Julia Reichert and the Work of Telling Working-Class Stories

FEATURES JULIA REICHERT AND THE WORK OF TELLING WORKING-CLASS STORIES Patricia Aufderheide It was the Year of Julia: in 2019 documentarian Julia Reichert received lifetime-achievement awards at the Full Frame and HotDocs festivals, was given the inaugural “Empowering Truth” award from Kartemquin Films, and saw a retrospec- tive of her work presented at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. (The International Documentary Association had already given her its 2018 award.) Meanwhile, her newest work, American Factory (2019)—made, as have been all her films in the last two decades, with Steven Bognar—is being championed for an Academy Award nomination, which would be Reichert’s fourth, and has been picked up by the Obamas’ new Higher Ground company. A lifelong socialist- feminist and self-styled “humanist Marxist” who pioneered independent social-issue films featuring women, Reichert was also in 2019 finishing another film, tentatively titled 9to5: The Story of a Movement, about the history of the movement for working women’srights. Yet Julia Reichert is an underrecognized figure in the contemporary documentary landscape. All of Reichert’s films are rooted in Dayton, Ohio. Though periodically rec- ognized by the bicoastal documentary film world, she has never been a part of it, much like her Chicago-based fellow Julia Reichert in 2019. Photo by Eryn Montgomery midwesterners: Kartemquin Films (Gordon Quinn, Steve James, Maria Finitzo, Bill Siegel, and others) and Yvonne 2 The Documentary Film Book. She is absent entirely from Welbon. 3 Gary Crowdus’s A Political Companion to American Film. Nor has her work been a focus of very much documentary While her earliest films are mentioned in many texts as scholarship. Early in her career, Reichert is mentioned in part of a movement, her career as a whole has been largely passing as a rising woman filmmaker making oral histories ignored by scholars of left-wing filmmaking such as Thomas of past (often defeated) political struggles—acategoryto Waugh, Patricia Zimmerman, and Michael Chanan. There which she is often consigned in the critical literature—when are interviews with Reichert from the early phase of her ca- sheappearsatall,asshedoesinthe1993 edition of Erik 1 reer in scholarly publications, but not analyses of the work Barnouw’s Documentary. Her early work (only) is referenced 4 itself, and the later years are fairly universally ignored. but not analyzed in Jonathan Kahana’s The Documentary A rare exception, for her early work, was Jump Cut,aninde- Film Reader, and none of her work is cited in Brian Winston’s pendent scholarly journal based (significantly) in Chicago and whose audience includes “radicals interested in culture,” Film Quarterly,Vol.73,Number2,pp.9–22, ISSN 0015-1386, electronic ISSN 1533-8630. as its masthead has always proudly declared. © 2019 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please ’ direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through Julia Reichert s career and aesthetic decisions can be best the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www. understood through an approach that looks at her cultural ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/FQ.2019.73.2.9. and production contexts, examining how her films intersected FILM QUARTERLY 9 with their political times, her own life trajectory, and the com- 5 mercial realities of the filmmaking marketplace. Ordinary Lives, Working Realities Reichert’s body of work is characterized by consistent themes across fifty years of nonstop production. They are films about the lives of ordinary working people in America, often women, usually set in the Midwest. The films are grounded in deep research and driven by a commitment to social justice. They methodically explore a situation or issue, with close, re- spectful observation and interviews that are always conducted by Reichert herself. These films were often designed within a Early days: Julia Reichert and Jim Klein. context of social movements and intended to have demonstra- ble effects in the world. Reichert also participated in creating The Film Fund, a The films have evolved stylistically with her increased foundation established to channel money from trust-fund mastery of her craft and the contributions of her filmmaking kids to social-issue filmmakers, and was part of the ten-year partners, Jim Klein and Steven Bognar. Her career has been struggle by documentary filmmakers in 1978–88 to create marked by constant learning by doing, starting with a film public television’s producing wing, the Independent Televi- 10 completed with only rudimentary training and advancing in sion Service (ITVS). She has remained an activist in sup- sophistication to include projects that incorporate an interac- port of documentary film on public television, including tive documentary (Reinvention Stories, 2013–14)andimpact the period 2013–15, when the documentary series Indepen- 6 modules (A Lion in the House, 2006). Throughout, the tone dent Lens and POV were threatened with removal from the has been consistent: unpretentious, earnest, elegant but clear. core PBS schedule. Although Reichert came of age when cinéma vérité was With Klein, she built a film program at Wright State Uni- dogma and interviews were unfashionable, she opted early versity in Dayton to teach first-generation students how to 7 for a social-inquiry approach. Only later, with more afford- make films. In conjunction with Dayton’smunicipalgovern- able technology, did she begin to use more cinéma vérité ap- ment, she launched an apprentice system that trained many proaches. The dignity of her films’ working-class characters Ohioans for careers in film and television. The project started and the struggles they confront in achieving that dignity are with fiction feature films she produced and/or directed while always in the front of the frame. teaching at Wright State, and has created a pipeline of work Reichert has also made history as a creator of film insti- and enabled film productions to come to Southwest Ohio for tutions. From the start, she understood her work as build- locations and lower costs. ing alternative institutions. She was a cofounder (with Reichert has always had at least one codirector throughout Klein) of New Day Films, originally created to distribute her career, but her collaborators agree that she is the driving her first film, Growing Up Female (1971), as well as the force, identifying the subject and story of the film. Between work of young filmmakers Liane Brandon and Amalie 1971 and 1984, she made films as a team with partner Jim Rothschild, and Joyce Chopra and Claudia Weill shortly Klein, whom she met, fittingly, in a film class at Antioch Col- 8 thereafter. New Day was a pioneer among independent lege. Reichert came from a working-class family and Klein distributors for incorporating outreach strategies into distri- from an upper-middle-class one, but they shared a burning bution long before there was a field of “impact producers,” commitment to social justice. Klein recalled: “It was always and one of the first to educate its own consumers—academics an all-out partnership—everything from interview questions and organizers—on how to leverage their institutions’ resour- to how we covered things. The big thing we had together ces to rent and buy New Day films. Drawing on this experi- was this sense of social commitment and being part of a large ence, and as part of her organizing work, Reichert also social movement. It made you believe you could do things be- wrote what might be the first how-to book on independent yond what you thought you could do.” 9 self-distribution and outreach. New Day became a thriving Their relationship broke up in the wake of the release of collective that continues to be a major distributor for indepen- Seeing Red (1983), although in 1985 they took a shared pro- dent filmmakers. fessorial job to start the Wright State film program. This was 10 WINTER 2019 also a moment when Reichert decided to go on her own, to marked by documentary triumphs such as Harlan County experiment with fiction film (Emma and Elvis, 1992), and to U.S.A. (Barbara Kopple, 1976)andThe Times of Harvey become a producer for other documentaries and fiction films. Milk (Rob Epstein, 1984). Bognar and Reichert’sfilmsare Indeed, it was in this producer role, Steven Bognar noted, strongly character-driven narratives within a social con- that she became known as the “godmother of the indie film text, as Bognar noted: “We’re not under the illusion that 11 movement.” Klein also developed a thriving independent movies can change the world, but they can help people solo career, including as a sought-after editor. and movements change the world by creating moments of It was also in this period that she met Bognar, a visual intimacy with people you might never meet otherwise.” artist and Ohio native, at a screening of Gregory Nava’s El And although their films are now produced with highly Norte (1983). Over the next few years, and in spite of the commercial entities, as Reichert points out, they still have fact that Steven was almost a generation younger, they be- a distinctively independent character: “Despite notes from came life partners—but not filmmaking partners until HBO, Participant, or Higher Ground, our films do not 12 1997,whentheybeganworkonALionintheHouse.Bog- ever have one main character, or even the usual three. nar describes their partnership as one of equals. He is We listen to a chorus of voices, go for real diversity. And likely to do most of the cinematography, although Reich- we’ve never made a celebrity film.” ert also shoots, but they share in the decisions.

Load more