Filmmaker Mike Hazard uses a straightforward approach to introduce viewers to an eminent documentary filmmaker who is still largely unknown among cineastes: George Stoney (1916-2012), who was dubbed the “father of public-access television” for his push to communicate with the masses. A North Carolina-born admirer of government-sponsored films such as Pare Lorentz's 1938 classic The River, Stoney sensed the potential of documentary cinema to effect positive social change (even if he felt uneasy about occasional artifice). Stoney did still-photo work with the Farm Security Administration until he served in WWII, and then later made films—many in collaboration, hence the title—examining the subjects of sharecropping, poverty, black and Indian grievances, prison rehabilitation, and even art (he roughed it in Ireland for 1978's How the Myth Was Made, a slightly skeptical examination of Robert Flaherty's iconic 1934 documentary Man of Aran). Stoney also taught at Manhattan's Tisch School. Interviewed before he voluntarily starved to death while in his 90s (the right of the elderly and infirm to die is an unresolved issue in the larger civil rights battle, he says), Stoney is clear-eyed and proud of his work, if not entirely comfortable with being the subject of a documentary himself. Extras include a segment with Stoney eulogizing his wife Betty, who died in 2009. Recommended. Aud: C, P. (C. Cassady)
Happy Collaborator: George Stoney
(2015) 55 min. DVD: $320. DRA. Documentary Educational Resources (<a href="http://www.der.org/">www.der.org</a>). PPR. January 22, 2018
Happy Collaborator: George Stoney
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