Guest filmmakers didn’t feature prominently in Cornell Cinema’s schedule until the late 1970s when Bill Gilcher was the director. He hosted such well-known filmmakers as acclaimed documentarians Frederick Wiseman, Marcel Ophüls and Peter Watkins; Ethiopian filmmaker Haile Gerima; Hollywood director Elia Kazan; and New German Cinema director Wim Wenders, all of whom visited in the late 70s/early 80s.
image from film FARREBIQUE (1946, dir Georges Rouquier)
Gilcher also brought an array of other guests that would come to represent part of the range of artists recognized by the program over its fifty year history, including Québecois feminist filmmakers Anne-Clair Poirier and Marthe Blackburn, who collaborated on A Scream from Silence (1979) and Beyond Forty (1982); Polish director Feliks Falk; and French directors Jean Mitry and Georges Rouquier, with Rouquier presenting his acclaimed film Farrebique (1946), about a year in the life of a French peasant family, his own.
image from film BIQUEFARRE (1983, dir Georges Rouquier)
After Rouquier’s visit in 1978, Gilcher applied for and received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to make a follow-up film on rural life in France to be directed by Rouquier. Gilcher took a leave from Cornell Cinema during the Spring of 1981 to work on the film in France, and the result was Biquefarre (1983), which had its American premiere at Cornell Cinema after Richard Herskowitz had become the director. The premiere was attended by Rouquier and others involved with film, including Gilcher, one of the producers. In a 2017 New Yorker article by film critic Richard Brody, Farrebique and Biquefarre are discussed as classic hybrids of fiction and documentary. Brody also included Farrebique in his 2020 New Yorker article, “Sixty-two Films That Shaped the Art of Documentary Filmmaking.”
Gilcher moved on to do many interesting things, including working as a senior program officer for the NEH Media Program and as Director of North American Electronic Media Projects for the Goethe-Institut in Washington, D.C.
The Richard Herskowitz Years
Lesbian feminist filmmaker Barbara Hammer
The rest of the 1980s saw an increase in the number of visiting filmmakers, as Herskowitz sought to make such visits a defining characteristic of Cornell Cinema. In addition to presenters in the EXPANDING CINEMA series, he hosted other noted experimental filmmakers, including Peggy Ahwesh, Robert Breer, Barbara Hammer, Yvonne Rainer and Michael Snow.
Four additional documentary makers later cited in Brody’s “Sixty-two Films That Shaped the Art of Documentary Filmmaking” also visited Cornell Cinema to present their works during Herskowitz’s tenure: Jean-Pierre Gorin (Poto and Cabengo), Kazuo Hara (The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On),Tony Buba (Lightning Over Braddock) and Mark Rappaport (Rock Hudson’s Home Movies).
Director and Cornell alum Louis Massiah ’77, Director Thomas Ott, and Professor James Turner (Africana) discuss EYES ON THE PRIZE in Uris Hall Auditorium FY89-90
Other acclaimed documentarians Herskowitz hosted included Christine Choy, Emile de Antonio, Assia Djebar, Robert Gardner, Louis Massiah ’77, Ross McElwee, Julia Reichert, Marlon Riggs, Kidlat Tahimik and Trinh T Minh-ha.
Feature filmmakers included Chilean director Raul Ruiz, Czech New Wave pioneer Vera Chytilova, Canadian filmmakers John Greyson and Atom Egoyan, and American filmmaker Charles Burnett, who presented To Sleep with Anger (1990), produced by (among others) Cornell alum Harris Tulchin ’74, who was also in attendance.
Poster for Derek Jarman’s film CARAVAGGIO (1986)
One guest highlight was British artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman, who introduced the Ithaca premiere of Caravaggio (1986) to launch a retrospective of his films, and to give a gallery talk about his films and recent paintings, exclusively presented in the U.S. by the Johnson Museum. A party for Jarman took place at the downtown loft, Top of the Stairs, which no longer exists, but the party made all the attendees feel like they were living in New York City amid the best of artists and atmosphere it offers!
Other film luminaries entertained by Herskowitz included Michelangelo Antonioni, whose visit as an A.D. White Professor-at-Large was arranged shortly before Herskowitz became director. Antonioni was asked to give a talk before a screening of the uncut version of The Passenger(1975), but instead, he famously declared “My films speak for themselves,” before exiting the stage. Herskowitz reports that Antonioni was much more generous with his comments when he met with a smaller group of students the following day in conjunction with a screening of Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye(1973), which he had chosen to discuss.
promo art & pic of Mary Woronov, cult film star
Cult film star Mary Woronov, who attended Cornell before leaving to become part of Warhol’s Factory in the mid-60s, was honored with a tribute in 1990 that included a screening of Warhol’s Chelsea Girls(1966), presented on two side-by-side16mm projectors in Willard Straight Theatre.
Two other notable Cornell alums visited in the early 90s: Murray Burnett ’31, who gave a great talk to a sell-out crowd about writing the play Everybody Comes to Rick’s, on which Casablanca (1942) was based, and hanging out with Marlene Dietrich. A gracious Christopher Reeve ’74, aka Superman, visited campus in November ’93 to meet with students and introduce a sneak preview of the Merchant/Ivory film The Remains of the Day (1993).
Fessenden’s Early Highlights & Visiting Alums
Not long after Reeve’s visit, Herskowitz announced he would be departing Cornell to become the artistic director of the Virginia Film Festival at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, which led to Fessenden’s appointment as acting director for academic year 1994-95. During that year she invited Todd Haynes to present his short film Dottie Gets Spanked (1993), made for the ITVS series TV Families. Almost fifteen years later, she invited Haynes to speak in conjunction with his unconventional Bob Dylan biopic, I’m Not There (2007), as part of the Atkinson Forum in American Studies, which included a retrospective of Haynes’ work and a series of documentaries about Dylan.
Legendary filmmaker Chantal Akerman (in red) chats with Mary Fessenden following a screening of her Portrait of a Young Girl at the End of the 60s in Brussels in the Schwartz Center for Performing Arts Film Forum. March 4, 1997
Other prominent guests invited by Fessenden during the early years of her tenure as director included the late, monumentally influential Belgian filmmaker, Chantal Akerman, who visited in March 1997 and spoke with two films during her visit: Portrait of a Girl at the End of the 60s in Brussels (1994) and D’est (From the East) (1993). Students who attended the events, including a pre-visit screening of Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), were profoundly affected, including Arun Chaudhary ’97, who went on to serve two years as the first official videographer of the White House under Barack Obama, and wrote about meeting Akerman after the screening of D’est in an article written after her death in 2015 for Forward, “How I Stole Chantal Akerman's Ideas For the Obama White House”
“Seeing Jeanne Dielman for the first time was one of the most significant cinematic experiences of my life,” reports Fessenden, “so I truly felt like I was in the presence of one of the greatest artists of the 20th century when I hosted Chantal Akerman.”
In the Spring of 2016, Fessenden programmed a series honoring the late filmmaker including Akerman’s final film, No Home Movie (2015), which is also cited in Brody’s New Yorker article, “Sixty-two Films That Shaped the Art of Documentary Filmmaking.”
Internationally acclaimed maker, Iranian-born visual artist Shirin Neshat, visited in the Fall of 2002. Known primarily for her photographs and video installations, Neshat’s short films were typically only shown as part of her installations, but during her visit, she presented five of the visually stunning shorts after giving an artist talk at the Johnson Museum as part of the Visual Culture Colloquium. Fessenden considers Neshat’s visit, along with her collaborator/partner, filmmaker Shoja Azari, another highlight of her early years, as she does a visit by Ang Lee, who came to campus to present a special sneak preview of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) in late 2000, a visit made possible by Cornell alum Tim Squyres ’81, who has edited almost all of Lee’s films, and received an Oscar nomination for his work on Tiger.
Editor Thelma Schoonmaker ‘61 with Cinema director Mary Fessenden following her presentation of highlights from her career, including her contributions to several features and documentaries directed by Martin Scorsese. November 19, 2005
Fessenden invited another well-known Cornell film editor, Thelma Schoonmaker ’61, for Cornell Cinema’s inaugural Atkinson Forum in American Studies event in 2005. Schoonmaker couldn’t have been more engaging, talking about her Academy Award-winning work on Martin Scorsese’s films along with the work of her late husband, renowned British filmmaker Michael Powell.
Cornell alumni working in film have visited frequently during Fessenden’s tenure, featured in the Cinema’s ongoing series Cornell Alums Make Movies. Squyres and producers Michael Hausman ’57 and Scott Ferguson ’82 have visited multiple times, often in conjunction with a sneak preview of a new film, perhaps most notably for Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (2005), which both Hausman and Ferguson produced.
Many other talented alums have visited to screen and talk about their work (their names are bolded in the accompanying list), including actresses Carla Gallo ’96, Adepero Oduye ’99 and Dominique Thorne ’19; documentarians Doug Block ’75, Danfung Dennis ’05, David Leitner ’76, Tia Lessin ’86 and Jill Magid ’95 (via Skype); editors Kathryn Schubert MA ’05 and Michael Miller ’74; experimental makers Rebecca Meyers ’97, Julie Perini ’00, Jason Livingston ’94 and Shelly Silver ’79; screenwriters Howard A. Rodman ’71 and David Seidler ’59; and writer/directors Andrea Berloff ’95, Will Gluck '93 and Justin Lerner ’02.
Animator Bill Plympton autographs merchandise following his appearance at Cornell Cinema.
Animators, Documentarians & Feature Filmmakers
In addition to all the guests Fessenden hosted that visited as part of a Central New York Programmers’ Group tour, most typically experimental artists or documentary filmmakers, and all the other accomplished experimental makers listed elsewhere in these 50th Anniversary articles, there were many other visitors over the years, including animators! Visits by animators like Latvian-born Signe Baumane; Paul Fierlinger, the son of Czechoslovakian diplomats, and stop-motion animators Stephen & Timothy Quay (better known as the Quay Brothers), whose work was influenced by Czech animator Jan Svankmajer, were among the animator visitor highlights, as were visits by Bill Plympton, Chris Sullivan, and Cornell alum Lynn Tomlinson ’88.
Documentary screenings, a key component of Cornell Cinema’s programming, many accompanied by their makers, have engaged Ithaca audiences for over 50 years. During the first half of Fessenden’s tenure, documentary guests included Craig Baldwin, Peter Lynch, Anne Makepeace, Renee Tajima-Pena, Yvonne Welbon, Rea Tajiri, Marc Singer, Robb Moss, Liz Mermin, Alan Berliner, Jennifer Fox, Zana Briski and Sam Green, who presented his Academy Award-nominated film The Weather Underground in 2003. While in Ithaca, Green met his longtime partner, choreographer Catherine Galasso, who was studying film at Cornell.
Filmmaker Caroline Martel takes questions following a screening of her documentary Wavemakers, about the early electronic instrument, the Martenot, October 22, 2013.
Subsequent years featured visits by Kimi Takesue, Matt McCormick, Caroline Martel, Penny Lane, Jane Gillooly, J.P. Sniadecki and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, the latter two members of the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard.
More recently, other partners at Cornell have arranged visits by award-winning documentarians Natalia Almada, Safaa Fathy, Marshall Curry and Anand Patwardhan, who screened their work in Cornell Cinema’s Willard Straight Theatre.
In Fall 2019, Cornell Cinema had the thrill of hosting Academy Award-winning filmmaker Cynthia Wade with Grit (2018), as well as Ithaca native and Ithaca College alumna Zia Anger, who presented her pioneering documentary performance My First Film (2019), which was the most recent film to be included in Brody’s “Sixty-two Films That Shaped the Art of Documentary Filmmaking.”
Luckily, even the pandemic and virtual screenings didn’t prevent Cornell Cinema from hosting several noted documentarians, albeit virtually, for engaging Q&As during academic year ’20–’21, including Brett Story, Cathy Crane and John Gianvito.
Last but certainly not least: the feature narrative filmmakers, who have come from both near and far. International guests have included Argentinian filmmakers Matias Piñeiro and Martin Retjman; Austrian filmmaker Gustav Deutsch; Bolivian filmmaker Rodrigo Bellot; Brazilian filmmaker José Araujo; Cuban maker Miguel Coyula; Egyptian maker Tamer El Said, German directors Monika Treut and Ulrike Ottinger; Indian filmmaker Mani Kaul;
Evans Chan – Hong Kong - The Map of Sex and Love (2001).
Indie makers: Joseph Tropiano
Jon Jost – also Isaac Julien - doc
Kelly Reichardt - Wendy and Lucy w/filmmaker Kelly Reichardt – April ‘09
David Riker – La Ciudad Larry Fessenden Benny Safdie So Yong Kim & Bradley Rust Gray Jim Mickle Jay Chandrasekhar John Curran via skype Katherine Dieckmann
Move The Yes Men into a different category – other – and write about them there
