Columbia School of the Arts film teachers Jack Lechner and Rob King are the guests on the first segment of this episode. They have produced a retrospective for Filmwax friend and fellow Columbia film teacher, producer Ira Deutchman (see Episode 444). The retrospective will include 17 seminal indie films in which Ira has been involved including “sex, lies and videotape”, “A Woman Under the Influence” and “Parting Glances”, plus various panels and Q&As with Deutchman and myriad filmmakers & indie film luminaries. The retrospective, called NY Indie Guy: Ira Deutchman and the Rise of Independent Film, will take place at Columbia’s Lenfest Center for the Arts, 615 W. 129th Street, from September 14th through the 23rd. Check out the website for schedule and tickets.
In the second segment, I interview photographer and filmmaker Sasha Water Freyer about her documentary “Garry Winogrand: Everything is Photographable”. The film will have a NYC theatrical at Film Forum beginning on Wednesday, September 19th. “What is a photograph?” Garry Winogrand (1928-1984) asks in his iconic, gravelly Bronx accent. Winogrand was a compulsive street photographer (although he hated that term), working for decades in NYC, then in Texas and California, to create a huge body of work (hundreds of thousands of images taken with his 35mm Leica) that comprise an encyclopedic portrait of America. During his lifetime he was celebrated (as a favorite of MoMA curator John Szarkowski) and reviled (especially for his book, “Women Are Beautiful”) and then more-or-less forgotten after his untimely death at age 56. Writes Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times: “(Winogrand) captured the fallout from the mid-century American moment – those few decades from the 1950s on, when placid, middle-class prosperity started to give way to something less affluent, more fragmented and harder to define.”
