American Direct Cinema Revisited: An Afternoon with Gordon Quinn

The Carsey-Wolf Center is delighted to welcome the legendary documentary filmmaker Gordon Quinn to the Pollock Theater for a discussion of his lifelong commitment to the direct cinema movement. Emerging between the late 1950s and early 1960s, direct cinema marked a major turning point in the history of American documentary filmmaking. These filmmakers developed an observational mode of filmmaking by abandoning the use of traditional storytelling devices such as written scripts, interviews, and voiceover narration; it is often described as “a fly-on-the-wall” style. Quinn joined this revolutionary film movement in 1966 when he cofounded Kartemquin Films, an independent film collective, with Stan Karter and Gerald Temaner. Still operating today under Quinn’s leadership, Kartemquin Films has produced a wide range of award-winning documentaries, including Steve James’s Hoop Dreams (1994) and Brent Huffman’s Saving Mes Aynak (2014).

This event will open with a screening of Richard Leacock and Joyce Chopra’s short documentary Happy Mother’s Day (1963), which centers on the family of the first surviving quintuplets born in the US. Quinn first encountered this film when he was an undergraduate student, and it inspired him to become a documentary filmmaker. Next, we will screen Quinn’s first film Home for Life (1966), which depicts the experiences of two elderly people in their first month at a home for the aged. One is a woman whose struggle to remain useful in her son and daughter-in-law’s home is no longer appreciated. The other is a widower without a family, who suddenly realizes he can no longer take care of himself. The film offers an unblinking look at the feelings of the two new residents in their encounters with other residents, medical staff, social workers, psychiatrists and family. Home for Life was restored in 2007 thanks to a National Film Preservation Foundation grant.

Filmmaker Gordon Quinn will join moderator Naoki Yamamoto (Film and Media Studies, UCSB) for a post-screening discussion of these two films, the direct cinema movement, and Quinn’s own career.