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 12+ additional films.
His first film, Black Natchez (1965-67), telecast on NET Journal, 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 (1965-69), a portrait of a black man who may be a police informant, follows the ups and downs of his life 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.” [1]
Pincus’ stayed 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. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (1972) and several National Endowment for the Arts grants, Pincus started and developed the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) film section. He was Visiting Filmmaker at Minneapolis College of Art and Design and Visiting Filmmaker for three years at Harvard.
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Pincus authored Guide to Filmmaking (1968) and co-authored The Filmmaker's Handbook (1984, 1999). After leaving filmmaking in the early 1980s, he lived and farmed in Vermont. Recently, he returned to filmmaking, forming a film company with Lucia Small, who made the award-winning documentary, My Father, the Genius. Their first film together, The Axe in the Attic, about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, had its world premiere at the New York Film Festival in 2007.
[edit] References
- ^ Huffines, Kathy. Cambridge Express, review of Diaries: 1971-1976. Images of Minorities in Film, Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archives, March 6, 1989.
