Ed Pincus
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Ed Pincus began filmmaking in 1964, developing a direct cinema approach to social and political problems. He has producer/ director/ DP credits on eight of his films and has been cinematographer on over twelve additional films. His first film, Black Natchez (1965, 1967), aired on NET Journal. It charts early attempts to organize and register black voters in a Mississippi town. After a black leader is nearly killed in a car bombing, a power struggle develops within the black community for control. The National Guard is federalized and a group of black men starts a self-defense organization. Panola (1965, 1969), a portrait of a black man who may be a police informant, follows the ups and downs of his life as a father, commentator, and nudge as he tries to make sense of violence and non-violence during the heyday of the Civil Rights Movement in the South. One Step Away (1967) (commissioned by Public Broadcasting Lab) charts the dissolution of a hippie commune during the “Summer of Love” in San Francisco. The Way We See It (commissioned for a WNET Series) portrays a group of Hispanic teenagers as they try to make films on the Lower East Side of NYC.
Diaries: 1971-1976 (1981) —about marriage, career, friends and family during the early days of the Women’s Liberation Movement—was a seminal film in defining the possibilities of what came to be called “personal documentary”. Le Monde, in a front-page review, called Diaries, “an epic work that redefines an art, forcing us to rethink what we thought we knew about the Cinema.”
Pincus’ filmmaking has always been on the technical cutting edge of documentary—e.g., the early use of color in natural light situations and the development of single-person filming techniques. Pincus is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (1972) and several National Endowment for the Arts grants. He started and developed the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) film section, was Visiting Filmmaker at Minneapolis College of Art and Design and Visiting Filmmaker for three years at Harvard. He authored the highly acclaimed book Guide to Filmmaking (1968); and co-authored The Filmmaker's Handbook (1984, 1999). After leaving filmmaking in the early ‘80s, he lived and farmed in Vermont. Recently, he decided to return to filmmaking, forming a film company with Lucia Small.
