RETROSPECTIVE
Julia Reichert 50 Years in Film
Director’s Foreword
JOHANNA BURTON DIRECTOR, WEXNER CENTER FOR THE ARTS
Contemporary art in all its myriad forms serves as a reflection of contemporary culture—often highlighting and illuminating present conditions even as they unfold around us. As Ohio State’s multidisciplinary laboratory for the exploration and advancement of contemporary art, the Wexner Center has worked to boldly underscore the relevancy of today’s most daring artists and their practices right from our inception in 1989. In our first year, the center presented films, visual art, and performances by artists across the spectrum of race, gender, sexuality, and class that foregrounded issues which still resonate today: AIDS, homelessness, surveillance, and US-Mexico migration, to name just a few. Among the arts, documentary filmmaking is perhaps singularly poised to capture the issues that define our place and moment in history—a case that’s borne out in the remarkable works of veteran filmmaker Julia Reichert. As you’ll see onscreen and read in the pages that follow, Reichert has personally captured more than four decades of human experience, fostering new perspectives on such era-defining movements as feminism, communism, and globalization by showing us their impact on the most intimate scale. Through her attentive, ever-empathetic lens, we see how these broad cultural forces shape people who we soon recognize have much in common with our own colleagues and neighbors, family and friends.
inside front cover (images left to right from top) Julia Reichert, photo: Jim Klein; Growing Up Female; Methadone: An American Way of Dealing; The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant; A Lion in the House, photo: Steven Bognar; Growing Up Female; Seeing Red; American Factory, photo: Siyan Liu.
The Wex is honored to have organized this 10-film retrospective showcasing the arc and sustained excellence of this Ohio-based filmmaker’s career, and we couldn’t be more delighted to send it off on a nationwide tour that we hope will bring Reichert’s work to an even larger audience. My thanks go to the Rohauer Collection Foundation for their continued support of our film/video program, and to the Institute of Museum and Library Services for their support of our in-house Film/Video Studio, which provides production assistance to artists at all stages of their careers. I’d like to congratulate Director of Film/Video David Filipi for his work in coordinating this series, and enthusiastically echo his acknowledgments at the end in this publication. Last but not least, I offer my profound thanks to Reichert herself for her unfaltering dedication, curiosity, and vision. As we celebrate our 30th anniversary, it’s hard to imagine an artist whose practice could underscore more clearly the ability of contemporary art to open our eyes to the world around us.
Introduction DAVID FILIPI DIRECTOR OF FILM/VIDEO, WEXNER CENTER FOR THE ARTS
In May 2016, Julia Reichert reached out to me and my Wexner Center colleagues with a proposal. Earlier that year, Julia was among the recipients of an inaugural Breakthrough Filmmaker Award from Chicken & Egg Pictures (now, simply called a Chicken & Egg Award). The award is meant to help women documentary filmmakers “break through” to the next level, but for Julia, with decades of work as an independent filmmaker behind her, the word took on a different meaning. The committee that nominated Julia also hoped that the award might push women filmmakers into a more national spotlight, giving them additional much-deserved recognition while simultaneously helping the entire field. A retrospective marking her decades in film was proposed by Chicken & Egg Pictures, and the Wexner Center, in concert with our friends at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, began to formulate a series that would realize the intention behind Julia’s award. Julia Reichert (along with longtime collaborators Steven Bognar and Jim Klein) has been a near-spiritual presence at the Wexner Center almost from the day it opened in 1989. Her films have shown on our screens, she has received support through our Film/Video Studio program, and over the years she has chaperoned carload after carload of her filmmaking students from Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, to see a film or hear from a visiting filmmaker in Columbus at the Wex.
Julia Reichert (far right) at the premiere of Union Maids, Victory Theatre Dayton, Ohio, photo: Tony Heriza.
Two events that stand out to me in my nearly 25 years at the Wex involve films made by Julia. In 2006, we presented two screenings of Julia and Steve’s epic A Lion in the House, which followed five families coping with the crisis of having kids with cancer. A few days after the screenings, we hosted a community event featuring a panel consisting of Julia and Steve, hospice experts, public health officials, doctors, and staff from Ohio State’s Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute. As a curator, we often show documentaries that are enjoyed by an audience but that don’t necessarily lead to immediate action. This afternoon was different. The capacity crowd was comprised largely of people touched by cancer: people living with cancer, survivors, those who had lost loved ones, health care professionals and advocates, and so on. It was practical, inspiring, informative, sobering, and enlightening from moment to moment. Again, as a curator, it is the ideal to help create an environment for a film to be received in such a manner.
Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar filming The Last Truck.
Almost exactly four years later, the Wex hosted a screening of Julia and Steve’s film The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant, a documentary about the looming shutdown of an assembly plant in Moraine, Ohio, and its impact on the workers and larger community. Julia and Steve invited several people featured in the film, people who lost their jobs just over a year earlier. The workers were a poignant addition to the postscreening Q&A, but what I remember is our dinner after the screening, which ultimately provided a glimpse into what makes Julia such a gifted documentarian. The large group of us settled in at a nearby sushi restaurant, and as dinner progressed, I began to fully appreciate the relationships and friendships that Julia and Steve had formed with these people. The mutual respect, understanding, and compassion between filmmakers and subjects was palpable, and one could only feel honored to be a part of the occasion. It is not hyperbole to call Julia the godmother of independent film in central Ohio, if not the entire state. She has been showing everyone how to do it for close to five decades and, perhaps just as importantly, has taught more than a generation of filmmaking students how to make a film and how to navigate
INTRODUCTION DAVID FILIPI
Julia Reichert filming The Last Truck.
the obstacles to getting it out into the world during her career as a professor at Wright State University. When a former student makes it into a festival or receives some other accolade, Julia beams (along with Steve and Jim) as would any proud parent. It is such an honor and privilege to organize this retrospective of Julia’s astonishing body of work. Taken as whole, Julia’s documentaries serve as nothing short of a history of labor, the women’s movement, health care, and radical humanism in the United States over the past 100 years. Like Howard Zinn’s seminal A People’s History of the United States (1980), Julia’s lifelong project is also told through the voices and stories of heroic everyday citizens, and her appreciation of and respect for her subjects comes through in every second of her films. Deeply admired and respected by her peers, Julia is a filmmaker’s filmmaker. She is driven, curious, compassionate, tireless, and generous. She has been kicking ass (including cancer’s) and making her films for 50 years, and I feel sorry for the poor bastard who suggests any film is her last. She has another story to tell. ■
INTRODUCTION DAVID FILIPI
Julia Reichert (right) and Alicia Weber filming Methadone, photo: Tony Heriza.
Essay BARBARA EHRENREICH
I can remember watching Julia Reichert’s film Union Maids (made with Jim Klein) in someone’s living room back in the mid-1970s. A 16mm projector sat on a rickety table.
Union Maids
There were about a half-dozen women in the room, mostly sitting cross-legged on the floor, while a few toddlers, mine included, engaged in some urgent commerce involving raisins and teething biscuits. These were not exactly ideal viewing conditions, but we caught snippets of the brave, cheerful-looking women on the screen recounting their efforts to organize women workers in the 1930s. “We could do it too” was the message, and the nurses in the room, who were engaged in an organizing drive at a local hospital, took it to heart. This scene may be more of a composite memory than an image of an actual event, but it stands in well as a metaphor for my experience of Reichert’s films—and that of so many other women— in those early years of her career. We, her potential audience, were perpetually distracted by our jobs and family responsibilities and could imbibe her work only in bits and pieces, and then only when the opportunity presented itself. We might be exhausted and pulled in several different directions at once, but a glimpse of Reichert and Klein’s Union Maids (1976), Growing Up Female (1971), or Seeing Red: Stories of American Communists (1983) could serve as an instant restorative tonic—spirited, fast-moving, and aesthetically bracing.
There is a lot in Reichert’s documentaries to make you angry, as there should be given the subjects they take on, but there’s a lot of sweetness in them too. I loved the scene of the mother and daughter walking to nursery school together in Growing Up Female, wearing matching and probably homemade outfits. Later in that same film, I was hypnotized by the interracial group of girls dancing to Little Peggy March’s 1963 hit “I Will Follow Him,” which seems to speak of female subservience but manages to communicate joy. I was moved by the snow falling slowly out of the night sky in The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant (2009). It signifies heartbreak and endings, but also—maybe—new beginnings. It wasn’t easy to see or show a documentary film back in the old days before DVDs, before Netflix, and before digitized films that can be distributed via email or websites. If you were lucky, the film might be shown on public television or in a local art theater. Otherwise, you needed a screen, a projector, a copy of the celluloid version of the film, and of course a place where people could assemble, watch it, and hang around to talk. Reichert sought out places where people who might be interested—initially mostly women—were gathering and arranged to show up with her equipment. With her first film, Growing Up Female, this meant
Growing Up Female (top left and right) and The Last Truck (lower right photo: Annie Reichert).
ESSAY BARBARA EHRENREICH
traveling around the country by Greyhound bus, carrying the 16mm print, finding someone local to lug a projector, and crashing for a few days with local activists in the Women’s Liberation Movement, as we called it then, before moving on to the next town or city with the precious names and phone numbers of fellow activists in hand. In other words, the distribution of her films depended on the existence of a social movement to bring people together and, if they were sufficiently roused by what they saw, to help channel their energy into action. When I finally met Reichert in person, she defied every stereotype I’d had of independent filmmakers. She wasn’t rich, and she wasn’t arrogant or egotistical. The daughter of a butcher and a house cleaner turned registered nurse, she dressed and spoke plainly, usually beaming with enthusiasm, and never abandoned her midwestern roots. Like many of us who had become secondwave feminists, she didn’t feel entirely comfortable in a movement starring Betty Friedan, whose groundbreaking 1963 book The Feminine Mystique centered on the plight of bored, upper-middleclass homemakers. To give one example, Friedan urged her readers to hire house cleaners to do the tedious domestic work, but said nothing about the house cleaners and what they might prefer to do—an omission that grated on those of us whose female relatives had been domestic workers themselves. We needed a new kind of feminist movement, one in which women of all classes and races would feel equally welcome. We were trying to build this movement, Reichert and I, along with thousands of other women, all calling ourselves “socialist feminists.” What we meant by that was the subject of endless debate. Do capitalism and patriarchy mesh neatly together to form a single system of oppression, or do they have to be tackled separately? And how? But if theory bogged us down, the practice of socialist feminism, meaning what we should actually do, always seemed pretty clear: If we wanted a feminist movement that could represent all women, not just those of the educated middle class and other relative elites, we had to address a wider range of issues. So while the “mainstream” feminist movement embodied in the National Organization for Women (NOW) focused on the Equal Rights Amendment and abortion rights, which we of course also supported, we wanted to see more emphasis on poor and workingclass women. For me, this meant years of writing and agitating about welfare rights (an effort that ended tragically with the 1996 welfare “reform” bill) and the need to raise the minimum wage. For Reichert, it meant making films that featured so-called “ordinary” women— factory workers, union organizers, moms, office workers, nurses.
ESSAY BARBARA EHRENREICH
I don’t know what Reichert’s life was like in the early years of her career, but I can extrapolate a little from my own experience and those of my comrades. As socialist feminists who claimed all issues as “women’s issues,” we had a lot on our plates, from environmental threats to the plight of poor American women forced to undergo involuntary sterilization (which was shockingly common at the time). I once defined a “socialist feminist” as “someone who goes to twice as many meetings,” which is what I found myself doing. These were thrilling and exhausting times, but when I think back, the word that comes to mind most often is “messy”—too much to do, too much to think about. While Reichert’s work was promoting the movement, the movement was providing the cultural space in which her work could flourish. The New American Movement, which had grown out of the “New Left” of the 1960s and brought together male as well as female socialist feminists, offered dozens of screenings of her films followed by intense discussions. Reichert helped organize, and I attended, the national Socialist Feminist Conference held in Yellow Springs, Ohio, in 1975, where again her films were shown. Local women’s groups followed up with their own screenings, and Reichert became a celebrity, not only in the movement, but perhaps even more impressively, in her home city of Dayton. In the mid-1980s, Seeing Red was an instant phenomenon in the film world, playing in movie theaters in 100 cities right as the Reagan era began. In between traveling and speaking with her films, Reichert was always involved in local activism, as the films moved from Growing Up Female (the first feature-length feminist documentary in the US), to Methadone: An American Way of Dealing (1974), to Union Maids, to Seeing Red, and to A Lion in the House (2006, about families, nurses, and doctors dealing with childhood cancer). Two were nominated for Academy Awards; A Lion in the House won the top Emmy for nonfiction. Union Maids brought two generations of union folks together, and Seeing Red brought old communists out of the shadows to engage with a new generation of the movement—often starting right in the theater. There is a kind of optimism running through these early films. Even when the organizational setting for the struggle was dubious (the Communist Party) or when the immediate outcome was defeat (chronicled in her new film 9to5: The Story of a Movement), people come together and discover what they have in common, which is the same as discovering who they are and what they can become. These films depict a time when both feminism and the civil rights
ESSAY BARBARA EHRENREICH
movement were infusing the labor movement and the Left with new energy and determination. We see people, mostly women, working, laughing, and marching together, confident that, one way or another, they can create a better world. It’s impossible to come away from these films without a sense of lives well lived, of possibilities we had not imagined. The later films take a darker turn. In The Last Truck, codirected with Steven Bognar, the filmmakers chronicle the 2008 closing of a GM plant in Moraine, Ohio, a local disaster that left thousands of people unemployed. When the closing was announced, Reichert and Bognar rushed to the plant to record the human impact of this latest instance of deindustrialization. Since they weren’t allowed to film inside the plant, they equipped workers with small cameras and trained them to do filming on their own. The result is emotionally devastating to watch. As the last truck rolls off the assembly line, people—black and white, men and women—who had been united by their work and their common pride in it, pick up their tool kits, say goodbye, and drive off into the night. There are no promises to get together again, no offers of assistance from the union, the city, or the company. It’s like one of Reichert’s earlier films run in reverse: instead of seeing isolated individuals come together, we see a community utterly shattered.
The Last Truck
ESSAY BARBARA EHRENREICH
American Factory, photo: Aubrey Keith.
Reichert and Bognar’s recent film American Factory (2019) is, if anything, more unsettling. A Chinese company buys that old GM plant and converts it into an automobile glass-making factory, holding out the promise of new jobs to replace the lost ones. But the new jobs are dangerous and performed in punishingly hot environments, as well as paying much less than the old ones had. When the workers try organizing themselves into a union, their Chinese managers bring in state-of-the-art American union busters and hopes for a union are crushed. One middle-aged worker confides that he now earns less than his daughter who works in a nail salon. American workers, who had climbed out of poverty through decades of union activism, were sinking to the level of the world’s low-paid, disposable workforce. The American blue-collar working class is under attack—by plant closings, union-busting, and nationwide deindustrialization. A way of life that allowed an individual with a high school degree to support a whole family has come to an end; proud cities that once sprouted smokestacks have been reduced to rust. Men who once took great pride in their work have turned to opioids, alcohol, or suicide. Coastal elites and the politicians they supported ignored the decimation of the blue-collar heartland at their own peril.
ESSAY BARBARA EHRENREICH
Many of the people laid off in the last couple of decades ultimately registered their dismay by voting for a faux-populist nihilist in 2016. Reichert hasn’t flinched from telling their stories, even as others looked away from the Midwest. She’s borne witness to the struggles of working people and women, for agency and dignity, across five decades. There is always a slightly valedictory tone to the retrospective celebration of an artist’s work, as if that work were now finished and there is nothing left to do but honor and appreciate it. This is not so in Reichert’s case. If anything, watching her films will convince you of the need for more of them—right now!—on the same themes, but updated to supplement today’s news. On the labor front, there are at least a half-dozen new organizations carrying on the struggle in long-neglected sectors. Among them: the National Domestic Workers Alliance, bringing together such formerly “invisible” workers as nannies and maids; OURWalmart, giving a voice to America’s 1.4 million Walmart employees; Fight for $15, a union-backed effort to raise wages for fast-food workers, and all the teachers standing strong together. Each of these campaigns deserves the kind of empathetic and richly textured treatment that Reichert has brought to all of her projects.
Barbara Ehrenreich is a journalist, author, and activist whose books include Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America (2001) and Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer (2018). She is the founding editor of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, which supports quality journalism about inequality.
Much more has changed in the 50 years since she began making films. Women’s participation in the workforce has doubled since 1970; 54 percent of women in the US, married and unmarried, are now the primary breadwinners in their families. At the same time, feminism, which expresses most women’s aspirations far more than it did in the 70s, has undergone a deep shift in its conceptual underpinnings away from the old “binary” division between the sexes. Surely, the struggle to locate ourselves on a shifting map of sex and gender deserves at least one Reichert-like film. Meanwhile, socialism, the other half of “socialist feminism,” has gone mainstream, with a majority of young Americans favoring it over capitalism in recent polls. Some of the old socialist feminist leaders have become respectable operatives in unions and the Democratic Party. Today, we even have feminist officeholders who are proudly and openly socialist. I would like to see Reichert and her team chart that profound change through their habitually sensitive interviews and life stories. There is, in other words, still so much to be done. I’d like to think Reichert has a few more films in her. Otherwise, we’ll just have to depend on the many younger filmmakers she has mentored and inspired. Fortunately, thanks to her efforts, the door is more open for them than it was for her. ■
ESSAY BARBARA EHRENREICH
Julia Reichert and Jim Klein interviewing Pete Seeger (at left), photo: Tony Heriza.
Essay FARIHAH ZAMAN
“They made a decision to be radicals. To challenge the very fabric of their society. How that decision affected their lives is the thread of our story, and it’s by no means a simple story to tell.” This spare but potent statement by filmmaker Julia Reichert in the narration of Seeing Red, her 1983 Academy Award–nominated documentary on the history of the American Communist Party, could well apply to the broader arc of the politically engaged, culturally attuned body of work that Reichert and those fortunate enough to collaborate with her over the years have created. Long before the current generation’s embrace of feminism, socialism,
Seeing Red
and radical action, Reichert tackled these subjects with rigor and compassion in her films and allowed them to resonate more deeply with viewers by humanizing, rather than weaponizing, their arguments. Her films don’t function solely as calls to action; they have shaped and challenged our very notion of what political filmmaking looks like—whether we know it or not. It is both the blessing and curse of many a great documentarian for their process and aesthetic achievements to be undervalued in favor of their passion for inspiring content. What makes Reichert’s work so continually relevant is not just its dedication to the cause but its development of a cinematic language able to convey the subtle contours and emotional registers that live within it. Perhaps part of the reason that Reichert’s techniques and choices as a director are not always foregrounded is because they are designed to recede, allowing a subject’s face or tone of voice to be the anchor of a film, and to enable those overlooked or misunderstood by society—Reagan-era communists dreaming of a more equitable future, working-class women rejected by a privilege-driven application of feminism who nonetheless know they deserve more, auto workers who see not just commerce but art in the result of their labor—to publicly, cinematically reclaim their power and value.
Seeing Red
This does not mean that Reichert’s camera simply sits rudderless. Each frame of her films is considered; many are painterly—and this is not always the case in documentary practice. In her films, there is a nuanced sense of purpose in the camera’s motion. For example, there is the moment in Union Maids, her 1976 film on working-class women labor organizers from the 1930s, when the camera is tightly focused on one face, leading us to believe we are engaging with a single interview subject. But soon the camera zooms out to reveal that this face is part of a group of people who are about to break into spirited dialogue. It is a clever but pointed visual indication of the idea that joining the movement meant no longer standing alone. When other types of cinematic material are woven into her interviews, it serves to enhance rather than distract from the vital human drama. There is a sequence in Seeing Red, for example, when we are taken on a lengthy journey through archival photographs depicting union gatherings from a bygone era, and then allowed to linger on one particular face. This man then suddenly appears on camera in the present, decades after the photo that introduced him in the film was taken. It is an artful transition that offers the viewer time to absorb the trace of history, and also reminds us that
ESSAY FARIHAH ZAMAN
Growing Up Female (upper left, lower right) and Last Truck.
every single face shown reflects as rich and important a life as the one on which she chose to focus. Although the content and style of Reichert’s interviews are striking, it should be noted that she has playfully experimented with many types of documentary footage. Her early works tend to employ a broad spectrum of archival material (Growing Up Female [1971] is a particular treat, with its wryly funny use of period advertisements that casually obliterate the annoyingly persistent notion that feminist equals killjoy). More recent work, such as A Lion in the House (2006) and The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant (2009), shows a shift to an increased use of vérité footage, the latter film featuring the harsh but stunning midwestern landscapes that have shaped the lives of its Ohioproud filmmakers as much as it has their subjects. Surely, part of the lapse in discussion of technique when it comes to Reichert’s work is also due to the fact that she knows what “growing up female” is all about. Reichert is held in reverent esteem within the documentary community—not just for her films but for bringing the same boundless energy, joyous rabblerousing, and belief in the power of organizing they contain to many of our most treasured gatherings and institutions, from informal but heated postscreening discussions to her instrumental
ESSAY FARIHAH ZAMAN
involvement in the development of Public Television as a home for nonfiction work, and to the creation of the Independent Feature Project and long-running distribution outfit New Day Films. Yet despite the fact that Reichert has presented some of the most skilled and distinctive interviews in our field, in which her subjects exhibit not only complete trust but also seem to find a new kind of validation of their thoughts and feelings in their interactions with the filmmaker, her name is not mentioned with the likes of Errol Morris or Werner Herzog, as it should be. I had the bracing pleasure of meeting Julia on an annual Reichert family vacation on the shores of Lake Michigan 10 years ago. She asked me a series of rather personal questions at a dinner table full of accomplished strangers, but did so with such frankness and sincerity that it was several minutes before I became aware that I was answering each of her questions, one by one, without hesitation, even sharing my then-hidden yearning to make films myself. During the entire exchange, she didn’t take her eyes off me for a second, and I was dazzled. I remember thinking: this, THIS is what I want to do; to listen to people, to hear them, to know them, to share with them, and for them to feel good about what had taken place between us. It is a profound thing to feel seen and heard—whether across a dining-room table or across the oftenintimidating space between a filmmaker and her subject.
Julia Reichert, Alicia Weber, and Jim Klein filming Methadone: An American Way of Dealing, photo: Tony Heriza.
ESSAY FARIHAH ZAMAN
Julia was in the room when I conducted my very first onscreen interview for my debut film, Remote Area Medical. She is the gold standard by which I consider whether I have had the openness, compassion, and courage to inspire the same kind of unburdening that she does from someone sitting across from me, telling me, the camera, and therefore the world about their innermost life. Her work evinces a keen understanding of the inherent risk that attends any interview subject who sits down with a filmmaker to share their story. Consider, for example, what it took for the subjects of Seeing Red to out themselves as communists during the punitive Reagan era. One subject of the film says, with feeling, “I felt that I owe it to everybody who knows me to know who I was, and who I am, and why I’m doing what I’m doing.” It speaks volumes that this subject chose to leave that record of her true self in the hands of Julia Reichert. While this ability to connect with people may spring from an innate and uncanny gift, it also has been honed by Reichert over a lifetime of love and labor, and has developed into a practice of true creative and political intention. There is a kind of apotheosis to be found in Reichert’s recent film American Factory, which won Reichert and her codirector, Steven Bognar, the Directing Award for a US Documentary at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. The film dives into the social and economic realities of working-class people in a new, Chinese-owned factory in Dayton, Ohio, yet somehow comes, inexplicably, to contain the whole world. Reichert began by looking as close to her own backyard as possible (the titular factory being a 25-minute drive from her home in Ohio), but being true to herself and the stories and themes that drive her led her across the globe to China. The result has been her most epic, sweeping work yet. Farihah Zaman is a Bangladeshi American filmmaker, critic, and curator. Her award-winning documentaries include Remote Area Medical (2013) and This Time Next Year (2014), and she has written for A.V. Club, Film Comment, Huffington Post, and Reverse Shot, among other outlets. Her background in the film industry includes work for Magnolia Pictures, The Flaherty, and Field of Vision.
Like Reichert’s energy to tackle the great and unspoken injustices of the world, these films, their ideas, and their preoccupations have not aged. Even as we feel the promise of the American Dream slipping nearly out of reach, an examination of our collective successes and failures in supporting nonmale, working-class Americans is vital to our understanding of how we might begin to proceed, how we might achieve a utopia like the one the subjects of Seeing Red dreamed of, or perhaps the global worker consciousness suggested by the closing shots of American Factory. To say Reichert’s films are still relevant is not enough; it is more accurate, perhaps, to say finally that, collectively, nigh on 50 years into her career, their time has come. ■
ESSAY FARIHAH ZAMAN
Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar filming American Factory.
Julia Reichert, 1973, photo: Eddie Roberts/Dayton Daily News.
Filmography
Growing Up Female
Julia Reichert and Jim Klein 1971, DCP, 52 MINS.
Considered controversial and exhilarating on its release, Growing Up Female examines female socialization through a personal look into the lives of six women, ages four to 35, and the forces that shape them—teachers, counselors, advertisements, music, and the institution of marriage. The film was widely used by consciousness-raising groups to generate interest and help explain feminism to a skeptical society. It offers us a chance to see how much has changed as well as how much remains the same. Selected for the National Film Registry in 2011.
Growing Up Female (top and bottom left); Methadone (top and bottom right).
Methadone: An American Way of Dealing Julia Reichert and Jim Klein 1974, DCP, 60 MINS.
Methadone: An American Way of Dealing is, unfortunately, a still-relevant film about how the rise in heroin addiction was typically addressed in the early 1970s. Set in Dayton, Ohio, Methadone captures how social services, designed to help, in fact often neutralize those they intend to serve. It is a sobering testament about what can happen to those unable to buy into the American Dream.
Filmography
Union Maids
Julia Reichert, Jim Klein, and Miles Mogulescu 1976, DCP, 48 MINS.
Told through the eyes of three remarkable women, Union Maids opens up one of the great untold stories in our history: the fight to form industrial unions in the first half of the 20th century. The film follows Stella, Sylvia, and Kate—all humorous storytellers—as they leave their small farms for the promise of greater job opportunities in Chicago and eventually join the battle for better conditions for factory workers. Nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
Seeing Red: Stories of American Communists Julia Reichert and Jim Klein 1983, DCP, 100 MINS.
Seeing Red tells the forgotten history and adventures of ordinary Americans who joined the Communist Party and the high price many of them paid during the Red Scare in the 1950s. Compiling more than 400 interviews with former and current party members, the filmmakers deliver an engaging, funny, and human portrait of 50 years of Red activism and attack. Among the stories are personal accounts from iconic folk singer Pete Seeger and a dozen other rankand-file members that have special resonance in today’s political climate. Nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. 4K restoration by IndieCollect.
Union Maids (top and bottom left); Seeing Red (top right photo: Tony Heriza, and promotional poster).
Filmography
A Lion in the House
Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar 2006, DCP, 225 MINS.
A Lion in the House follows the unique stories of five children and their families at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center as they battle pediatric cancer. From the trauma of diagnosis to the physical toll of treatment, the film documents the stresses that can tear a family apart, as well as the courage of children facing the possibility of death with honesty, dignity, and humor. As the film compresses six years into one narrative, it puts viewers in the shoes of parents, physicians, nurses, siblings, grandparents, and social workers who struggle to defeat an indiscriminate and predatory disease. Winner of a Primetime Emmy for Exceptional Merit in Nonfiction Filmmaking. The film was a coproduction with ITVS.
The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant
Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar 2009, DCP, 40 MINS.
Two days before Christmas in 2008, the General Motors assembly plant in Moraine, Ohio, shut its doors. As a result, 2,000 workers and 200 management staff were let go and related businesses shuttered, resulting in thousands more displaced workers. But the GM staff lost much more than jobs—they lost the pride shared in their work and camaraderie built over years. Events captured in the film serve as an interesting harbinger of the cultural forces that some believe had a hand in carrying Donald Trump to the White House. Nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject. The film was produced by HBO Films.
A Lion in the House (top and bottom left); The Last Truck (top and bottom right).
Filmography
Sparkle
Making Morning Star
2012, DCP, 18 MINS.
2016, DCP, 37 MINS.
Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar Sheri “Sparkle” Williams has been a star dancer with the legendary Dayton Contemporary Dance Company for nearly 40 years—a record unheard of in the professional dance community—and she is one of the few dancers outside of New York City to have been honored with the prestigious Bessie Award for Individual Performance. When this powerhouse dancer suffers her first serious injury, she’s forced to consider whether she has the will to return to the stage as her 50th birthday approaches.
Sparkle (top and bottom left); Making Morning Star (top and bottom right).
Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar Shot in Cincinnati, Making Morning Star presents a behind-the-scenes look at the joys and challenges of developing a new American opera. Featuring interviews with composer Ricky Ian Gordon, librettist William M. Hoffman, and director Ron Daniels, the film captures the delicate balance of personalities during an intense collaboration, unfolding in a workshop hosted by the Cincinnati Opera and the University of Cincinnati’s Conservatory of Music. Will the opera be ready on time?
Filmography
American Factory
9to5: The Story of a Movement
2019, DCP, 115 MINS.
2019, DCP, APPROX. 85 MINS.
Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar Rust Belt, Ohio. In the husk of a huge, abandoned General Motors plant, a Chinese billionaire opens a new factory, hiring 2,000 blue-collar Americans and hundreds of native Chinese. Early days of hope and optimism are truly tested by the scale of the project and by the cultural differences between high-tech China and postindustrial midwest America. The filmmakers take us deep inside the story, and the plant itself, examining this collision of cultures and the future of both American labor and Chinese economic dominance. Screening courtesy of Netflix.
Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar
Many have heard the song “Nine to Five” by the great Dolly Parton or seen the 1980s blockbuster of the same name starring Parton, Lily Tomlin, and Jane Fonda. Yet few realize that these two icons of popular culture grew out of a social movement that spanned over 25 years and sought to have a profound impact on work for women, and the American workforce as a whole. This illuminating documentary tells this little-known story, starting with a group of female office workers in Boston in the early 1970s and touching on still-relevant issues such as sexual harassment, pay equity, and the “glass ceiling.”
American Factory (top left and bottom); 9to5 (top right).
Julia Reichert: 50 Years in Film is organized by the Wexner Center for the Arts with The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and curated by David Filipi, Wexner Center Director of Film/Video. © 2019 The Ohio State University Wexner Center for the Arts Wexner Center Film/Video Staff David Filipi, Director Jennifer Lange, Curator, Film/Video Studio Chris Stults, Associate Curator Paul Hill, Editor, Film/Video Studio Alexis McCrimmon, Editor, Film/Video Studio Adam Elliott, Program Assistant Debra Lemak, Administrative Associate Bruce Bartoo, Projectionist
SEASON SUPPORT FOR FILM/VIDEO
ROHAUER COLLECTION FOUNDATION SUPPORT FOR THE FILM/VIDEO STUDIO PROGRAM
SUPPORT FOR ARTS ACCESS
GENERAL OPERATING SUPPORT
Brochure Staff Brandon Ballog, Acting Director, Creative Services Ryan Shafer, Publications Editor, Marketing and Communications Janet Jenkins, Editor (Farihah Zaman’s essay)
Acknowledgments Thanks to Rajendra Roy, Carson Parish, Maureen Masters, Josh Siegel, Sean Egan, and Olivia Priedite at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Ashley Stanton at the Wexner Center for the Arts; and Julia Reichert, Steve Bognar, James Klein, Melissa Godoy, Liz Yong Lowe, and Ben Evory for their assistance with this retrospective. I’d also like to thank the following individuals and their colleagues for their support of this tour: KJ Relth (UCLA Film & Television Archive), Jim Healy (UW Cinematheque), John Ewing (Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque), Morgen Ruff (Northwest Film Center), Dean Otto (Speed Art Museum), Sheryl Mousley (Walker Art Center), Marian Luntz (The Museum of Fine Arts), Todd Hitchcock (AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center), and Margaret Parsons (National Gallery of Art). Special thanks to all of my Wexner Center colleagues for their support in organizing, promoting, and presenting this retrospective.
image credits and captions American Factory images are courtesy of Netflix. The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant images are courtesy of HBO. Seeing Red: Stories of American Communists images are courtesy of IndieCollect. All other images are courtesy of the filmmakers except as noted in the captions that appear throughout this booklet. inside back cover (left to right from top) Methadone; A Lion in the House, photo: Steven Bognar; American Factory; Methadone; Methadone; American Factory, photo: Julia Reichert; American Factory; Seeing Red.
—David Filipi Thanks to Chicken & Egg Pictures, HBO, Higher Ground Productions, IndieCollect, ITVS, Terry Lawler, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Netflix, New York Women in Film & Television, the Ohio Arts Council, Participant Media, the Women’s Film Preservation Fund, Yvonne Welbon, and her family. —Julia Reichert
WEXNER CENTER FOR THE ARTS | THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY | COLUMBUS, OHIO @WEXARTS #theWex | Film lives here. (614) 292-3535 | WEXARTS.ORG |
Tour Venues The Museum of Modern Art, New York MAY–JUNE 2019
Wexner Center for the Arts, The Ohio State University OCTOBER 2019
UCLA Film & Television Archive, University of California, Los Angeles NOVEMBER 2019
UW Cinematheque, University of Wisconsin-Madison NOVEMBER 2019
Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque
NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 2019
Northwest Film Center, Portland, Oregon JANUARY 2020
Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky FEBRUARY 2020
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis FEBRUARY 2020
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston MARCH 2020
AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center, Silver Spring, Maryland MAY 2020
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC MAY 2020