Tag: documentary films

Peter Adair: Film History

Peter Adair, Director and Cinematographer

Born at Santa Monica, California in November of 1943, Peter Adair was an award-winning American director and cinematographer. As a documentary film maker, he used the personal stories of ordinary people to record the progress of the gay liberation movement and the effects of the later AIDS epidemic. 

Peter Adair was the only son of three children born to John Adair, a distinguished anthropology professor at Cornell University who studied the Zuni and Navaho nations, and Casey Adair, editor for the literary journal “New Mexico Quarterly” and her husband’s many research publications. Peter Adair grew up in New Mexico where he was an outsider, participant and observer of the cultures his father was studying. His venture into making films began with the gift of a movie camera from his parents on his high school graduation.

In 1967 near the end of his academic studies at Antioch College, Adair completed his first major documentary, “Holy Ghost People”. Directed and narrated by Adair, the film documents the church service of a faith-healing and snake-handling Pentecostal community in Scrabble Creek, West Virginia. Recognized by anthropologist Margaret Mead as being one of the best ethnographic films made, “Holy Ghost People” is used in anthropology and documentary film classes. 

After recognizing his gay sexual orientation, Peter Adair collaborated with his sister Nancy Adair and four other LBGTQ members of the Mariposa Film Group to direct his production of the 1977 “Word is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives”. This documentary intercuts interviews with twenty-six people from the United States, ranging in age from eighteen to seventy-seven, who speak of their experiences as gay men or lesbians. Each interviewee shared their experiences of ‘coming out’, falling in love, and their struggles against discrimination, prejudice and stereotypes. In production for five years with over two-hundred interview sessions, “Word is Out” was the first feature-length documentary about lesbian and gay identity made by LBGTQ film makers; it was selected for preservation in the United States Film Registry by the Library of Congress in 2022. 

Adair worked on a series of projects in 1984, the first of which was his directorial and production work on “Stopping History”, a film for the Public Broadcasting Service, which examined ethical questions centered on nuclear weapons. Documenting the nonviolent blockade at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory where most nuclear U.S. nuclear weapons are made, the film asked viewers to consider nuclear war and its incurrable destruction. Later in 1984, Adair acted as consultant and did additional camerawork for Rob Epstein’s “The Times of Harvey Milk”. He also produced a series of tutorial videos for the Project Read adult literacy program of the San Francisco Public Library.

In September of 1984, Theatre Rhinoceros, a San Francisco-based theater company, presented “The AIDS Show: Artists Involved with Death and Survival”, a production that addressed the social impact of HIV/AIDS and the fears it generated on the LBGTQ community. Peter Adair and Rob Epstein collaborated as directors on a 1986 documentary film of the same name that became one of the first to examine the impact of AIDS on the arts community. Along with personal narrations by Adair and Epstein, excerpts from the original play were combined with interviews between the play’s creators and its performers to form a  hybrid of drama and documentation.

 After learning of his own positive HIV status, Adair wrote and directed the 1991 “Absolutely Positive”, a documentary that examined the uncertainty within which asymptomatic HIV positive people dwell. After interviewing over one-hundred people, Adair and his producer Janet Cole selected eleven people at different stages of the disease. “Absolutely Positive” contains the interviews of these eleven individuals and examines their lives both before and during their illness. In 1995, Adair collaborated with interactive product creator Haney Armstrong to produce an interactive legal drama-adventure game. “In the 1st Degree” was a CD-Rom in which the player examined  evidence, interviewed witnesses and presented the case at trial. Noted for its sequences, it became the second-place finalist in Computer Game Review’s 1995 Best FMV of the Year. 

In January of 1996, Peter Adair received San Francisco’s The Frameline Award, given to a person who had made a major contribution to LBGTQ representation in film, television or the media arts. Six months later, Adair died at the age of fifty-two from complications of AIDS in the Bernal Heights neighborhood of San Francisco. He was survived by his life partner Rudy Norton, his father John Adair, and sisters Margo and Nancy. Peter Adair was posthumously inducted into the San Francisco Rainbow Honor Walk in 2022. His papers are housed in the James C, Hormel LBGTQIA Center of the San Francisco Public Library.

Notes: The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) has a short article “Remembering Peter Adair” on its website: https://bampfa.org/event/remembering-peter-adair

An on-the-air June 1991 FreshAir interview between PBS host Terry Gross and Peter Adair concerning his HIV-positive status is archived at: https://freshairarchive.org/segments/filmmaker-peter-adair-being-hiv-positive

An article on the production of Peter Adair’s documentary “Absolutely Positive”, written by historian and digital storyteller Brendan McHugh, for Public Broadcasting Service’s station KQED can be found at: https://www.kqed.org/arts/13906624/absolutely-positive-hiv-aids-activism-peter-adair-doris-butler

Milestone Films has an excellent article on the background and production of Peter Adair and Rob Epstein’s “The AIDS Show” film at: https://milestonefilms.com/products/copy-of-common-threads-stories-from-the-quilt

Dziga Vertov: Film History Series

Dziga Vertov, “Man with a Movie Camera”, 1929, Film Scene Gifs, Cinematographer Mikhail Kaufman, Silent Film, Running Time 68 Minutes, All-Ukrainian Photo Cinema Administration/Dovzhenko Film Studios

“Man with a Movie Camera” is a 1929 experimental film which was written and directed by the Soviet pioneer documentary film and newsreel director Dziga Vertov. His filming practices and theories influenced the cinéma vérité style of documentary film-making which combined improvisation with the use of the camera to unveil truth or hidden subjects. This style would sometimes involve stylized set-ups and interaction, at times provocative, between the filmmaker and the subject. 

The cinematographer was Mikhail Kaufman, the younger brother of Vertov and the actor who played the man of the film. The film was edited by Vertov’s wife, Yelizaveta Svilova, who became known for her documentaries on World War II and for her work as co-director of the 1945 “The Fall of Berlin”, the 1946 Stalin Prize winner. The film is famous for its cinematic techniques which included multiple exposures, fast and slow motion, split screens, extreme close-ups, tracking shots, and jump cuts, in which footage from a scene is removed to render a jump in time.

“Man with a Movie Camera” presents urban life in Moscow, Kyiv, and Odesa during the late 1920s. Ordinary Soviet citizens are shown, from dawn to dusk at work and at play, in scenes where they interact with the structure of everyday life. Divided into six separate parts, one for each film reel printed, the film is done in an avant-garde style with varying subject matter. Mixed in with scenes of laborers at work and sporting scenes are scenes of Mikhail Kaufman traveling to locations and setting up his camera, as well as Svilova cutting and editing strips of film. Several staged situations are also on the film, including a spliced scene of falling chess pieces played backwards.

Dziga Vertov was a member of a movement of filmmakers know as the kinoks whose mission was to abolish all non-documentary styles of film making. Most of his films were controversial and despised by many filmmakers. Vertov’s “Man with a Movie Camera” was a response to critics who rejected his previous film “A Sixth Part of the World”. Produced in 1926, it depicted through a travelogue format the multitude of Soviet people in remote areas and the wealth of the nation. Although well received by Pravda, the newspaper of the Communist Party, prominent critics gave it bad reviews. 

“Man with a Movie Camera” was not always a highly regarded work; it was criticized for both its stark experimentation and for its staging. Vertov’s Soviet contemporaries criticized its focus on form rather than content. The pace of the film’s editing, four times faster than a typical film of the era, with about seventeen hundred individual shots, bothered many viewers and critics. Today it is regarded by many as one of the great films ever made; it ranked nine in the 2022 Sight & Sound poll of the world’s best films. Throughout the years, many notable composers have written soundtracks for the film. 

Note: Dziga Vertov’s “Man with a Movie Camera” in its entirety can be seen on YouTube and on the DailyMotion website located at: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x21992b