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Stanford’s Doc Department by Don Schwartz
Jan Krawitz, docmaker and director of Stanford's documentary program
FILMMAKER/TEACHER JAN KRAWITZ
is a Professor in Stanford University’s M.F.A. Program in Documentary Film and Video. She has been teaching in the program since 1988. During this time Krawitz has been Program Director for two different stints—the second of which concluded in 2014.
I learned of Stanford’s program from interviewing two filmmakers for this magazine, see Christopher Beaver and Dan Geller, both of whom earned their graduate degrees in the program.
Naturally I was curious about the MFA program that had nurtured such talented filmmakers. In the process, I’ve discovered the talented Krawitz who spoke with me of her journey to filmmaker, her films and the program.
Born and raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Krawitz received her B.A. from Cornell University with an independent major in film and photography. Her graduate program was at Temple University where she received an M.F.A. with a focus on documentary film production and studies
I spoke telephonically with Jan at her Stanford office.
CineSource: Jan, it seems to me you were born to be a documentary filmmaker.
Jan Krawitz: [laughing] I think that’s true. When I was in high school I did a summer film program at the age of 15, and everybody in the class made a fiction film but me. [laughing] I made documentaries even as a precocious adolescent.
When and how did your interest in media, telling stories, documentaries begin?
When I was younger—because of the era in which I grew up—I thought I wanted to be a social worker. Before it was fashionable, before there was even Habitat for Humanity, I spent two summers in high school in American Friends Service Committee Quaker work camps—engaged in community projects.
One was in Ripley, Tennessee working with the [federal] Office of Economic Opportunity, and sponsored by the AFSC. And the other one was in Firebaugh, California, which was a migrant farm worker community at the time. They were building houses to stabilize the migrant itinerant community—so we assisted in that project. Back in Philadelphia, I was tutoring in the inner city. This was in the late sixties.
Krawitz's first film after graduating, ‘Little People’, co-directed with Thomas Ott, concerned height-challenged people and the stigma of difference. photo: courtesy J. Krawitz
Also, during those years, in my public high school, I was exposed to photography, darkroom work, and 8mm filmmaking in a graphics arts class. I started to see films at the Philadelphia Art Museum at their Friday night series where international films were shown. There was another theater there called The Band Box, somewhere in north Philadelphia. So, I was seeking out alternative films even when I was in high school.
Then I went off to college. After a summer doing community organizing, I decided that wasn’t the way I wanted to have engagement with the world. And at the same time, from the start of my freshman year at Cornell, I began to take classes in documentary studies. I was exposed to a lot of work—Pennebaker, Wiseman, Leacock—formative cinema verité filmmakers.
An incredibly important experience happened, when I was in high school. I had the opportunity to see Fred Wiseman’s ‘High School’ which, of course, was shot in a northeast Philadelphia high school—at the same time that I was attending a different high school in Philadelphia—and Wiseman’s ‘Law and Order’ which came out in ’69. It was a double feature [laughing] at a cinema in Georgetown in Washington, D.C.
I was visiting my sister in college, and somehow we ended up at this double feature, and I remember watching ‘High School’ and thinking ‘Oh my gosh, that’s my life on screen. How can this be?’ I made such a connection with this documentary, and how the filmmaker totally got it. And even when I see ‘High School’ today, like a Proustian experience it throws me back into the same gym suit—even though the film was in black and white, I saw that gym suit as royal blue in the film—it was so resonant with my reality.
This was a really powerful experience for me. But, it wasn’t an a-ha moment, like ‘I want to do that.’ It was the beginning of a more gradual interest.
After my sophomore year in college, I ended up switching majors from sociology to an independent major in film and photography, and embarked on this straight-and-narrow path in terms of my interest in documentary. And I haven’t wavered from it. I think it’s the most dynamic genre for me both as a filmmaker and as a viewer. I feel really privileged to be able to teach in an academic program that focuses exclusively on nonfiction
Before we talk about the Stanford program I want to talk about your filmmaking work. I presume you were shooting in the two programs you attended at Cornell and Temple.
I think Cornell had one filmmaking class at the time—taught by a film theorist. I made my first 16mm film one summer with a Bolex. There was no location sound because we didn’t have the capabilities at that point. So I added a music track at the end (which ran separately on a ¼” tape recorder).
I did an independent study my last semester in college in which I made a black and white, 16mm portrait film about a very old man who lived on the outskirts of Ithaca, New York—in a house that had been his childhood home and still had no running water or electricity. He was known as ‘Bill, the Bee Man,’ and he raised bees and sold honey out of his home.
Cornell students would visit him to buy honey, but you first had to sit there and be regaled by his tales for at least an hour, if not the whole afternoon, and then you’d walk away with a jar of honey. I had been out there a couple of times, and when it came time to think of a film project, I chose Bill as the subject.
I worked alone on the film, I would go out there with my Bolex and there would be bees flying everywhere—I have a production still of me behind the camera and a bee sitting on the lens. I was able to edit only with a single soundtrack consisting of Bill’s voiceover because I didn’t have access to 16mm mag mixing facilities. That was my first real film.
A scene from one of Krawitz's early 16mm films, 'Styx'. photo: courtesy J. Krawitz
Then I went off to grad school to get my M.F.A. at Temple University. The second film I made there was ‘Styx’. It received significant exposure in international film festivals and distribution by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It’s a black-and-white visual essay of people on the Philadelphia subway. No verbiage. It came out in 1976.
My thesis film was about a travelling tent circus that I lived with for a month, in the summer of ’78. ‘Cotton Candy and Elephant Stuff’ was released in ’79 and won a Student Academy Award.
What about your films after grad school?
The first film I made after graduating was ‘Little People’, a co-directed documentary feature made with Thomas Ott who I met in my graduate program. We were the only two students in the M.F.A. class that matriculated in 1975, so we ended up working together on a number of films while in school. We were a two-person crew for my thesis film, a two-person crew for his thesis film, and then we did this one collaborative film after we graduated. ‘Little People’ was released in 1982.
It’s a film that looks into the lives of dwarves, little people. I was interested in the subject matter as a paradigm for looking at ostracism and otherness in our culture, how we as a culture find it so convenient to ghettoize groups of people and create these artificial barriers.
Some little people are organized in the context of a national organization called ‘Little People of America’ which holds an annual national convention. Thomas and I attended in 1980 to see if there was the potential for a film on the topic and to see if we could get access and cooperation. We shot the film in the summer of 1981.
It was about a ten-week shoot, and we travelled to many locations around the country. We filmed our subjects in their homes and jobs and at the 1981 national convention in St. Paul, Minnesota. We were a two-person crew, shooting 16mm, with Thomas on camera and me on sound. We co-edited the film.
‘Little People’ was released initially as a 88-minute film. It premiered at the New York Film Festival which, at that time, was like Sundance. It was THE place to premiere a film and get it reviewed in the ‘New York Times’. Two years later, we shortened it to 58 minutes for a national PBS broadcast
I never intended to return to the topic of dwarfism because I value the new experiences that each project affords and I’m ready to move on to a new topic once a film is completed. As a documentary filmmaker, you can parlay your interests into a passport to gain entrée to other people’s lives and other people’s reality that would otherwise remain inaccessible. It was a formative experience for me to be involved with the subjects appearing in ‘Little People’ with the degree of interaction that we had. They were exceptionally generous in terms of inviting us into their homes and sharing their work lives and personal lives.
Krawitz editing ‘Big Enough', a continuation of the themes explored in 'Little People’. photo: courtesy J. Krawitz
Over the years, I kept in touch with some of the people who appeared in ‘Little People.’ About 16 years later, I became aware of controversies within the dwarf community about genetic testing and other issues. I joined a listserve for dwarves and I could see that they were passionate about the issue of genetic testing as well as the representation of dwarves in the media with the proliferation of reality TV shows, the occasional focus on dwarf bowling, etc.
The other thing that had changed in the interim 20 years was the passage of the ADA, the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990. I thought it might be interesting to go back and see how the lives of some of the individuals who appeared in the first film had changed. Obviously, this is not a novel idea. Michael Apted did the ‘Up’ series and there are other longitudinal films out there. But I felt I had unique access to these people and their stories as well as a bunch of footage from the original film.
Initially, my idea was to go back and revisit the three people who were kids in the first film. There was an 11 year old, a ten year old, and a 16 year old. One of them, for a number of reasons, couldn’t participate. And then I thought, ‘Why am I limiting it to just kids? There were many other interesting people in the first film.’
I knew in my heart who I wanted to include in the second film, but to convince myself, I went back and looked at all of the 16mm outtakes from ‘Little People’. I then decided to follow up with six people who were featured in the first film: an 11 year old boy, a 16 year old girl, and two young couples—now twenty years older.
I was interested in how their lives had changed and choices they had made in terms of getting married and starting a family. From a casting point of view, these four sets of subjects offered a lot of complexity and range with regard to the issues that the film would cover, including a mixed marriage between a dwarf woman and an average-sized man, and a dwarf couple who gave birth to an average-sized son.
I shot the film in the summer of 2000, titled it ‘Big Enough’, and released it in 2004. The title emanates from a line in the film where one of the characters says, ‘You know, in our culture, people can’t wait till they’re big enough to do something… When you’re an average-size kid growing up in a dwarf home, you’re big enough a lot sooner than other people.’
The film reprises clips from ‘Little People’ and also outtakes that didn’t make it into the first film. The earlier footage allowed me to highlight the ‘then-and-now’ aspect of the film.
‘Big Enough’ was broadcast on the national PBS series, POV, in 2005. It had a really large audience the first year, so they reprised it on POV the following year.
Any other films you want to mention?
A scene for 'Mirror, Mirror', addressing body image. photo: courtesy J. Krawitz
I did make two films about women’s issues—the first is ‘Mirror Mirror’, a film about women and body image that came out in 1990.
I used a stylized approach. All the women are interviewed in a studio, sitting among mannequins and wearing an identical Kabuki-style mask. The intent was to divert attention away from the women’s faces towards their bodies. The film explores ‘the tyranny of the ideal’ in our culture, and how so many women are affected by it—their sense of not being good enough, big enough, tall enough, skinny enough, whatever it is. [laughing] It’s a preoccupation of mine.
I regard the film as an act of ventriloquy. My voice is nowhere in it, but my concerns are everywhere in it—in terms of what the women are talking about, and the choices of archival footage and music.
In 1996, I released a film that I had been working on for about four years. ‘In Harm’s Way’ is the only personal film I’ve ever made. It dealt with an experience that I had with sexual violence, with being a victim—I know that’s not a PC word—of a sexual assault in 1985.
In the wake of that event, I didn’t even consider making a personal film about it. But over time, there was an insistent voice in the back of my head, saying, ‘You had this thing happen to you. You have a lot of ideas about it. You’re a filmmaker. You have the tools and resources and creative voice to explore this in film.’
This first-person essay film is not as much about sexual violence as it is about what emerged in the wake of this event. It caused me to rethink how women of my generation were socialized around issues of empowerment and the messages we received about what to be fearful of in society and how to take control of your own safety.
‘In Harm’s Way’ uses archival footage to represent potential threats confronted by girls growing up in the 50s and 60s—nuclear issues, stranger danger and other instructional films that we were exposed to as kids. Once I establish the context for these messages and how they informed my worldview, the film transitions into the circumstances of the assault and explores the legacy of a traumatic event like this.
The film was shown on the PBS series Independent Lens. Ironically, the assault happened while I was on a shoot in West Texas for my 1985 film, ‘Drive-in Blues’, a short documentary that chronicles the rise and fall of the drive-in movie theater.
‘Perfect Strangers’ is my most recent film. For four years, I followed the story of an altruistic kidney donor as she seeks to find a recipient for her kidney. I was very much interested in this extreme act of altruism and en route, I was able to explore the complicated emotional terrain surrounding organ donation in our country
I am hopeful that the film—if I have succeeded in my goals—will cause a little bit of uneasiness in the viewer as she considers, ‘Is this something I could do? If so, for whom? And if not, why not? In what way am I contributing to this interwoven society that we all live in? Where do I reside on the continuum of altruism?’
I like to make films that inherently speak to a bigger issue. ‘Little People’ and ‘Big Enough’ are about dwarfism, but they also speak to larger themes—a requirement for any successful documentary film.
What’s happening with ‘Perfect Strangers’?
I finished it in 2013, and it’s been on the festival circuit for about a year and a-half. This past summer, I embarked on the outreach and engagement phase. That’s really where documentary is at these days. I was lucky enough to receive a Fledging Foundation grant that is targeted specifically for community outreach
Last summer, I went to the Transplant Games of America, a huge bi-annual affair, somewhat like the Olympics. The event is attended by organ donor families and deceased donor families, living donors, organ recipients, as well as people who are on the waitlist.
They have a variety of competitive events—from Scrabble and bridge to a half-marathon. I showed the film twice at the Games, and it was really rewarding because these are people who connect with the documentary on an emotional and experiential basis.
Last fall, I was invited to present ‘Perfect Strangers’ at a number of other screenings including universities, the American Association of Kidney Patients national conference, and a Donate Life screening in Portland, among others. These are all listed on the website. The film has just been acquired for broadcast on the PBS series ‘America ReFramed’ but I don’t yet know the airdate.
You graduated from Temple with an M.F.A., how did you get from there to Stanford?
I started teaching right away. I was in graduate school for three and a-half years during which I started thinking about how I wanted to function in the world as a filmmaker. It seemed like there were two paths at that time: one was making my own work while also making films for other people, or I could continue to make my own films while teaching.
I was fortunate enough to get the opportunity to teach at Temple in my last two years in the M.F.A. program and I really enjoyed it. So towards the end of my studies, I started applying for teaching jobs.
My first job was as a one-year ‘visiting filmmaker’ at Evergreen State College, in Olympia, Washington. It was an experimental college where people took interdisciplinary programs rather than discrete courses. It was inventive—a bit like U.C. Santa Cruz with narrative evaluations and no grades. While there, they offered me a permanent position, but for a number of reasons I decided to leave.
I then went off to the University of Texas at Austin where I taught from ’80 to ’88. I received tenure there. In 1986-87, I spent a fellowship year at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies. It was a year to basically develop a new film—‘a room of her own’ type of model. I had just finished ‘Drive-In Blues’, so part of the time I was travelling to film festivals, and part of the time I was doing research for ‘Mirror Mirror’.
After many years teaching at UT Austin, I became a little bit frustrated at having to repeatedly teach fiction filmmaking. That’s what most of the students were interested in. Their films had great production values—the department had nice equipment and the students knew what they were doing. But what started to be a little dispiriting was that the films were somewhat soulless. These were twenty year-old kids who didn’t have much life experience. Their scripts weren’t well written and many lacked imagination.
I’m generalizing terribly here. Every once in a while there was a brilliant film. In fact, one of my students, Lee Daniel, made a beautiful, evocative film as a Film 1 student. He later became Richard Linklater’s cinematographer and shot ‘Before Sunset,’ ‘Before Sunrise’ and ‘Boyhood’.
When I saw the Stanford job advertised, I applied because I knew the program focused exclusively on documentary. I was lucky enough to get the position, and I moved to California in 1988. At the time they had an M.A. program in documentary, and since 2006, it has been an M.F.A. program. It’s been really wonderful because teaching students in a genre that I’m fully immersed in has made a world of difference.
Even if a student makes a film that’s not terrific, it always has some redeeming value. Whereas some of the fiction films I supervised at U.T. [laughing]—particularly the slasher films of which there were a preponderance—had little of that. Coming to Stanford was wonderful because it was a lot easier to get invested in the work that the students were doing.
Now, you became head of the program at some point, yes?
I was head of the program twice—in the late 90s, and most recently, from 2006 until the summer of 2014. There are currently two full-time production faculty in the program—Jamie Meltzer and me. A third colleague recently retired, and we’re doing a search now to replace her. Jamie is the current program director.
I want to take step back. Would you give me an outline history of the Stanford program?
The Stanford program began as an M.A. program in the Department of Communication, and in 2006, we left the department of Communication and joined the Department of Art & Art History. The M.F.A. program was inaugurated that year. With the terminal degree, our students can go into teaching if they choose to, although most of them continue to work as full-time filmmakers after graduation. Since joining the Art & Art History Department, we have been able to expand their training. They now take classes in studio art, art history, and receive a substantive foundation in film studies, history, and criticism.
I’d like to hear anything you want to say about your personal philosophy of filmmaking.
[laughs] In a line?
No, we’re having fun. You can say as much as you want.
That’s a tricky one. ‘Why am I a filmmaker?’ I think I’m a documentary filmmaker because I feel there are lot of important stories to be told and a lot of wonderful people who deserve to have their stories revealed. It’s a dynamic, visceral, and accessible way to reach people. I like to jostle the viewer, make them think about the world around them through a different lens. I consider this a responsibility.
The most important goal is for is the viewer to leave a film of mine with some perceptible or imperceptible shift in their worldview, their way of looking at things, their way of being in the world. That really hit me early on as a filmmaker when Thomas and I submitted ‘Little People’ to the New York Film Festival.
At the time the programmer was a film critic and film historian named Richard Roud. ‘Little People’ was accepted and we attended the festival. I remember when I met Richard he said, ‘You know, I watched the three-quarter inch cassette of ‘Little People’ on a Sunday morning. I went to Jones Beach that afternoon, and a little person came walking down the beach, and I felt like I saw that person in a completely different light than I would have before seeing your film.’
That really stayed with me because I thought, ‘Wow. That’s what I’m trying to do—cause a shift in one’s experience in the world. And if it’s one person, or a hundred people, that’s great. I’ve done my job.’
I always used to equate filmmaking—[laughing] well, pre-Internet filmmaking—with a tree falling in the forest because it was such a one-way interaction. You’re putting these trees out there, and you don’t really know if they’re making a sound when they hit the ground. You don’t really know in what way they are impacting the viewer.
Now, with the Internet, more people take the time to respond to documentaries that they see. In the community engagement screenings I’ve been doing with ‘Perfect Strangers’, I can receive immediate feedback about the film, and the ensuing discussion helps me understand its impact on the audience. That, to me, is what documentary filmmaking is all about. It’s about imposing my set of experiences, my unique sensibility on a particular subject matter. What I choose to explore is seen through my filter and distilled into a documentary film that has my imprint on it.
Don Schwartz is an actor, writer and blogger on all things documentary, and can be seen here or reached .