Toasts and Tributes
Compiled by Cara Mertes
[Figure 1] [Figure 2] [Figure 3] [Figure 4] [Figure 5]
Ana Bia Andrade
I was nineteen years old when the Arts and Design Department of the Catholic University in Rio de Janeiro offered a special course on video, with a certain George Stoney as professor. People just said that hewas a man from New York.I thought, "Well, I'd like to know a bit about video, and it's a good opportunity to practice English." At that time, I didn't imagine how a person like George could change everybody's life, giving everyday lessons about hope and happiness, and assuring us that, with honesty, hard work, and love in mind, all dreams can come true.
The class started and the old man, wearing that red-and-blue checkered shirt and a blue hat, presented some videos about babies and children (All My Babies, Bari Ellen, Can You Hear Me?), artists (How One Painter Sees), Asians (Sad Song for Yellow Skin), black people (We Shall Overcome), and strikes (The Uprising of '34). Then, he presented a CBS 60 Minutes program about Brazil, showing crimes, violence, and poverty. The final purpose of the course was to answer a video letter from New York University students, trying to show them the spirit and reality of our country.
Except me, all the students in the class were white and part of a high economic class. They started claiming that 60 Minutes, which showed household workers and homeless people, was not telling the truth, saying that we treat poor and black people here with respect. I became very angry and, as a bad-tempered young girl, started a discussion about racism and prejudice. Finally, the class [End Page 137] decided to make videos about Brazilian music and beaches and sun and beautiful people. I told George that I would like to make a video at Rocinha (the biggest Latin American favela, five minutes away from the University), showing people as they really are--totally based on the feeling I had after seeing all the videos he had just presented. But I didn't have a camera or any experience in filmmaking. He told me, "You are going to do that because you can use my camera." Then we became friends and during that year we went out almost every day just to visit places and talk to people. (George has made many friends in Brazil: artists, teachers, actors, and many common people.)
The day he left, a friend who worked on the Rocinha video went with me to accompany him to the airport. I cried a lot, thinking that I would never see him again in my life. But George wrote me a lot of letters. And three years later, when I got money to spend some time in New York, I couldn't wait to see him. Again, I met many special people (as I would describe everybody around George), and we had great fun just talking about life, about feelings, [End Page 138] about societies, about Ben & Jerry's ice cream. For the second time I cried when I left, thinking once more that I would never see him again.
A few years later, my phone rings. He just said, "I am in Brazil, and need you to spend two weeks in the jungle with the Krao Indians." No question about it! I just left everything, and went with him wherever he wanted to film, talk about life, meet people, and eat armadillos at 4 a.m.
For the last thirteen years, these simple words on the phone have made me feel so very happy: "I am here and need you to bring me some videos for a conference," or "Help me talk to people working on Paulo Freire's life story"(that's when I met him partially naked, as his red-and-blue-checkered shirt was being used by the actor), or whatever else he wanted me to do.
I don't have to cry anymore, because I am sure that I am going to be with him many times again in my life, that his values and spirit are already inside me, and that every minute spent with him means many years of life knowledge.
I am a teacher now, and day by day I remember George's way of teaching. It's absolutely necessary to tell my students about my experiences with him and the important things he did for our country, especially with Indians, as well as presenting Paulo Freire's life and work to the American people. I really don't believe that he doesn't understand Portuguese, as he knows exactly what is happening all the time.
Also, I am quite sure that sometimes he goes to Ireland just to be as he really is: a tale, a legend, perhaps a leprechaun.
Ana Bia Andrade teaches graphic design at Catholic University in Rio de Janeiro. [End Page 139]
Henry M. Breitrose
In the late fifties, as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin, I became active in the Wisconsin Film Society, where I had the good fortune to see two extraordinary films, Palmour Street and All My Babies. I noted that they were made by someone named George Stoney. They set me on a course that led to a lifetime in documentary, and to a long friendship with George. George has a social and political sensibility that I tend to associate with the South, and specifically with the agrarian populists of the New Deal. My own sensibility, as far as I can tell, is urban second-generation immigrant, with a concern for social justice, but a certain lack of what William Carlos Williams dubbed "The American Grain." In practice, George doesn't follow rules, while I still think that I must, in order to get along in America.
It didn't take very long for me to realize that I was a much better teacher than a documentary filmmaker. In fact, there are few filmmakers as good as George who are really good teachers. When I came up for sabbatical leave at Stanford in 1965, I was in the enviable position of choosing my replacement to teach documentary filmmaking, and immediately thought of George Stoney. He accepted, and then asked, "What should I do?" As I raced for the airport, I advised him to teach the students how to make films, and to avoid "war stories."
When I returned a year later, the program had been radically transformed. The students were energized, the editing rooms were going day-and-night, and I finally understood that in addition to their class assignments, the students were making all manner of extra-curricular films that would make my mother blush and my Dean's blood curdle, as well as supplementing their meager living expenses. Maybe the resistance to the Vietnam War had something to do with it, but I believe that George taught them about rules and the need to question authority. The class work was very good indeed.
We kept George Stoney at Stanford as long as we could, but eventually it became clear that he wanted to return to production and to the East Coast. I had been consulting with the National Film Board of Canada on Challenge for Change, a project that was intended to empower poor people with a means of [End Page 140] telling their own stories in audiovisual form. My former students, Bonnie Scherr Klein and Mike Rubbo, were at the NFB, and their status as non-Canadians seemed to give them both considerable relief from the French/English cultural politics that were, then as now, a feature of life at the NFB. I realized that George Stoney would be an ideal head of the program. His heart and politics were on the left side of his chest, he had no use for unreasonable rules, and he was NOT Canadian. A perfect combination to run a controversial program!
George transplanted his hugely effective teaching skills from California to Mont- real, worked with young and enthusiastic filmmakers, and produced an impressive array of social documentaries. In all, more than one hundred thirty films were made in the series. My favorites are VTR St.-Jacques, directed by Bonnie Sherr Klein, and A Young Social Worker Speaks HerMind, directed by Terence McCartney-Filgate, in what we now would recognize as classical Direct Cinema style.
In academic year 1975-1976, George and I found ourselves in England at the same time. I was on leave from Stanford, and George was investigating Robert Flaherty's work in England and recuperating some of his own personal history. It was all about Man of Aran, Flaherty's documentary reconstruction of life on a bleak island off the coast of Ireland. George's grandfather, I think, had been the local doctor, and he died in "unexplained circumstances." He was also the only Protestant on an island of serious Catholics, and there was some ambiguity about the lack of explanation.
Most filmmakers would have been quite content to locate any of the participants in a documentary made forty-two years earlier. George located some of the key players, still alive on the island, seemingly gifted with total recall. He found John Goldman, who edited the film, and John Taylor, who operated the film lab that developed and printed the film on the island, much as Nanook of the North was processed on-location. George even managed to find some of the lab equipment, moldering away in the loft of a disused house. But he wanted more. He wanted the actual camera with which Man of Aran was shot, or if not the actual camera, one just like it. [End Page 141]
I had a car and George had some leads, so I took the day off from my visiting professor gig at the London School of Economics and we proceeded to the terra incognita of furthest North London. George had an address of a camera technician in Willesden or Cricklewood Broadway or thereabouts, and with me at the wheel, trying to remember that one drives on the left side of the road, and Georgeat the A to Zed guidebook, we went off in search of the Newman-Sinclair camera.
Eventually we found a workshop in an alley, and a most enthusiastic technician of some considerable years, wearing what looked to be a tan lab coat, greeted us and showed us a metal box with a delicately machined outer surface. Asingle lens protruded from one end, and a handle, with which to wind its clockwork motor, stuck out of one side. George's face lit up. The technician went on to explain that this was not precisely the camera used by Flaherty, but it was the same model. He remembered Flaherty's camera, because he prepared it for Flaherty's use. He also remembered Flaherty, with considerable awe.
Some months later, still in London, I received a call from the U.S. Information Agency office in London. This struck me as passing strange, because at the time I could barely muster sufficient security clearance to enter a Post Office. The USIA was trolling for visiting American professors who might be persuaded to lecture at remote locations. The director of the office wanted to know if I'd be interested in spending a couple of weeks telling India about American documentary. Immediately, my thoughts turned to George Stoney, who had been in India several years earlier, making a film in Gwalior for the Baha'i faith.We did a two-week brother act through New Delhi, Madras, Bombay, and Calcutta. One day in New Delhi, George was nowhere to be seen. He reappeared the next morning, having hired a car and driver and made the not-inconsiderable trip to visit his "family" as he called them, in Gwalior.
Perhaps the defining moment of my long friendship with George Stoney happened when we visited Calcutta on our Indian adventure. In 1911, the British moved the capital of India from Calcutta to New Delhi. Calcutta was left to get along on its own; as best it could, which wasn't very well at all. The Bihar famine of 1966-67 and the establishment of a Muslim Bangladesh after the 1971 war flooded the already decaying and overcrowded city with Bengali-speaking [End Page 142] Hindus and Muslims, who were desperately, unimaginably poor. Generations were born, lived out their lives, and died in the streets. I was overwhelmed and outraged by the poverty of the street-dwellers, and my senses were deeply offended by what I saw and what I smelled. But George was awed by the durability of family structure that could survive such conditions. In retrospect, I think that he fully agreed with me, but penetrated beneath the economicand political surface to find a deeper meaning at a much more human level.
These days we see each other irregularly and with little advance notice. George picks up the conversation where we last left off, assuming that I am aware of everything that he's been up to since we were last together, in the same way that one might reconnect with a close relation. I think that he believes that if I didn't know, I should have known, and in any event I wouldn't be shy about asking for explanation. And I do.
Henry M. Breitrose is Professor of Communication at Stanford University.
Pamela Calvert
George's central teaching is that of the radical accountability of the filmmaker to the subject and community--to be able without hesitation to bring the finished film back home to the people among and with whom it was made. This commitment takes production out of the transactional marketplace and transforms it into an exchange of gifts, if you will, between the mediator and the mediated.
Pamela Calvert is a board member of Working Films, www.workingfilms.org [End Page 143]
Ayoka Chenzira
I will never forget the support given to me by the man film students affectionately refer to as "Stoney." His guidance and support came at a critical time in my life. I was new to New York, having arrived to attend New York University's film school in the seventies. I had committed to learning film after years of being trained in other art forms, even though no one that I knew at home had ever heard of a seventeen-year-old black girl wanting to make movies, and kept insisting that what I meant was that I wanted to be an actress. And my political awareness was beginning to take shape. I set out for New York with a brand new super-8 camera, ready to conquer the world. It turned out to be more difficult than I had expected.
George's documentary class was unlike anything that I had experienced. I was exposed to numerous films that gave me a better sense of history and people, challenging my own stereotypes. And George was the most outspoken, no-nonsense opinionated teacher that I have ever had. In short, he was rebellious and was known to challenge authority for all of the right reasons. This was a new breed of white man and it took some getting used to.
I was initially unhappy at NYU. That there were only four other black students in the program was only part of the challenge. I felt disconnected from what most other students were interested in, and I constantly butted heads with the director of the program, who I found rude, limited, sexist, and a destructive force. It all came to a head when I told him that I wanted to pursue a career as a director of photography and he advised me to go into editing because "women are good with their hands." All of this spoken while preoccupied with paperwork on his desk. Although I never shared this with George, he seemed to know that I was angry about something (as I was busy preparing a program of independent studies as a way to get some distance from school). He encouraged me to make whatever kind of film was important to me and not to think about anything else for the moment. So I did. I made a film called Syvilla: They Dance To Her Drum (which George named because I was having difficulty naming the film), a documentary about a first-generation African-American concert dancer who was my dance teacher and a friend. [End Page 144]
Initially, no one wanted to work on the film with me. It wasn't going to get them into Hollywood, it was to be made in black-and-white, the subject of the film was dying of cancer, and the fact that she was culturally important (the dance training link between Katherine Dunham and Alvin Ailey) and was credited with being an important teacher to Marlon Brando and other well-known actors was not enough to interest most. So I slugged it out, at first alone and later with the help of two wonderful classmates. I made every mistake in the book (which George kindly pointed out), but I got through it, and one reason was George's gentle but firm guiding hand. Syvilla Fort died while I was still making the film. I thought that I would never recover from the loss, until George reminded me of what I had pitched to the class, and why it was important that I make the film even if no one else ever saw it. I pulled myself together, completed the film, and for two years lectured and toured with the film to numerous colleges and universities. It even got me my first trip abroad.
Since my training with George I have made fifteen films, traveled around the world and taught filmmaking at the City College of New York and in various countries in Africa. In my classes each student is required to write about why the film that they want to produce is important to them. I learned from George that sometimes this is the only thing that will sustain you as the process of pulling together the art form and the business of filmmaking begins. It is still a powerful piece of information for both emerging and established filmmakers.
George Stoney continues to have my respect, admiration, love, and a very special place in my heart. Thank you, George, for not giving up on me.
Ayoka Chenzira is chair of the Department of Communications, Film and Video, City College of New York. [End Page 145]
Mike Fentiman
Without George Stoney the Community Programme Unit (CPU) of the BBC's Public Service Television may never have existed. Back at the start of the seventies, George Stoney was our inspiration. George came to England in 1970-71 for a public exhibition of new media in London's Hyde Park. As a producer of a late-night BBC media discussion show, I invited George to appear, showing a British audience for the first time some of his video work from his Manhattan cable station.
For us, contained and constrained within a straitjacketed tradition of "institutional quality standards" and the restrictive practice of our broadcast trades union, his work opened our eyes probably even more than those of our audience. One example of George's work with community expression through video, both in form and content, breaking new ground both technological and social, stands out even now some thirty years later.
Imagine this: George gets out of his truck armed with his Portacam, attracted by a crowd on a Manhattan sidewalk in confrontation about the slum conditions of their tenement. George asks questions, pointing the microphone at angry tenants. As he questions them, he is conducting the argument, using the microphone like a baton. Liberal, radical, sympathetic to their cause, he is still in charge. Then the mic is handed over to/is grabbed by one of the group on the sidewalk. From then on, the mic is passed between, as they each have their say.
They are now in charge. They are now empowered. They are telling us. We aren't asking them. This seminal symbolic moment educated me more, I think, than any other single moment in my forty years of work in public television
Later on we showed more of George's work, both in Manhattan and from his time with Challenge for Change in Canada. Our program editor, Rowan Ayers, was a man educated by his own output, and after a conspiracy or two, a nod to the left, a pinch of subversion, and a few well-timed and well-placed leaks to the press, he founded Open Door, the world's first national public access program on April 12, 1973. [End Page 146]
Open Door and its successor, Open Space, no longer exist. One of its offspring, Video Nation--featuring regular two-minute access slots from fifty camcorders circulating to every corner of the U.K.--ran for five glorious years, until the end of 1999. It is no more. Many other good programs still come from the CPU. But a liberal editorial policy is not the same as true public access, is it George?
The BBC and the CPU owe a tremendous debt to George Stoney, and twenty-five years has not been a bad run. And anyway, what goes around comes around, eh, George!
Mike Fentiman was editor of the BBC Community Programme Unit, 1975-86
William Greaves
I thought I knew George pretty well until, to my surprise, this Southern gentleman's name turned up in some research I was doing on a film that I was making on the life of Dr. Ralph Bunche, the legendary African American Under-Secretary-General of the UN and Nobel Peace Prize winner. It turned out that George had worked for Dr. Bunche in the late thirties and early forties. Bunche had hired George, who was just out of college, to do field research in the Deep South for Gunnar Myrdal's landmark study, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. This study was the first to examine racism in America, and Dr. Bunche, who at that time was a top Howard University scholar, was Myrdal's chief collaborator on the project. I learned from my research that young George had risked his life on more than one occasion, as he gathered crucial information for Bunche about the dynamics of race relations in the extremely hostile racial climate of America's Deep South.
William Greaves is an independent filmmaker. [End Page 147] [Begin Page 149]
Jacquelyn Hall
The Uprising of '34 was much more than a documentary. It was a vast educational/political project. When the lights go up at community meetings, George told us, "The elderly testify; their children and grandchildren ask more questions."
The film, that fight, the memorial to the seven slain strikers of Honea Path, SC, that The Uprising of '34 helped to inspire--all these gave me a powerful jolt of energy. It is not too much to say that they gave me the will to go on doing the work of historical reclamation, secure in the faith that however limited one's own efforts may be, talented, passionate people will enhance them, carry them on.
I see George Stoney as the embodiment of the incendiary, leftwing populism that is one of the chief glories of the South's so often benighted political tradition. I also see him as an exemplary native son, one in a long line of liberals and radicals that have come out of the University of North Carolina.
Jacquelyn Hall is Director, Southern Oral History Program and Julia Cherry Spruill Professor of History, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
Richard Herskowitz
George Stoney got to me just in time. Hearing George speak about the public access movement shook me out of a fascination with theories of cinematic enunciation and subject-positioning and pointed me back towards asking: How could reception situations be created that would encourage the transformation of dominant cultural formations and subject positions? I was redirected towards the career in alternative media exhibition that has occupied me for the last twenty years. I've invited George everywhere that his spirit and his creations can possibly inspire other media students and producers losing sight of our goal: a more emancipatory and participatory public sphere.
Richard Herskowitz is Artistic Director, Virginia Film Festival and past President, International Film Seminars. [End Page 149]
James Ivory
In 1956 I was completing my first film, a documentary about Venice and its painters called Venice: Theme and Variations. This short 16mm film--only half an hour long, but on a big subject--was my thesis project in the Master of Fine Arts program at the University of Southern California film school. I had been working on it for four years, including time in the U.S. Army in Germany, when I went to Venice on leave, and I was very proud of it. Finally, when I was ready to show my film to the U.S.C. film school faculty, to my great dismay when it was screened for them, they didn't like it and promptly said so. My feelings then were exactly the same as they have been more than once in following years whenever the distributor or financier of one of my features has not liked my film. Such an attitude, naturally, has always seemed to me to be outrageous; however in the world of features everyone tries to put a good face on his disappointment in order to move forward to save his investment. But in this case not one penny had been spent on my Venice film by the U.S.C. film school. The money had all been my own, or my father's.
Wandering morosely along the rickety-looking wooden cloister of the old U.S.C. Cinema Department (it had once been a livery stable), perhaps even with my film in its can under my arm, I met George Stoney. He was teaching some summer school classes there and I had luckily come to know him a bit. On an impulse I invited him to see my film and added that the U.S.C. faculty hadn't liked it and had even said they were thinking of removing the school's name from the credits. Stoney agreed at once, watched it soon after, was very enthusiastic, and went to the head of the Cinema Department to plead my case. Thecredit remained, my film was accepted as made, and in due course I graduated. The following year Venice: Theme and Variations was named by The New York Times as one of the ten best non-theatrical shorts of 1957, and went into profitable distribution.
As I think back on this episode, I'm mostly struck by the professionalism of committed, practicing filmmakers like George Stoney versus the rather personally removed and uninvolved academics who were nominally my mentors at U.S.C., and whose spiritual descendants still inhabit the lecture halls of [End Page 150] many American film schools. Unlike them, Stoney just happened to teach, or better still, liked to teach and liked the personal bonds he enjoyed with his students, while all the time pursuing his own filmmaking career. Lester Novrosat the U.S.C. film school was also like that in those same years and, like Stoney, showed me great kindness while I was struggling with my first film.
George Stoney: only twelve years older than I was then, he already seemed vastly wise. Trim and spare, with intelligent merry eyes behind big glasses, he was as quick in his movements as he was quick and precise in his thought. Fate placed me on his path that bad day in 1956. I have no doubt that other fledgling, and perhaps disappointed, directors have been helped by him just as I was, over the many years--no, decades--that we've been friends. One could perhaps describe his assistance to me at U.S.C. as political or diplomatic. In the practical area he helped me to find another, better, actor to narrate my film--Alexander Scourby, who narrated Stoney's own film about syphilis, a film which also used old prints and maps and drawings in order to tell its grim story, as my film on Venice had.
James Ivory, Director and Screenwriter, Merchant Ivory Productions
Jill Janows
There is a freedom and purity in George's involvement with film and education, as in his politics, which always invigorates. He cares nothing for trends or celebrity or sentimentality or safety. He still fights to make wonderful films (or videos) about important, not necessarily popular, subjects which grip him...and to share films which have something authentic and serious to say--something that no one else is saying and that begs to be said--in an exceptional way. [End Page 151]
Jill Janows is an executive producer at WGBH/Boston who has produced and directed documentaries on poets and other library subjects.
Bill Jersey
Honesty, integrity, respect; the words fit George like an old pair of shoes. He is a living celebration and affirmation of why many of us continue to pursue truth, beauty, and justice in and through the documentary.
Happily, George can also be a tough critic--impatient with the sloppy, the simplistic, the careless, or the caustic. I remember when he cut a snake handler sequence out of his film because he thought it made his subjects look foolish. He never wanted anyone to look embarrassed, so if he is, by all our praise, "We apologize, George."
Bill Jersey is an independent filmmaker.
Fred Johnson
I first met George more than twenty years ago in Louisville, Kentucky. I was attending an event funded by the Kentucky Humanities Council convened to evaluate, perhaps celebrate, a Kentucky Public Television production that had gotten major humanities funding. I recall it was a historical drama, featuring six-figure funding, stiff acting, and historical figures from Kentucky's colonial past. I also remember the whole cast walking around in eighteenth century frontier clothing that looked like it had just arrived from the dry cleaners--including the buckskins. The writing and history it represented was just as dry-cleaned and pressed into the point of view of Kentucky's elites. George was the headlining filmmaker and scholar brought in to preside over this event. I have no idea how that came about.
I was working at a media and cable access center in Frankfort, Kentucky, wherethe cable system is publicly owned. We usually avoided such mainstream gatherings like the plague (unless we were working some hopeless angle on getting public television money) but my colleague, Jim Bell, who managed the center, handed me these invitations and I discovered Stoney's name on the agenda. "Hey I know about this guy! He used to run the Challenge for Change Program [End Page 152] up in Canada." Challenge for Change had long been revered in our world, along with Ted Carpenter's grassroots video center in Johnson City, Tennessee. We were small-format, grassroots video makers, not filmmakers, and it is hard to explain what a cultural buzz there was around all that in the mid-to-late seventies. We were experimenting with video, local cable channels, citizen participation, and video art and were as full of righteous energy, and ourselves, as any dot com scene today. George was already legendary in this world; we simply had to go meet him. We did, and to the horror of nearly everyone there except George Stoney, managed to disrupt the comfortable little discourse, insisting, among other more outrageous things, that the funding would have been better spent for grassroots oral histories from Kentucky's citizens. After the meeting ended and the glaring participants filed out, George came over and we had the first of many wonderful conversations about video, documentary, media politics, and art. The man matched the legend--still, I had no idea how many worlds George walked in with similar grace. That all came later.
George's tiny apartment on Waverly Place is really a gateway and bolthole to an almost mythical world of media activism, media making, and media education. I walked in and never really came out. My first visit brought me face to face with former FCC Commissioner, Nick Johnson, holding forth on telecom policy. Since then that passage has opened on crusty New Deal documentary types, labor historians and leaders, media historians and academics, BBC community programming activists, "Freirian" media educators, as well as actors, photographers, curators, and documentary makers from around the world flogging every conceivable idea.
George has tramped down a path that led me, and many others, to a world where you make documentaries with people rather than about them, where it is possible to share directorial and editorial control in myriad ways; where it is commonly understood that democratizing media starts with the power of producers and directors. Of course, the path does not stop there. Managing to teach and make award-winning documentaries, he has also led one of the most important political interventions in post-war era, spearheading a movement that seized cable channels and funding for the public. He did this through a strategy of organizing around love and common experiences, not hate. He continues to encourage me to be part of this adventure. For that I am immeasurably grateful. [End Page 153]
Fred Johnson is a documentary maker and a founding member of Media Working Group
Bonnie Sherr Klein
George was my mentor long before mentors were trendy. He was my teacher, my boss, my colleague, and is still my role model and good friend. He is what we call in Yiddish a mentsch. George Stoney loves film, but he loves people more.
My favorite story on George is one he used to be fond of telling on himself. In 1965, George was visiting professor in the Stanford University Broadcasting-Film Program. I had just completed shooting my Master's Thesis film--a training film about teaching black students in high school. George didn't know that funding for the film had only arrived one week before the end of the school year. We'd hastily rented sync-sound equipment (which we had never before used) and read the instructions while shooting. I'd spent the summer syncing rushes, and showed an assembly to my newly arrived advisor in the fall. George pronounced--with uncharacteristic harshness: "I'm sorry, but you don't have the material for a film in there." He was right that it took an ungodly amount of manipulation (and UGH voice-over) to fashion a film. But George was the first and loudest to praise the finished product, which I titled, with a bit of an echo, For All My Students. George never tired of bragging about how wrong he can be, every time he introduced me and "the film that couldn't be made."
I was fortunate to work as George's production assistant (which included location manager, casting director, and sound recordist) on several health films he made while at Stanford. He invited me to follow him to New York for their completion, though as it turned out I was too full of my young self to work as humble assistant to his New York editor. George asked me to rejoin him at Stanford the following spring semester to begin a new production. While I was settling in, I received a phone call that my father had survived a serious heart attack, and if I wanted to see him alive, I ought to head home to Philadelphia. I repacked my bags, left George a message, and flew back East. A few days later, I received a letter from George that went something like this: "As a filmmaker, I'm devastated that you left, but as a father, I hope my daughter would make the same choice you did." [End Page 154]
I deserted George once again the next summer. He was off to Japan, and had left me to direct a George C. Stoney Associates film on a home for the aged in New York, when my soon-to-be-husband Michael received a draft notice. With George's blessing, we promptly married and left for Canada (and the National Film Board's Challenge for Change Program), and I passed the film to Phyllis Chinlund, another Stanford alumna, who made a beautiful film.
Now it was my turn to hire George, or at least recommend him for the leadership of Challenge for Change, which turned out to be a perfect fit. George arrived in Canada with a Japanese kimono set for our newborn, no French, and threw himself into sixties Canadian politics. When Dorothy Hénaut and I proposed that we help a French-speaking citizens' group use Portapaks to organize their community, George was immediately game. He (like us) knew nothing of the technology--no danger of us imposing our expertise! Happily, George did impose one condition: "You can do this thing," he said, "but only if you document it on 16mm because video is undistributable and the experience must be disseminated." The resulting film was VTR St.Jacques, and disseminate it he did. The rest is the history of public access.
I was deeply inspired by the October 1999 George Stoney celebration at New York University. George's legacy is far greater than any individual one of us appreciated; we discovered how many cousins we have in the commitment to documentary film and media activism through George Stoney, and pray that we share George's love of people and mentschlichkeit in carrying his vision forward.
Bonnie Sherr Klein made films with Challenge for Change and Studio D (the Woman's Studio) at the National Film Board of Canada before she became disabled by a stroke. She is currently involved with disability culture, helping other people with disabilities tell their stories in a variety of arts. [End Page 155]
Peter Miller
For the past seven or so years, I've worked to complete a half-hour documentary about the old radical song, "The Internationale"--for which George Stoney has served as unofficial guardian angel, cheerleader, and guide. Whenever my attention drifts or my spirit begins to flag, George miraculously appears.
I never asked George to help, and yet he seemed to know that he was needed, and gently egged me on. In the sometimes isolated world of social change filmmaking, George Stoney is a one-man community.
While he was making The Internationale, Peter Miller also co-produced the "Jazz" series for PBS.
Marie Nesthus
I am not certain how I first met George Stoney. It could have been at New York University where I took his class in documentary film. It could have been at a meeting of the New York Film Council where he reported on a trip that he had taken, working to establish public access television centers across America. It could have been at the Museum of Modern Art where he presented How the Myth Was Made, his groundbreaking follow-up to Flaherty's Man of Aran.
However, I am certain that early in my acquaintance with George, I became aware of the broad spectrum of his creative energies. I also realized very early on that at the core of all his remarkable work lay a deep and abiding faith in the individual, the ordinary person, and the inalienable right of that person to self-expression. I see this at work in his filmmaking when his camera in How the Myth Was Made extends past the point that Flaherty's Man of Aran left off, past the point of the picturesque, the symbolic, the universal, and into the territory of the everyday and the individual. I see it as a camera observes the reaction of the Aran Islanders to their depiction on the screen and records their responses--their ideas. [End Page 156]
I see it in his teaching--where he requires his students to keep a personal journal of their thoughts on the documentaries they watch, and to consider, always and foremost in their viewing, the position in any film of its human subjects.
I see it in his indefatigable efforts to establish ways in which people all over the world can show themselves to others and make their voices heard--whether through public access television, video letters or other community-based media projects.
To become George's friend and colleague is to become a member of his vast network. For many years, with great regularity, I have picked up my phone to hear, "I am in New York for only a short time. George Stoney recommended that I call you." He has begun many friendships and partnerships that way.
What has struck me most about my partnership with George, as co-chair of the Program Policy Committee of Manhattan Neighborhood Network (the public access television facility), is his gentle, soft-spoken, yet determined, nature. When you disagree, as we have occasionally, he will make his point to you clearly, even firmly, but he remains always unfailingly polite, even courtly, in his manner.
I hold myself fortunate that my life and George Stoney's have interconnected in so many ways. I do have one question, though--"However does the man stay so unaccountably young?" [End Page 157]
Marie Nesthus is Director of the Donnell Media Center at The New York Public Library.
Ajit Anthony Prem
As a copy I write, three generations down, about an original. Through his work, Stoney questions my generation of filmmakers in their distaste for social change, who define themselves not by their work but their attitude towards it, technically capable of polishing any trace of hard labor, and seriously afraid to indicate any hint of cognitive thought.
It took me a little while to realize when working with Stoney that filmmaking is not a fantasy ride devolving into a frenzy; instead, it is labor to be attached to what is wanted and what is needed. To let that final draft be a little messy, let the rawness of the struggle be an invitation. Stoney is from a generation of documentary filmmakers who tried to combine creativity with social solutions that were organic and immediate, stripping cinema of its shallow entertainment and using it as a tool for change.
Some definitions of this wonderful man, George Stoney, to this writer: The quick straight walks with his head down, knowing his destination. The antique typewriter that can be heard clicking away in the next room without a pause, dismissing the mean temperatures of a hot summer evening. An Emmy that proudly and gracefully gathers dust in a corner, trying to hide among trinkets and collectibles. [End Page 158]
Ajit Anthony Prem is a filmmaker living in New York City.
Marcia Rock
I met George Stoney in the early seventies when the half-inch reel-to-reel- Portapak first came on the market. My first documentary was called, I Sold My Car for a Portapak, featuring an interview with George. He articulated the feelings many of us had at the time, that the Portapak represented a revolution in the use of electronic media, that we could now break the umbilical cord to the networks, wrest the production tools from the hands of institutions, and have the editorial freedom to produce programs with a personal vision that did not have to please a mass audience. His concept became a reality with the advent of public access cable television providing distribution for this programming.
Marcia Rock directs the Broadcast Journalism Program at New York University and is an independent documentary producer.
Michael Roemer
In the fifties I saw two George Stoney films--All My Babies and Still Going Places--that made a deep impression on me. In all the years since, I have not known another filmmaker or film teacher who has held so steadfastly to deeply human social values. In an industry in which ambition, image, and money tend to rule, he has stood for the absolute opposite. I don't think there is another documentarian--not to speak of those working in features--who is as willing to share his projects with others or as ready to submerge his own clear voice and vision in a commonality.
Michael Roemer is a filmmaker who teaches at Yale University. [End Page 159]
Vera Rony
Commenting on the short stories of Russell Banks, reviewer A. O. Scott cited Bank's "quiet, stubborn class consciousness, a commitment to protect the dignity of his people..." The same can be said of George Stoney, but we need to add his uncanny ability to summon not only the dignity, but the poetry often hidden behind the prosaic facade of working people.
The Uprisingof '34 also showed another aspect of George's talents: his acute political sense. Some of us involved in Uprising wanted to point out the connection between the defeat of this great strike and subsequent negative developments in the South. But George understood that an overt political conclusion would bar the film from Southern churches and schools and probably television. He concluded that it was more important that this long-suppressed, germinal episode be uncovered for as many Southerners as possible than that we draw all the right conclusions for a much smaller audience. I hate to admit it, but George was right.
Vera Rony, executive producer of The Uprising of '34, was founding director of the Center for Labor/Management Studies, SUNY/Stony Brook.
Kathe Sandler
George Stoney was one of the most accessible and socially committed professors in the Undergraduate Department of Film and TV at New York University when I was studying there in the late seventies and early eighties. There were no professors of color in those days, and as one of the very few black students there, I generally felt like a fish out of water. Stoney was one of the rare people there who made me feel at home.
Kathe Sandler is an independent documentary filmmaker. [End Page 160] [Begin Page 162]
Herb E. Smith
What I like about George Stoney is that he expects our work to be good, not passable but really good. I have never taken a course from him and I don't see him very often. It is more like the friendship of a distant uncle whom you really admire. When you are in a bind you think, "What would George do?" And somehow you know what to do.
Appalshop exists within the context of both ideas about the importance of decentralizing the media and also hands-on practices. The idea of a community film workshop in a small town in the center of the Appalachian coalfields was based on some of the work George had done in Canada. When Appalshop started in 1969, we were young mountain people trying to figure out what to do with the filmmaking equipment that we had gotten our hands on. We heard about how the new lightweight film and video equipment was being used in Canada to empower people who found themselves in difficult straits. In those days, the people of the Appalachian coalfields were facing hard times, about likenow. Appalshop filmmakers felt challenged to use our equipment in similar ways.
Filmmaking is a strange line of work. Coal miners know when their work is good --they come home alive and they see the tons of coal. Most filmmakers do not have such clarity when they look back on their work. What is it that makes a film really good? How do we know when we have succeeded as filmmakers? Thetrap of allowing our work to be adequate, and thus mediocre at best, is always ready to catch us, as the pressures of budget, time, and mental strain bear down.
Community-based filmmakers have some particular challenges that come from the lack of expectations for our best filmmaking. Every day we face excuses that we state as reasons. The constant lack of money, equipment repair problems, distance from labs and post-production services, and distribution issues, all of that and more can lure us into producing inferior films. This is where our friendship with George has been the most helpful. He knows that community-based filmmaking can be a path to excellence. He knows that the process can be good not only for the way that a broader range of people is involved, but also in that the resulting work is strong. [End Page 162]
Years ago, a Kentucky funding source called in George to evaluate their media funding. Appalshop was working on a film they had funded, so we showed the work-in-progress. The film was past the projected completion date and we were struggling to finish it. At the screening, little was said and we wondered where we stood. Later, the word got back that George had not only told them the work was on track, but that they should give Appalshop more money and fund us year after year so that we could strengthen our production capacity.
When you are young you are lucky if you have an uncle who tells your parents to cut you some slack. As you get older you realize that you are especially lucky if that uncle expects a lot of you, because you might feel driven to do your best work to prove him right.
Herb E. Smith continues to make films as part of the Appalshop cooperative.
Sara Stuart
George Stoney really gets it. It isn't necessary to explain or justify our work. He understands the importance and power of self-representation: that who is communicating shapes the message and its influence. It is always such a relief and so energizing to speak with him and share experiences.
George considers communication to be a process not an end in and of itself, a process that contributes to change. He sees that the value of a video program is not measured by the number of its viewers or by its budget or by the technology used to produce it, but rather by it's impact. He approaches all work seriously. It could be shaky, out of focus, and in a language that he doesn't understand but, still, he wants to see it and to know how it helped to make change in the community.
Sara Stuart directs Communication for Change. [End Page 163]
Pegi Vail
I believe George's connection to Ireland--with its combined traditions of storytelling and religious values--is key to his enormous body of work. He once said that "the filmmaker always leaves his mark on the places and the people he films." Since this sentiment can be applied to both George the filmmaker and George the teacher, the number of people he's influenced can be endlessly multiplied.
Pegi Vail, a doctoral candidate in cultural anthropology at New York University, is a documentary filmmaker and co-founder of docs-in-progress.com. [End Page 164]
Julio Wainer
George Stoney and I have been collaborating since 1994 on a film about Paulo Freire, Brazilian philosopher and "educator of the poor." Stoney, who has a strong and continuing relationship with Brazil, first met Freire in 1984, when he was visiting Brazil on a Fulbright fellowship. Freire had asked to meet George and see some of the videos he had brought with him. They met again in 1987 at the Highlander Center, a legendary meeting place for the American Left, in the mountains of Tennessee. George (with the assistance of some of his NYU students) documented the historic encounter between Freire and Miles Horton,Highlander's founder--an encounter that resulted in We Make the Road by Walking(1990), a book by Miles Horton and Paulo Freire, and a video by George Stoney, both of which emphasized the importance of community leadership.
I'm not sure that George had read Freire's The Pedagogy of the Oppressed when it was published in the seventies, but there is a convergence of thought between the two men. Both express a basic commitment to literacy and free expression, whether in written or audio-visual forms, as a fundamental right and as basic to democracy. For both, the starting point for social change is what surrounds people, not pre-established concepts. To them, peoples' ways of expressing themselves are different from one another, sometimes opposite, but not necessarily incompatible. This may be thought of as a beautiful patchwork with different and unexpected points of views.
George Stoney's philosophy, like Freire's, cannot be translated into written texts,but it can be felt in the ensemble of his activities: his films, his classes, his relationships. For me, he is a "big umbrella" under which we can fit different aspects of our professional lives, training people to use video as a tool for communication, having the means to express their views. [End Page 165]
Julio Wainer is a media activist who teaches at the Catholic University at Sao Paolo.
Cara Mertesis Executive Producer of P.O.V./American Documentary.
