7 Questions with Jonathan Olsheski

Filed under Events by Andrew Rosinski on March 12, 2009 at 2:35 pm {one comment}

7 questions with Jonathan Olsheski

Johnathan Olsheski, an up-and-coming Philadelphian filmmaker, hit the streets during the midnight hours to follow and film the nightly routine of a “scrapper” ― you may know them as those drifting individuals who push shopping carts filled with metal scraps ― these vagabonds forage around searching for discarded waste, collecting junk with little to no value, in hopes to sell it and turn a profit. The result of Jonathan’s followings is The Scrapper, a 32 minute documentary short, which recently played at the Chicago Underground Film Festival and will also be screening at Viva Doc on Tuesday, March 17.

1. What initially sparked your interest and/or influenced you to pursue filmmaking?

My journey towards documentary film was a long and winding one. I’ll give it to you in chapter form:

I. Loathley Lady Skate Company

It started out in the mid-’90s making skate videos and ridiculousness vignettes containing some mixture of blood, poop and insanity (http://llscfilm.com). Back then it was purely social, purely fun, an excuse to hang out with friends and actually do something.

II. Boring Art Fart

I graduated from high school in 2000, intent on being a garbage man, but somehow found myself studying film at Temple University. My focus shifted from energetic, social spontaneity to weird, serious, personal projects as self-therapy. EXPERMENTAL! I got bored and added English literature as a second major and found my way into still photography and new media design. I graduated with no desire to pursue filmmaking. I continued to shoot stills of abandoned buildings and work low-wage construction.

III. Wendy Stabs Peter Pan

I always struggled with the desire to create and the desire to do something noble and worthwhile. I thought I would end up being a nurse, social worker, or teacher. I met a southern photojournalist (http://www.flickr.com/photos/alymae/) and after a short, tumultuous romance I was left feeling incredibly rotten, but also inspired to pursue photography as a means of storytelling/connecting. Rather than exploring empty spaces I would explore the humanity in Philadelphia.

IV. CommuniTEA – Pass the Tea around

Two friends living from an intentional community called the Bruderhof introduced me to Sister Margaret and the good people of New Jerusalem Now (http://newjerusalemnow.org), a community of recovering addicts, and found my first story. Portions of this interaction can be found at Whispers in the Storm (http://whispersinthestorm.com). Magically, photography became of means to connect and to build relationships with people I previously wouldn’t relate to. From there I began teaching photo classes to recovering addicts and feeling like my two passions (aesthetics & social justice) were finally coming together.

V. Sell Out Versus Drop Out

So, while I was doing all of this fun stuff I was also balancing being employed and being unemployed. I’d make a chunk of money then quit and try to live as long as possible on what I had made while pursuing projects that I was excited about. Then I started to make good money at a job I actually liked and I felt like I was beginning to lose my passion for documentary storytelling, so I had to decide whether to try and keep the job and balance it with everything else or just quit. I decided to quit. Then I had to decide should I just be unemployed and do projects, or go back to school and do the same kind of work in an atmosphere where I will be challenged and exposed to things I wouldn’t be exposed to on my own. So, I went back to Temple’s film school for my MFA and started shooting video and film to coincide with my stills. That’s where I am at today. The Scrapper was a product of my first year of grad school.

2. There’s the film school route and countless other routes. Which have you pursued and how would you describe the experience?

See above. School is fun. I like my classmates. I like getting access to equipment that I don’t have to buy myself. I like teaching undergrads…but it’s a tool and it is working for me right now. By no means is it a prerequisite for good work.

3. What most immediately struck you about making a film about a scrapper subject and how does your film about a scrapper differ from the countless other documentary shorts that have been made about homeless individuals?

I’ve always been interested in scrapping and the guys with the carts. My Grandpap scrapped all of kinds of things for me when I was a kid in Pittsburgh. That’s how I got my first Night Rider big wheel. Me and my friends used to scrap every Tuesday night to get things to break and set on fire for the movies we made in high school.

For me, it’s all about exploring. The Scrapper actually came about as I was doing an observation assignment for a screenwriting class. I was sitting in this wild beer store in my neighborhood taking notes on everything that I was observing. Joe (the scrapper) came in and sat next to me and we talked about hockey for the next hour and he bought me a $1.25 24oz Bud Ice. It wasn’t until later that I found out the he scrapped. Later I saw him with his cart and told him I always wanted to do a project on a scrapper. I asked him if I could do a project on him and he was happy to have the company.

How does my project differ? It is my project. My experience. Joe is a quirky, unique guy, but there are tons of documentaries about quirky individuals and their daily activities. He isn’t homeless actually. I guess that question shouldn’t be: why is it different?, but why does it matter? I think portraits of the lives of unseen populations are incredibly important as long as they are done collaboratively with the subject and with sensitivity. I believe that greater understanding leads to greater empathy. I would hope that this would develop into some sort of practical, beneficial change for these populations, but I am struggling with this concept right now. After passively consuming a story about someone different from you, do you treat people in similar social conditions any differently? Or, is it just another form of reality TV entertainment? …but ethics gets boring. These days I go with my gut, not my head.

4. How would you describe your guiding set of film making principles?

Explore, listen, have fun, participate, respect, collaborate, learn, share.

5. The Scrapper screened at the 2008 Chicago Underground Film Festival. Did you attend the the festival? What’s your short-list of favorite films you watched?

My wife gave birth to our baby boy, Caleb Lee, just three weeks before the Chicago Underground Festival, so I didn’t make it out.

6. Reconsidering your previous festival experiences and submission processes, what have you learned not to do, what to do, and how do you intend to improve your future submission processes? Name three festivals you have particular regard for.

I’m new to the festival thing…I think it’s a little bit weird. I’d say start your own festival. Screen your own stuff. Create community actively. Don’t just pay $35 a pop through withoutabox and hope someone likes your work. If you feel good about your work, promote it yourself. I get rejected mostly, so I have a biased opinion.

7. Your top five documentaries are:

Top five docs:
· Julien Donkey-Boy ;)

· Panola

· Radek

· Dark Days

· Children Underground.

The Scrapper(2008) will screen with Heavy Metal Jr. (2005) on Tuesday, March 15th at 5:15pm. The event is free and will be held in 1104 S. Wabash Ave. in the Michael Rabiger Center for Documentary Film. For more visit Jon’s website http://thescrapper.org

8 Interview Tactics to Borrow From Oral History

Filed under Articles by Arlen Parsa on March 5, 2009 at 7:23 pm {one comment}

At the suggestion of Don Smith, I went on a limb and am taking Oral History: The Art of the Interview during this, my last semester at Columbia. Don, one of the Documentary III instructors, said it’d be useful to learn about interviewing techniques from a different point of view.

I’ve learned a lot from Oral History (49-3672), taught by Dr Erin McCarthy, and I’d definitely recommend it to any documentary film students, although it’s a pretty intensive class. Over the course of the semester, you learn about collecting audio or video personal narratives from (extra)ordinary people involved in history at the ground level, and then you conduct an interview of your own which gets put in an archive used by scholars on whatever the particular subject is (this semester it’s anti-Apartheid activism in Chicago).

I thought I’d share some of the lessons I’ve learned about how to interview from an Oral History perspective, which, although not exactly the same as documentary purposes, are similar and certainly interesting.

* A good question hardly ever starts with “Did you…” because that often leads to a yes or no answer.

* If you are asking your subject to recall events in their life, do it in chronological order that it actually happened in: you want to guide them through history in a linear way.

* Save reflective questions– those asking them about how they feel about past events today– for the end of the interview. They’ll have just been recalling the events for you and they’ll be in a mode where they can offer judgement on them much better at that point.

* When interviewing somebody who has been interviewed several times before (i.e. politicians etc) and will likely have prepared or stale answers, oral historians will first open them up with a question or two about their childhood, to shake them out of their soundbite mode into true recall.

* Super broad questions (“how do you feel about racism?”) aren’t good– oral historians usally try to ask questions that put a specific image in the interviewee’s mind.

* Don’t assume, lead or judge with your questions; allow the interviewee to choose how they want to answer them. In the same vein, don’t give choices in your questions (i.e. “were you mad or sad when…”), let the interviewee tell you how they feel because they may feel pressured to choose one of your options even though that isn’t how they really feel.

* Outline for your subject how the interview will work before you start if there are different categories of questions you plan on asking.

* Don’t ask compound questions with multiple parts if you can avoid it because people will tend to only answer the last part because it’s the part they’ll remember. Feel free to break complicated questions into multiple questions.

Notes from Fredrick Wiseman’s lecture at DePaul

Filed under Events by Mitch Wenkus on March 5, 2009 at 6:45 pm {one comment}


Photo: Diana Gabriel.

Frederick Wiseman has made over 30 full-length documentaries, but says he doesn’t think about his art. He came from a law background and examines institutions across the nation, but says he never does research. The ironies you find in Frederick Wiseman’s films come across when you listen to him speak.

Sometimes I had a hard time figuring out if he is being serious or sarcastic. Most of the time I think he was serious when he spoke about the process of filmmaking. It was nice a filmmaker who makes such serious, sometimes troubling, films not take himself too seriously.

All in all, I picked up some good advice, had a few laughs, saw one of my favorite filmmakers, and got reminded not to take myself not too seriously because I am only making films.

Here are some Frederick Wiseman-isms, all closely paraphrased from his Lecture at DePaul University on 2-27-09:

“My first film was on a prison for the criminally insane. A High School was an obvious follow”.

“I never research before my films. The films are the research. I do not want to read other people’s opinions”

“Documentary filmmaking requires three things: judgment, instinct, and luck”.

When asked, who are your strongest influences? Fred replied, “I have no idea. Certainly not other films”.

“Editing is a manic depressive exercise. Sometimes you’re ecstatic, bored, or depressed. It takes a lot of strength or insanity to sit in the editing chair. I am not quite sure which one”.

When asked how he feels about shows like Jerry Springer where people go on the program to show their worst moments. Fred replied, “I don’t know who that (Jerry Springer) is.”

“I don’t know what the audience will think. I can only assume they are as smart or as dumb as I am. Anything else would be condescending”.

“Things that work best: Funny or Emotional”

“I edit by myself, because I like to talk to myself”.

“The book that helped me most with editing was James Wood’s novel on the structure of Fiction writing”.
When asked to tell us about his art, Fred replied, “It is not something I really think about. It relives boredom. It is challenging. I treat it as a sport. I train for it. There is a lot of equipment to carry, long days, and it takes a lot of concentration”.

“I am not kidding when I say, if I could say it in 25 seconds or less I shouldn’t make the film”.

“I am trying to capture contemporary American society”.

“It is impossible to run out of good material”.

In Order Not to Be Here (2002)

Filed under Reviews by Andrew Rosinski on March 2, 2009 at 2:22 am {no comments}

Deborah Stratmans \"In Order Not to Be Here,\" (2002).
In Order Not to Be Here is the inspired, award-winning vision from Chicago-based experimental filmmaker and artist Deborah Stratman. Rife with creepiness, In Order feels like a bad-dream—or a leaked surveillance video from a lurking shadow government—it’s a dreamy, objectively-haunting, quasi-surveillance video. It’s also a film that poses many questions, one being the inevitable query of categorization: docudrama or experimental narrative?

In Order opens with an aerial, infrared intelligence video of a k9-team, who is in the midst of a hunt; following radio command from a offscreen surveyor, the dog-team slogs through darkness to capture an unknown figure.

A more subdued middle-passage succeeds this gripping opening, shifting focus to an indexing of familiar suburban imagery (e.g. fast-food, fences, street-lights); alas, we confront the bleak reality of our consumer-driven milieu—and, yes, it’s also a reminder that we know the characteristics of a McDonald’s building far too well (!).

A memorable chase scene book-ends this and, again, Stratman experiments with the aerial point of view camera. In fact, Deborah employs a handful of experimental film techniques throughout, including modified usage of the Kuleshov Effect, which proves to be sharply effective in a small number of instances, the most notable being audio from a news report (or quasi-news report) detailing a fire, which plays over this concluding chase, and, in turn, bestowing new meaning upon the image—altering a unknown runner into a fleeing arsonist, adding a sense of suspense and story.

Subversive and soigne, subterraneous and shadowy, In Order Not to Be Here is trenchant proof that Deborah Stratman is a trail-blazer clearing her way to the forefront of contemporary experimental film. ▲

Deborah will screen and discuss her newest work, an 55 minute experimental doc, O’er the Land (2008), on 4/15/09, part of Viva Documentary’s Winter Film Series. Deborah’s doc, The BLVD (’99), examines Chicago’s the subterranean street-racing culture, and will screen at viva doc on 4/7/09).

Deborah Stratman’s website, Pythagoras Film

Ask a Filmmaker: An Unfinished Dream

Filed under Articles by Mario Contreras on March 1, 2009 at 8:08 pm {one comment}

My thesis project, Untitled DREAM Act Film, is transitioning from casual pre-production to real pre-production. What does that mean? It means that it’s time to stop playing around and start working on this film. One way that I thought of to do this was to talk to someone who has done or is doing what I’m about to set out to do.

Margarita Reyes is a University of California Los Angeles student studying Chicano Studies. She’s collaborating with UCLA film minor, Andrea Ortega, on An Unfinished Dream, a social justice documentary following the lives of undocumented students in the California university system. She was kind enough to answer some of my questions.

MC – What drew you to the topic of the DREAM Act?

MR – Last year I met “B”, who, like myself, was a UCLA transfer student.
Several weeks into my first classes with her, I found out “B” was an
undocumented student and was not going to be able to pay for her tuition fees.
“B” did not choose to come to the United States as a 4-year-old. That decision was made for her.

“B” and I have shared our family histories and found that there
were many similarities. The only difference being that I was born in the United
States, and she was not. I don’t feel like she should be treated as though
she is invisible because of her immigration status. She is one of the kindest,
most loyal, and hard working people I know. She is an academic overachiever, a volunteer and she is currently organizing other undocumented workers to form unions in her community.

I am proud to call her my friend and she has inspired me to produce this
documentary in order to tell her story.

AO – The DREAM students, as they have come to be called, attend school like other students but have to overcome an extraordinary amount of obstacles to accomplish their higher education. While the CA DREAM Act benefits a student whether he/she is a citizen or undocumented, the undocumented students show their commitment for education as they endure commuting for 2-3 hrs on bus to get to school, working three jobs to pay for college and on top of that not enjoying benefits that other students receive such as studying abroad, doing research or having a paid internship.

As a Mexican-American first generation female of a low-income family, I already struggle to pay for my university, but to see the DREAM students persevere despite not getting that financial aid that I need to pay for college, is an admirable quality when on top of that they are able to find a manner in which to advocate for themselves. Most of them are the valedictorians, class presidents and top students coming from their high schools who have so much potential and talent to offer our society, yet there is currently no outlet, because after all the hard work they place into acquiring their degrees they are still not allowed to give back to the community as they wish to.

I have found inspirations through students that with so much less than me have
made it to the university and are fighting for others who should not have to go
through what they went through. They have strengthened my resolve to
help those less fortunate and shown me how privileged I have been throughout my
life.

MC – Why did you chose documentary to explore the topic?

MR – We chose documentary because we wanted to show the human face of the issue.
These are human beings, like you and I, who are experiencing an apartheid
situation. They should not be treated as second-class citizens. They are
amazing, overachieving, hard-working, upstanding citizens of the world who only
seek to contribute to the country they call home.

AO – A documentary can give a more organic perspective and it humanizes the issue by showing you reality. This documentary is being made with care so that you can see the true identity of undocumented students and recognize them as the neighbors and friends you have always known as opposed to the stereotyped representation you may hear or read about in newspapers and such. There are just so many layers and angles in the lives of these students that only a documentary can capture.

We want the audience to truly understand and see how dedicated these students are to getting their higher education and just how hard they work to accomplish it. Truly it is the students creating the story and the documentary the tool to which the rest of the world is able to engage in that story. That is what is so great about documentaries is their ability to tell reality to a mass audience in an enticing manner.

MC – How have you dealt with any legal obstacles that have risen around the
status of the characters in your film?

MR – Here’s the catch, when a student goes to a California university or college
they sign a legal document, an affidavit, which says they will adjust their
status as soon as they are eligible. Most of our students are in the process of
adjusting their legal status. They are reporting to immigration; they are going
to court and spending thousands to become legal in this country.

AO – We have taken the utmost care with protecting the students as we wanted them to feel comfortable to open up, despite having to be underground or invisible most of the time because of their status.

MC – Did you have difficulty gaining access to the subjects of your film?

MR – Yes, it was a long and sensitive process. We have grown to love them. They
are not just subjects to us. They are a part of our family. Being such a
sensitive issue with serious repercussions for them, I know that they trust us
with their stories. We will not let them down or allow anyone to hurt them in
any way.

AO – We are dealing with a delicate issue and I started getting involved in the issue only a little before we started the documentary. The truth is that since they are very aware of their rights and risks we did have to show that we understood the issue and had no intention of misinterpreting the material they gave us. Since then, however, I have become an advocate for their situation myself because through filming this documentary I learned of the importance and significance of this cause.

MC – What is your target audience?

MR – Our target demographic is 14-35 years of age. We realize the importance of
teaching our youth that there are others like themselves who are struggling to
attain higher education. Their obstacles far surpass what the “normal”
American student in high school and college experiences.

We hope to help the momentum of the Federal Dream Act campaign for 2009. So
please go to www.AnUnfinishedDream.com for production updates and/or you can go
to DreamACTivist.org for constant news and events in regard to Dream Act 2009.

Viva Doc Calendar

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