I shot a long day yesterday. It was a conference with a name almost as long as the shooting day: Universal Design for Learning: Tipping Points from Research to Practice. It was fascinating material, very much inside a specialized niche, but related to so many other cultural movements. And just the fact of shooting a long day – though tiring and hard work – is rewarding. And that's more to the "Universal" aspects of this: how the niche defines the norm.
Much of my work is back here in my office. Long term projects, long presented and crafted. And it feels good to get out into the field – really another foreign field – and get rewarded (aka PAID) for doing that. And that's how work can be rewarding and fulfilling.
The content of much of the conference was about how the classroom will be, increasingly, a place where universal design elements will serve all children, including those with "disabilities." Some of the most exciting moments – speaking, of course, subjectively – were when web based technology enable all students to access content. Linked together it can become social networking. As we – with our climate change project, and our continued outreach towards individuals with disabilities and their supporters – move towards a way to link interests, we are part of the niche becoming universal. The niche becomes more universal (or it can become so) as it becomes more accurate in its reflection of the human needs and aspiration of the niche.
Friday, April 4, 2008
Sunday, March 2, 2008
Friday, February 22, 2008
My Uncle Joe
Re: MyUncleJoe.org
More than twenty years ago I began a film project on my uncle. I thought he was cool and interesting. He had lived over half his life in an institution with a label of what then was called "mental retardation." But he got out of the institution – Fernald State School – and found his rightful place in a community south of Boston: Quincy, Massachusetts.
He had challenges, but faced them with a free and indomitable spirit. The film I made about Joe, simply titled, My Uncle Joe, was released in 1991.
We lost Joe in February, 2005 when he was struck and killed by a small truck while he was crossing a street. He was heading home after dinner at one of his favorite restaurants.
I've been working with Joe's brothers to create a site dedicated to Joe's independence. There will be this show site and a related web site, MyUncleJoe.org. All will present stories of people who, like Joe, tell us something about how our world works and who we are. It will be about struggles and triumphs. It will be for people labeled with disabilities and poeple who help them, as well as people who just want to know more about what makes us all tick.
So here we go. It starts today.
Bill Rogers
February 21, 2008
More than twenty years ago I began a film project on my uncle. I thought he was cool and interesting. He had lived over half his life in an institution with a label of what then was called "mental retardation." But he got out of the institution – Fernald State School – and found his rightful place in a community south of Boston: Quincy, Massachusetts.
He had challenges, but faced them with a free and indomitable spirit. The film I made about Joe, simply titled, My Uncle Joe, was released in 1991.
We lost Joe in February, 2005 when he was struck and killed by a small truck while he was crossing a street. He was heading home after dinner at one of his favorite restaurants.
I've been working with Joe's brothers to create a site dedicated to Joe's independence. There will be this show site and a related web site, MyUncleJoe.org. All will present stories of people who, like Joe, tell us something about how our world works and who we are. It will be about struggles and triumphs. It will be for people labeled with disabilities and poeple who help them, as well as people who just want to know more about what makes us all tick.
So here we go. It starts today.
Bill Rogers
February 21, 2008
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
Picture This Film Festival
Was pleased to accept an award from the Picture This Film Festival for FRONT WARDS, BACK WARDS in Calgary this past Saturday. I only wish I could have made it there in person. It seems like a grass roots fest, for people with disabilities, celebrating the individual with a people-first perspective. And an honor to be recognized by them.
The challenge in creating work that is honest about disability is that you have to form a complete, often complex relationship with your subject. We can certainly say that disability is only a definition – a state of mind that can have little to do with the capabilities of a person – but then there's the reality of the personal experience. With my Uncle Joe, who was labeled "mildly mentally retarded" I often sensed frustration at limitations, real and projected. An ongoing issue was not being able to drive a car. These limitations are real. A driver's license and car are freedom in America.
We can and do create false divisions between "us" and "them." Having spent a long time making and learning about people with disabilities and the place where such people were defined, I've found the dividing line between ability and disability to be malleable, personal and cultural.
An example of this idea is contained in the title of our film, and the title I wanted to give it. We ultimately went with the title Front Wards, Back Wards because it refers to the varying shades of disability (or not) that were lumped together at the institution. The title I wanted was Idiots, Simpletons & Fools. It was vetoed by many people who were concerned of the obvious negative connotations for people so labeled. I liked it precisely because it points to negative labeling, and implicates those creating the labels. But it is not for me to judge the effect of negative labeling, so I would have had to overcome the objections to try to command more attention. Many other filmmakers would have done so, and either I'm a wimp or I listened.
And that points to the two realities that intersect with disability – my perspective as maker and your perspective as viewer. Both relate to the important reality of the subject. It's about how we all meet in images and experiences – as all play out in images and sounds. Is the experience true? Is it real? Is it significant? Glad to get a recognition from the Picture This folks that they thought yes.
Here's the letter I sent in acceptance of the award:
I am so pleased to accept your award for Front Wards, Back Wards. Making this film has been long and often hard. Hard waiting for funds, hard waiting for doors of access to open, hard to go inside a place where human beings never should have been. But my personal experience in making it was easy in comparison to those who lived, forgotten, behind Fernald’s walls and places like it.
In my early days researching this project I found a note – in crayon, scrawled – it said “I want to go home.” Who was that person? What were the conditions of his or her life?
When I got tired because of the hard work, discouraged because the work is long, I remembered that note and the stories of Vic and Joe and Patti, and remembered that they were the ones who had it hard. And from that perspective my job was and is really easy: listen, look and tell others.
This project is about the first institution for people defined as mentally and developmentally disabled. It’s about how institutional walls acted to contain people. And to contain we have to define – what’s in and what’s out. Working on this project, working on a project about how containers define those we contain showed me that it’s not only the disability that presents the problem but our, to borrow your festival’s title, our picture of it, our notion of disability and the conditions of the humans whose lives with disability we see and define.
But I also wanted my audience to spend time in a place where we cannot simply explain away disability. It is not the case that we can say that disability is MERELY a state of mind. When someone needs to be fed, moved, even in a sense spoken for, as is the case of one of our films stars, Patti Hillis, there is a disability, a particular experience that requires an adjustment from “normal” experience. Patti confronts us with a way of relating with the world that is markedly different from most others. But in showing her distinct experience, we can see that familiarity. She wants to go out into the air, and feel a spring breeze on her cheeks.
So thank you for your recognition of stories like Patti’s and the complex web that it weaves with others. It feels like a recognition of the spirit of that person who said, so we could hear it, years later, but loud and clear, “I want to go home.” I imagine that person looking out one of Fernald windows, wondering and hoping we can hear. Your festival now has heard that voice as you’ve welcomed many others. Thank you.
-Bill Rogers
Producer/ Director Front Wards, Back Ward
The challenge in creating work that is honest about disability is that you have to form a complete, often complex relationship with your subject. We can certainly say that disability is only a definition – a state of mind that can have little to do with the capabilities of a person – but then there's the reality of the personal experience. With my Uncle Joe, who was labeled "mildly mentally retarded" I often sensed frustration at limitations, real and projected. An ongoing issue was not being able to drive a car. These limitations are real. A driver's license and car are freedom in America.
We can and do create false divisions between "us" and "them." Having spent a long time making and learning about people with disabilities and the place where such people were defined, I've found the dividing line between ability and disability to be malleable, personal and cultural.
An example of this idea is contained in the title of our film, and the title I wanted to give it. We ultimately went with the title Front Wards, Back Wards because it refers to the varying shades of disability (or not) that were lumped together at the institution. The title I wanted was Idiots, Simpletons & Fools. It was vetoed by many people who were concerned of the obvious negative connotations for people so labeled. I liked it precisely because it points to negative labeling, and implicates those creating the labels. But it is not for me to judge the effect of negative labeling, so I would have had to overcome the objections to try to command more attention. Many other filmmakers would have done so, and either I'm a wimp or I listened.
And that points to the two realities that intersect with disability – my perspective as maker and your perspective as viewer. Both relate to the important reality of the subject. It's about how we all meet in images and experiences – as all play out in images and sounds. Is the experience true? Is it real? Is it significant? Glad to get a recognition from the Picture This folks that they thought yes.
Here's the letter I sent in acceptance of the award:
I am so pleased to accept your award for Front Wards, Back Wards. Making this film has been long and often hard. Hard waiting for funds, hard waiting for doors of access to open, hard to go inside a place where human beings never should have been. But my personal experience in making it was easy in comparison to those who lived, forgotten, behind Fernald’s walls and places like it.
In my early days researching this project I found a note – in crayon, scrawled – it said “I want to go home.” Who was that person? What were the conditions of his or her life?
When I got tired because of the hard work, discouraged because the work is long, I remembered that note and the stories of Vic and Joe and Patti, and remembered that they were the ones who had it hard. And from that perspective my job was and is really easy: listen, look and tell others.
This project is about the first institution for people defined as mentally and developmentally disabled. It’s about how institutional walls acted to contain people. And to contain we have to define – what’s in and what’s out. Working on this project, working on a project about how containers define those we contain showed me that it’s not only the disability that presents the problem but our, to borrow your festival’s title, our picture of it, our notion of disability and the conditions of the humans whose lives with disability we see and define.
But I also wanted my audience to spend time in a place where we cannot simply explain away disability. It is not the case that we can say that disability is MERELY a state of mind. When someone needs to be fed, moved, even in a sense spoken for, as is the case of one of our films stars, Patti Hillis, there is a disability, a particular experience that requires an adjustment from “normal” experience. Patti confronts us with a way of relating with the world that is markedly different from most others. But in showing her distinct experience, we can see that familiarity. She wants to go out into the air, and feel a spring breeze on her cheeks.
So thank you for your recognition of stories like Patti’s and the complex web that it weaves with others. It feels like a recognition of the spirit of that person who said, so we could hear it, years later, but loud and clear, “I want to go home.” I imagine that person looking out one of Fernald windows, wondering and hoping we can hear. Your festival now has heard that voice as you’ve welcomed many others. Thank you.
-Bill Rogers
Producer/ Director Front Wards, Back Ward
Friday, September 28, 2007
Music Hall show
We have an upcoming screening in Portsmouth of our Fernald film and I'd like to get many people at the screening who have been effected by disabilities and institutions to be present and to talk about how the issues of the past are alive today. New Hampshire has closed its institutions, and even in Massachusetts a dwindling group receives services at large facilities. But to what extent are the issues of Fernald (and in NH Laconia) still with us?
I made Front Wards, Back Wards because I feel the issues of the past are very present. I am concerned that if we say that we've closed institutions we might say we can forgot the mistakes (and triumphs) of the past. Or simply use them as fodder for horror films. Many people lived and died behind walls like those of Fernald (and Laconia and Pineland). Those lives had meaning and value, even as the people who held that value and meaning were systemically devalued.
As I mentioned in a post earlier the film will show again on Channel 2 on October 23 at 10PM, a couple weeks after the NHFF screening on October 12 at 4:15 at the Music Hall.
I was in a play – Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage – quite a few years ago directed by Tony Kushner (Angels in America). I played The Cook who tries to lure the charismatic Courage away from The War. But it's futile. The War is where she makes her money, and my character was left to beg for a stone for his soup, singing for his supper. I feel that's what we, creators, must do; sing our most passionate song to get people to listen. But we really are in service to others, at least in relation to others. So come to the Music Hall. You'll hear some passionate songs.
I made Front Wards, Back Wards because I feel the issues of the past are very present. I am concerned that if we say that we've closed institutions we might say we can forgot the mistakes (and triumphs) of the past. Or simply use them as fodder for horror films. Many people lived and died behind walls like those of Fernald (and Laconia and Pineland). Those lives had meaning and value, even as the people who held that value and meaning were systemically devalued.
As I mentioned in a post earlier the film will show again on Channel 2 on October 23 at 10PM, a couple weeks after the NHFF screening on October 12 at 4:15 at the Music Hall.
I was in a play – Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage – quite a few years ago directed by Tony Kushner (Angels in America). I played The Cook who tries to lure the charismatic Courage away from The War. But it's futile. The War is where she makes her money, and my character was left to beg for a stone for his soup, singing for his supper. I feel that's what we, creators, must do; sing our most passionate song to get people to listen. But we really are in service to others, at least in relation to others. So come to the Music Hall. You'll hear some passionate songs.
Sunday, September 23, 2007
NH Film Festival II
Something the NHFF seems to do well is establish a good atmosphere for filmmakers to come together. I think a lot of us made a decision to stay in the boondocks, because we could work here and live here. Here is where we want to live.
But there's no film industry here, just some people who express themselves with the medium. If we want to compete in the wider world – get our work seen – we need to know the wider (business) world. So a festival can help us to bring an audience of viewers as well as makers together, and we can build some of the pieces that we need to get our work to a wider audience.
Our work needs to continue to get better and our ability to bring it to an audience needs to get better.
I think it is business 101. I never did business school or classes – arrogant fool that I was (am), so it's a slow process of realizing a market. And, not being in a center like LA or NY, there are less people sophisticated in the business of film/ media. So we guess at how to bring a film to an audience. We can learn, and we can get better about it. My focus is on the production side of things, while I'll continue to find those who approach film as if it were curtain roads, or software, or medical devices, or popcorn...
Early in my career I met with a film exhibitor. After talking for a while he said, "You and me don't talk to each other." He puffed on his cigar from behind his SUV- sized desk. This was before Hummer's and Denali's so he had to make the best with he had. "You just want to make movies, and I just want to make money."
If I want to keep doing this my projects need to be viable and make money for somebody. And our work engages many. We just have to keep getting better. Here's to the New Hampshire Film Festival!
But there's no film industry here, just some people who express themselves with the medium. If we want to compete in the wider world – get our work seen – we need to know the wider (business) world. So a festival can help us to bring an audience of viewers as well as makers together, and we can build some of the pieces that we need to get our work to a wider audience.
Our work needs to continue to get better and our ability to bring it to an audience needs to get better.
I think it is business 101. I never did business school or classes – arrogant fool that I was (am), so it's a slow process of realizing a market. And, not being in a center like LA or NY, there are less people sophisticated in the business of film/ media. So we guess at how to bring a film to an audience. We can learn, and we can get better about it. My focus is on the production side of things, while I'll continue to find those who approach film as if it were curtain roads, or software, or medical devices, or popcorn...
Early in my career I met with a film exhibitor. After talking for a while he said, "You and me don't talk to each other." He puffed on his cigar from behind his SUV- sized desk. This was before Hummer's and Denali's so he had to make the best with he had. "You just want to make movies, and I just want to make money."
If I want to keep doing this my projects need to be viable and make money for somebody. And our work engages many. We just have to keep getting better. Here's to the New Hampshire Film Festival!
Saturday, September 22, 2007
NH Film Festival
It has been a busy month – end of summer into the high shooting season of September light.
And a few nice dates coming up:
Invites to: Taos Mountain Film Festival in New Mexico for Flying Downhill. And the New Hampshire Film Festival for Front Wards, Back Wards, right in our back yard (actually a block away for the screening at the Music Hall).
And an upcoming Prime Time slot on WGBH, Boston on October 23, 10 PM, after Frontline.
More soon.
And a few nice dates coming up:
Invites to: Taos Mountain Film Festival in New Mexico for Flying Downhill. And the New Hampshire Film Festival for Front Wards, Back Wards, right in our back yard (actually a block away for the screening at the Music Hall).
And an upcoming Prime Time slot on WGBH, Boston on October 23, 10 PM, after Frontline.
More soon.
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