasionally in motion pictures but who was to become one of the century’s great still photographers, and to Joseph Strick, who would go on to make a series of challenging literary adaptations throughout the 60s and 70s.
Though these four filmmakers were only loosely and intermittently affiliated, they worked together in various configurations on a number of seminal projects, most famously THE QUIET ONE (1948) and THE SAVAGE EYE (1960). These films, which stand as two of the most remarkable works produced in the period preceding the full flowering of independent cinema in the 1960s, further developed the approaches that Hurwitz and his colleagues had pioneered, boldly combining elements of fiction and documentary and striving to foster a socially-engaged cinema.
Organized in part as a tribute to Strick and Levitt, both of whom recently died, the series will highlight the two films mentioned above, along with several others made, either together or apart, by all four filmmakers.
Special thanks to Manny Kirchheimer, Betsy Strick, Sally Swisher, Walter Hess, Cecile Starr, Eric Liknaitzky (Contemporary Films), Mark Toscano & May Haduong (Academy Film Archive), Anne Morra & Mary Keene (MoMA), and Mike Olshan.
