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While there's no doubt that few members of the Kartemquin Collective
will be voting for the incumbent in the upcoming Presidential election, self-described
activist "posturings" have for years taken a back seat to high-quality, highly-focused documentary filmmaking.
Vintage Kartemquin
"When we began in the 60's we had these manifestos and we look back at them now and sort of chuckle," says Quinn.
"But one of the most important things is to change and evolve. That's part of what makes documentaries so exciting is that you go out in the world and you encounter and you have to change based on the way that you deal with it."
Raising the Stakes
The biggest harbringer of change for Kartemquin was the arrival of Director Steve
James. Kartemquin achieved particular critical acclaim and box office success
in 1994 with "Hoop Dreams," a powerful documentary spearheaded by James surrounding
the lives of two aspiring basketball stars from Cabrini Green in Chicago.
"I think one of the things that Steve brings to the organization is a much stronger sense of narrative structure, that we can sort of use some of the techniques of feature filmmaking to tell our stories. Journalists have all these rules about how they do things. But you know, if we need a picture of someone walking though a door we'll ask them to do it and its not a big deal for us," says Gordon Quinn.
Steve James, director of "Stevie"
Relying on a comparatively narrative approach, unflagging dedication and hundreds of hours of film to create what Roger Ebert called "poetry and prose, muckraking and expose, journalism and polemic...one of the great moviegoing experiences of my lifetime," "Hoop Dreams" garnered an Academy Award nomination for Best Editing, a Chicago Film Critics Award for Best Picture and a groundswell of support from critics and viewers alike.
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At the time, the world of the documentary was a far cry from its current stature.
"I remember being with Woody Wickham with the MacArthur Foundation before they funded "Hoop Dreams" and him saying, 'does this thing have any chance of playing in theaters?'
And I said, 'Oh Woody, I have to be honest with you. Don't even think that. It's a documentary. It's shot on tape. You never see that in theaters.' It's changed so much in terms of both the technology that's making it, but also what's considered acceptable for theatrical distribution," says James.
Even getting recognition from the festival circuit proved challenging.
"Now there's a whole category of digital cinema and you're up front about the fact that it's shot on DV," said Jim Morisette.
Another of James' Kartemquin projects to receive recognition is "Stevie," a powerfully disturbing film about James' relationship with Stevie Fielding, a troubled young man from Southern Illinois whom James had once served as an "Advocate Big Brother."
The tale of a mentally disturbed man who is convicted of molesting a small child isn't the easiest type of project to get funded, but in typical Kartemquin fashion, the group thought the subject was important enough to undertake and they figured out a way to make it happen.
"We did out of our own pockets, we loaned it money, we had no budget until the end when Robert May came in and helped us get it finished," says Quinn.
Scrappy group that they are, Kartemquin edited the film on an Avid system that local production firm IPA had thrown out.
"It's literally the first Avid ever in Chicago," said Morrisette, "a 33 mhz Quattro Mac which we now own and used to finish the offline for the film."
As with "Hoop Dreams, "Stevie" was warmly received, gathering awards and acclaim at Sundance, Toronto International Film Festival and getting picked up by Lion's Gate. While both the warm reception and the rise in commercial viability for documentary films caused by "Hoop Dreams" are welcomed by James and Kartemquin, the director does have his concerns.
"The thing that worries me a little bit is that it's not the best thing for people to get too wrapped up as distributors and the press in the whole notion that documentaries have to be really entertaining to be viable.
That would be unfortunate, because they're running away from the idea that documentaries are medicine. Nobody wants to have their film seen as medicine, but I worry that the reality television craze could really infect things and make it challenging for challenging movies to get seen."
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003: Kartemquin Films
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