Former Walker Moving Image Curator Melinda Ward began her tenure as film coordinator in 1974 and worked with Film in the Cities on collaborative programming, eventually becoming a member of its board. In conjunction with our series Film in the Cities: A History and Legacy, she interviewed Emily Galusha, former FITC staff and board member, about the organization’s structure, institutional collaboration, youth education, and arts funding.
The Walker has a long history of supporting film as an art form, early on hosting avant garde filmmakers like Maya Deren. The Walker hired its first full-time film curator, John Hanhardt, in 1973, the same year the Edmond R. Ruben Film and Video Study Collection was established. I arrived a year later, in 1974, just in time for the opening of a groundbreaking gallery and auditorium film- and video-based exhibition, Projected Images, which included work by Michael Snow, Paul Sharits, Peter Campus, and others. It was a very exciting time for experiments in both film and video. As filmmaker Hollis Frampton put it: “In the late ’50s, as I was 19 or 20 years old, as did a lot of young people at that time, I imagined myself to be a poet; it was a good thing to be. A few years later it was a good thing to imagine oneself to be a painter, and now I think everyone wants to be a filmmaker.” As it was a time of tremendous social upheaval, youth empowerment, and evolving media technology, it was also a perfect environment for the creation of Film in the Cities and the ensuing collaboration with the Walker.
The Walker had a strong practice of collaborating with local arts organizations, especially in the performing arts. It was very natural to establish a collaborative relationship with Film in the Cities (FITC). Filmmaker and FITC board member Molly Davies took me to FITC and introduced me to their unique program working with high school students. I later joined the board of FITC.
MELINDA WARD (MW)
I’d be interested in what you have to say about the model of Film in the Cities and how it influenced other arts organizations to follow its design.
EMILY GALUSHA (EG)
I’m pretty sure it was FITC Director Rick Weise who used the metaphor of a three-legged stool to describe FITC’s program structure: the three legs of the stool were education, exhibition, and artist services. Film in the Cities, like some of the succeeding medium-specific organizations, was modeled on that idea. One of the legs, artists services, resulted from the observation that the equipment on which the art form was based was really expensive and not needed all the time, so it made more sense to pool funds and resources to provide equipment access to independent artists so they could afford to work in their chosen media. Later, with foundation funding, FITC also was able to grant financial support to independent artists.
My recollection is that the education component came out of Rick Weise’s and Tom DeBiaso’s strong interest in teaching young people. Rick wanted to teach media literacy. He believed it was essential to teach people how to filter the mass of images bombarding them and how to understand what folks were trying to get them to think and feel, as they watched those moving images.
MW
Because Film in the Cities’s early start was as an education program, working with youth and disadvantaged youth as well, it was about empowering youth; it was about desegregating schools and helping kids value and record their own lives.
EG
And giving them the tools to do that.
MW
Both the physical tools and also the skills. It was important that there was an active filmmaking community that came together. Filmmakers like Kathleen Laughlin taught at Film in the Cities, and FITC founder Tom DeBiaso soon went to the Minneapolis College of Art and Design to teach. You start seeing this ripple effect.
EG
Film was also enmeshed with photography then. FITC had a really extraordinary photography program under Jim Dozier, particularly in exhibition. There was a community of students, ex-students, budding professionals, real professionals (I mean people who are trying to make a living from doing it, in both those art forms, film and photography). It ended up being a really juicy mix. The exhibition piece was important because it provided an access point for the general public that wasn’t particularly interested in making it themselves. They didn’t feel the need to be camera people or directors or anything else. They just wanted to see good work. Exhibitions provide a public access point separate from but linked to the access for people who want to study and learn it, as well as for people who already know it but just need the tools to make it.
And then as fellowship programs got going, artists could not only get access to equipment but to some money to help use it.
The first of the other medium-specific organizations to adopt the model was the Center for Book Arts: it included exhibition, education, and artist services, with artist services encompassing both equipment access and support for teachers, supporting artists by hiring them as teachers, and also providing some grant funds that were raised.
MW
We should talk about the synergies between the FITC and the Walker film programs and how that contributed to the ecosystem. Walker had an ideal screening space, and through its marketing and promotion capacity could place the avant garde and independent films on a par with the other art forms and reach a wider general audience. FITC, with its community of students and filmmakers, provided an eager audience for the Walker screenings. When FITC hired Sally Dixon in 1978 for a year as a temporary director, Rick Weise had a fellowship from the Bush Foundation, which provided the opportunity to really heat up the visiting filmmakers program. Sally had previously created the film department at the Carnegie Museum of Art and was internationally known for her support of avant garde filmmakers. In addition to showing their films, she made it possible for them to make films in Pittsburgh. During that time, she became close friends with many of the filmmakers including Stan Brakhage, Hollis Frampton, and Robert Breer. Sally and I collaborated on bringing the filmmakers to the Twin Cities. FITC hosted workshops for students and filmmakers, and the Walker screened the films with the filmmakers present. Sally also initiated the commissioning of critics and scholars to write essays that were then published as little books to accompany the filmmakers’ workshops and screenings.
MW
Say a little bit about the larger social context and turmoil where media were seen to have a large role in affecting social change. Outreach to disenfranchised groups was also a priority for cultural organizations.
EG
Yes, especially in the schools.
MW
The arts and media all had a role to play in education, civil rights, desegregation.
EG
I think that was a period when the Rockefeller Foundation started providing major support for arts in the schools.
MW
Oh interesting, and they were also big supporters of independent media.
Another very important factor was the National Endowment for the Arts’s support for the media arts. They funded both the Walker and Film in the Cities as well as other media art centers around the country. That really helped create a network and national movement for independent film. Sally Dixon was on the original committee that helped shape the guidelines.
EG
FITC was really a prototype for those all-purpose media art centers but also represented a model that was followed by other medium-specific organizations like Northern Clay Center, Highpoint Center for Printmaking, the Textile Center, and the Center for Book Arts. It’s the three-legged stool model.
All of them used exhibition again as a point of access for people who didn’t necessarily want to make the art, but want to see the finished product at the highest level. Film in the Cities, and these other organizations, had high standards for what they showed. When they showed studio work, they also provided an opportunity to show the best that’s being done by people who sometimes are accessing that third leg, which is the equipment and the gear.
MW
It’s also important to bring in artists of national stature from other regions. You get the synergy between what’s happening in different places, and that sparks ideas going back and forth. So that’s part of the standard.
EG
And it keeps the local work from becoming insular and parochial. Because if you bring in someone to show a film or do an installation, then you can set up master sessions, work with the students, with kids as well as adult students, bring in outsiders—it just feeds the community in a way that can be really, really lively. It’s also efficient. If we brought in a major visiting artist, often in conjunction with an exhibition, we would also use them as a panelist for one of the artist fellowship programs, have them do a lecture for the general public, maybe also do a workshop for teachers and makers, so that we made the most and best use of that person coming to town.
MW
And it also provides a living for the national artist as well. But let’s end by coming full circle, back to the students. Some of the same social problems that existed 50 years ago when FITC got started, like racism, still persist today.
EG
They do persist, but there may have been a long-term impact. Maybe the kids who were at Film in the Cities, who then made their way through the world and are now in their 40s and 50s, wow: I hope they’re different people, enjoying a different world or seeing a different world than they would have if the Film in the Cities experience had not existed for them.
MW
Absolutely. It’s been interesting to see the reaction this three-week program on FITC has been getting on Facebook. All kinds of people are saying, “Oh, I loved that class. That was my favorite. That was, that was, that was.”
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