Reichert, center, and Steven Bognar film an interview for "The Last Truck."
Once you’ve experienced a Julia Reichert documentary — or five or six, the way I have in the past few weeks — you’ll understand why Michelle and Barack Obama admire her work.
After watching American Factory or The Last Truck or Union Maids, you’ll come away moved and inspired. You’ll forget about impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump for a few hours and experience the grounded sensation of knowing that we’re all a part of something larger than ourselves. You’ll connect with the plainspoken subjects of the films, working-class Americans who express fear and hope about the future. You might cry, at least a little. You’ll believe that our connections, our rootedness, matter. And that forms of solidarity — among races, families, workers, communities — are worth exploring from every angle.
You’ll get why the former First Lady praises Reichert by saying, “You let people tell their own stories.”
And you’ll be hungry to see more.
Lucky for Madison, UW Cinematheque is in the middle of a Reichert retrospective. She will be in Madison for a Q&A and screening of the 1983 film she made with James Klein, Seeing Red: Stories of American Communists on Nov. 16 (see sidebar).
It’s a brilliant feat of programming, catching the three-time Oscar nominee at a point where her 50-year career is soaring to new heights. Reichert didn’t just get a publicity blurb from Michelle Obama; Michelle and Barack chose American Factory as the first release of their new venture, Higher Ground Productions. As a result, you can watch American Factory, which looks at the culture clash that occurs when a Chinese company buys a shuttered Ohio auto plant, on Netflix (it’s not part of the Madison retrospective). Netflix also has a mini-documentary where Reichert and her co-director, Steven Bognar, are sitting at a table discussing the film with the Obamas.
NETFLIX
Michelle and Barack Obama with Bognar (left), and Reichert in American Factory: A Conversation with the Obamas.
It’s rather mind-blowing to see the Obamas relaxing at a table with cups of coffee and two casually dressed filmmakers from Ohio, discussing the importance of storytelling. “Why did you pick our film? There are a million films out there,” Reichert asks them. That’s when Michelle tells the filmmakers how much she appreciates their ability to gain people’s trust and let them speak for themselves. “I hope it sparks curiosity,” says Barack. “We all have a story in us, a sacred story. A story that gives us meaning, a purpose in how we organize our lives.”
To experience Reichert’s impressive body of work is to understand her purpose — to give voice to the people she has spent her whole life among. “People like the people I grew up with were not really seen in films, not really seen in documentaries, or in the news,” she tells the Obamas. Michelle nods, and adds that these are her family’s stories, too. Reichert’s straightforward documentary style reflects her worldview, shaped in a working-class Ohio family. “Our hearts are with them,” she explains, referring to the struggling workers she got to know while filming The Last Truck and American Factory.
By staying in the Midwest, Reichert has defied the notion that the nation’s top filmmakers are on the coasts. In fact, her Midwestern-ness is at the core of most every project she has undertaken, starting with Growing Up Female (1971), her senior project at Antioch College, which became a staple at feminist consciousness-raising groups around the country.
“I think living in a small city, or a small town, here in Ohio gives us some very important things,” Reichert tells Isthmus in a phone interview from her home in Yellow Springs, Ohio. “One is access all around us to stories of regular people, and stories of really deep social shifts that are going on that are largely ignored by the east or west coasts — largely not understood, in fact badly understood.”
By way of example, she talks about The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant, another documentary she co-directed with Bognar, released by HBO Films in 2009. It captures the emotional final days of GM’s Moraine Assembly Plant, just a stone’s throw from the home she shares with Bognar, her partner in life and work. “Ever since Trump was elected, people on the west and east coasts are like ‘What the fuck is going on in the Midwest?”
What was happening was obvious to Reichert.
The economic collapse in 2008 hit Ohio hard, and she and Bognar had a front-row seat to the effects of globalization. “God, that was devastating. And it was frightening for all of us. So we shared that fear. Even with Obama in office — and that was a good thing — there was a lot left unaddressed for working-class and poor people around here. We saw everything closing. We saw the long lines at the job center.”
As with all of their films, Reichert and Bognar knew they would first have to earn the trust of their subjects.
“We were at that plant from June to December, on a really regular basis. We stood at the edge of that plant as people were leaving with signs, saying, “Hang in there, Moraine Assembly” or “Good Work!” We just stood there with that sign, and people would just pass us and pass us and pass us, and eventually they would stop and talk to us because we would keep being there.”
Although she works almost exclusively in nonfiction (she’s made one fiction film, which hasn’t been a part of the retrospectives popping up around the country), Reichert sees a difference between what she and Bognar are doing — documentary storytelling — and journalism. “We weren’t the press. I wasn’t the lady with the high heels and the makeup, who might show up once with the burly cameraman with the big-ass camera. I had the camera, or Steve had the camera, and we’d be dressed in frumpy old clothes. That’s how you eventually get people to realize you’re really there. And then you show up at the bars, and one person trusts you and they tell somebody else, and then they trust you.”
General Motors never gave the filmmakers permission to film inside, so they trained plant workers to capture shots on camcorders. “I teach photography, so I would meet them in the bar at night and critique their work,” says Reichert. “I’d say, ‘No, you can’t just zoom all over the place. Hold your shot. Use the rule of thirds. Watch the background so it’s not so crowded.’”
The combination of this democratic filmmaking combined with Reichert’s compassionate interview style is deeply effective. Time and time again, these subjects defy stereotypes about the intelligence and sensitivity of factory workers. They cry on camera…a lot. They love what they do, and express pride in their work. And they are clearly (and rightly) terrified about what the future holds after the plant closes. The Last Truck has an entire scene where the workers are congregated in the vast, cold, barren parking lot, hugging each other, as they strap the metal toolboxes that have represented their livelihood onto their trucks and SUVs.
(clockwise from left) 9to5: The Story of a Movement (2019), Union Maids (1976), A Lion in the House (2006).
“We care a lot about the people. We developed relationships with them,” says Reichert. “Folks have come to know us. We’ve come to know them. We’ve been to their houses, we’ve had a meal with them or a beer, we’ve shown we’re going to be there. You just keep showing up.”
Being in industrial Ohio allows the couple access to these critical stories and also instills a sense of responsibility, says Reichert. She describes her neighborhood. “So my neighbor — I’m looking at his house — is a high school teacher. The neighbor on this side works in a print shop. We have post office workers, firefighters and teachers, of course.
“My friends who live in New York — which I have a lot of — they live on a block with other artists, with filmmakers, a lot of wealthy people,” says Reichert, adding that film crews often jet in to the Midwest to try to understand what’s happening here. “They have no connection with the community after that. I’m responsible for my community here. People know where I live, me and Steve. There’s a certain kind of respect and honoring of the true voices of Midwesterners and regular folks around you.”
Reichert and Bognar’s unfussy style makes their movies accessible to general audiences. You don’t get the sense that the filmmakers are putting themselves above their subjects. “I do a lot of test screenings. You pull people together to just try out your work. Is it working? Does it make sense?” says Reichert. “I think that’s partly why our films communicate so well. We do rigorous test screenings, but who comes? They’re not other filmmakers who come...ever. It’s just our neighbors and our friends and some of them are well educated, some are not. I think that has made our films really clear. It’s also pulled me away from any thoughts I’ve had of doing experimental work. We always want our films to be understood and have an impact on regular folks.”
Reichert grew up in Dayton, in a family of Republicans, with a union worker father and three brothers. “I come from a working-class background, and I didn’t know anyone who went to college. There were no books or pictures in my house,” she says. When she was 12 or 13, her father bought her a small Argus Rangefinder camera, and she began to devour photography books, teaching herself techniques and studying the masters. She pored over the images of Robert Frank and Henri Cartier-Bresson. “All these great photographers whose subjects were generally regular folks, people on the street, people at work,” says Reichert. “I just ate that up, and looked at every book I could find and studied their composition and their subject matter and read about their backgrounds.
“I took a little longer to get through college. I had to drop out for a while and earn money. I actually was ‘college material,’ but like a lot of people, you don’t really have an opportunity to go to college. You don’t know how to apply, you don’t know how to get money. You don’t know how to do all that.” At Antioch she discovered radical politics, and also got turned on to radio by volunteering at the student-run station. “It allowed us to learn how to interview, how to edit, how to tell a story, how to write a narration, how to address an audience,” says Reichert. “When it came time for senior project, it was kind of like, I love photography, I’m good at it, I love radio. Why not make a film?”
The result was the groundbreaking Growing Up Female, made with her then-partner (and now neighbor and “best friend,” James Klein). Growing Up Female is often described as the first feature documentary of the women’s movement. But the film is not about militant feminism. It’s full of gut-punch revelations about how differently men and women were viewed in that era. It’s gentle and sly, filled with revelatory images and interviews with women, girls, teachers and one particularly transparent ad executive. “Don’t forget we’re talking 1970s in Ohio, not New York, not Berkeley, but Ohio. The women’s movement was just a whisper,” says Reichert.
In a booklet produced by the Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University that accompanied an October Reichert retrospective, feminist author Barbara Ehrenreich contributes an essay where she recalls watching Union Maids (1976) — a portrait of three pioneering Chicago labor activists — in a friend’s living room in the mid-’70s. “It wasn’t easy to see or show a documentary film back in the old days before DVDs, before Netflix, and before digitized films that can be distributed via email or websites,” writes Ehrenreich. “Reichert sought out places where people who might be interested — initially mostly women — were gathering and arranged to show up with her equipment. With her first film, Growing Up Female, this meant traveling around the country by Greyhound bus, carrying the 16mm print, finding someone local to lug a projector and crashing for a few days with local activists.”
(clockwise from right) Reichert editing in her basement in 1973, American Factory (2019), Growing Up Female (1976).
Growing Up Female explores societal stereotypes by conducting in-depth interviews with six young women and girls. Women, she says, were expected to be “beautiful and weak,” a notion that was being exploded by early feminists. “Those are things that I certainly 1,000 percent grew up believing,” she says. “Growing up Female shows how I grew up, in a way. It also shows what we all learned in our consciousness-raising groups.”
At those gatherings, women would get together to discuss different topics. “How do you see your mom? How do you see your body? How do you feel about your intelligence? Every night you met, you’d take one topic, and everyone would speak until they were done,” says Reichert. “And what we would realize is it’s not just that I think I’m not as smart, or I hate how my boobs look, or I think I’m fat, or I never enjoyed sex. We were like, ‘Oh, my god, we all feel the same way. I mean, it’s not my shame; it’s societal structures.’
“And man, that really lights a fire under your ass to do something about it,” she says. “In that era, the late ’60s, early ’70s, you had to find a way to speak the truth about what was around you because the mass media was not telling the truth, and we could all see it. They were not telling the truth about the war in Vietnam; they were not telling the truth about what the women’s movement was all about; they just made fun of us, you know, they made us look ridiculous — man-haters, bra-burners, ugly women, the whole gamut.”
Reichert and Klein were striving for an equal partnership, both at home and at work, at a time when gender roles in the home were more strictly defined and the film industry was completely male-dominated. “We believed — the women’s movement believed — that the only way to achieve equality was to live it, meaning, the men have to wash dishes every other night, the men have to take care of the kids, the men have to do the grocery shopping — whatever it is, you have share it equally,” says Reichert. “Well, when it got to editing, we did the same thing. One day I edited, another day, Jim edited.” Klein was more experienced, quicker and more comfortable with editing, says Reichert, but they persisted in sharing the duties on principle. “He was patient, and I was patient, and we had a purpose. If we’re going to have equality, we have to live it, even if it slowed us down.” she says, adding that their roles started to diverge more by the time they made Union Maids, in 1976. By then Klein did most of the editing while Reichert threw herself into archival research and curating the film’s excellent soundtrack. The film was praised by the late, great historian Howard Zinn, who called it “the best film on labor history I have ever seen.”
Infusing every Reichert work is a sense of hope for the future. Human resilience is at the core of her films, even when the lives of her subjects seem impossibly grim. Methadone: An American Way of Dealing (1974) is a clear-eyed portrait of the clients in a Dayton methadone clinic. The Emmy-winning A Lion in the House (2006), a four-hour epic produced for PBS’ Independent Lens, follows five families whose children had cancer. Reichert herself has survived lymphoma.
When I ask Reichert how she stays positive, she says, “I’m that kind of girl, I guess.”
Rather than hiding from the problems plaguing modern society, she’s always diving right in and talking about it with anyone who is willing to share.
She understands the contours of the battlegrounds. “There have been huge, vast setbacks for working people. We see it in the wage gap, the fact that average people’s work is paid not much more than it was paid decades ago and the fact that the billionaire class globally is growing and growing, and that there’s these displays of wealth that you see in cities, and even in The New York Times Magazine, that are disgusting,” says Reichert.
But after spending years interviewing people on the front lines of battles for justice, Reichert believes the tide is shifting. “I feel like there’s been a change in the air. The idea of unions is gaining popularity and the understanding of the wage gap and what that means.” She points to recent strikes by teachers and the U.A.W. “Militancy is on the rise, and that’s a good thing. Grassroots movements of working class people are on the rise. The #metoo movement, which is a movement for equality for working women, had such traction. So I feel things are going to swing back the other way — or are swinging back the other way.”
Reichert also believes, fervently, in the power of storytelling, and of documentaries, the art form she has devoted half a century to perfecting.” I think looking at nonfiction broadens your life, broadens your horizons,” says Reichert. She still recalls seeing Night and Fog, a 1956 French film made 10 years after the liberation of concentration camps. “I didn’t know there was a Holocaust until I saw that film,” says Reichert. “When you see [documentaries], it makes you want to connect with other people, and it makes you feel not alone. It makes you realize there are people who are really in need of support and a better shot at life — and that there’s something wrong in the system. Your understanding of history can really be broadened by looking at films.”
How to see Julia Reichert’s films
Seeing Red: Stories of American Communists
Saturday, Nov. 16, UW Cinematheque (4070 Vilas Hall), 7 p.m., with a Q&A with Reichert
This black-and-white documentary by Reichert and James Klein was released in 1983 during the Reagan years, and surprisingly, it showed in more than 100 theaters across the country. An Academy Award nominee for Best Documentary, it features interviews with past and present members of the American Communist Party. For many of the subjects, who faced harassment and discrimination for their views and affiliations, it was a “coming out” moment. It is bookended by two interviews with folk singer Pete Seeger. It’s also an honest film, addressing the lack of democracy in the party and the split that occurred when word of Stalin’s atrocities made its way to the U.S. Note: Get to Cinematheque! It’s not easy to get your hands on a copy of Seeing Red. It is available for rental, purchase or streaming from New Day Films. But it is not cheap.
Short Works by Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar: The Last Truck, Sparkle, Making Morning Star
Saturday, Nov. 23, UW Cinematheque (4070 Vilas Hall), 7 p.m.
Oscar-nominated The Last Truck (2009) is a riveting documentary about the closing of the General Motors assembly plant in Moraine, Ohio, just minutes away from where Reichert and Bognar live. It shows the impact on the workers (some of whom provided footage from inside the plant) and the ripple effect on the entire community. Sparkle is a profile of Sheri “Sparkle” Williams, a longtime dancer with Dayton Contemporary Dance Company. And Making Morning Star is a backstage look at the making of a new opera.
American Factory
Available on Netflix
One of the best documentaries released this year, American Factory won the Directing Award at the 2019 Sundance festival. A followup to The Last Truck, it shows what happens when the Fuyao Group, a company owned by a Chinese billionaire, buys the shuttered GM plant. At first, the devastated community greets the new owners with open arms, but the contrast in workplace cultures is stark, and a union drive creates friction in the factory and beyond. You can also geek out by watching the companion video, American Factory: A Conversation with the Obamas.
