From West by Northwest.org Arts & Letters Northwest Media: A Tribute toTom Taylor and His Mentor, Andries Deinum By Dr. Brooke Jacobson Mar 20, 2003 Today we are honoring and celebrating Tom Taylor who has contributed so much to the film and media culture of Portland, but to honor Tom Taylor is also to honor the man who laid the groundwork for Tom's arrival in Portland and fostered his work with the Center for the Moving Image at Portland State University. It is an honor for me to have been asked to speak about two professors who changed my life and who succeeded in transforming cultural life in the city of Portland. The story goes back a ways to the middle of the last century--imagine that--but it's a piece of history that is still very much alive, and that I can only skim lightly in these few minutes. Just recently the University of Southern Californiaís School of Film and Television mounted a plaque commemorating Andries Deinum, a former faculty member who was fired /by USC in 1955/ for refusing to name names for the House Un-American Activities Committee. That firing, fiercely protested at the time by students and faculty, was only one of many gross violations of academic freedom and civil liberties during the McCarthy years--a time not unlike today's fervor for homeland security. Few schools have been willing, even in recent times, to acknowledge their complicity in witch-hunting, so it's noteworthy that the current faculty at USC's School of Film and Television, despite administrative resistance, chose to memorialize Andries Deinum and acknowledge the firing. We can appreciate this long buried story because Portland became the beneficiary of that injustice. Andries Deinum came to Portland in 1957 as a self-described "refugee from occupied Hollywood," and he proceeded to generate the elements of the large and lively film community that endures here today. More than that, he inspired a "re-visioning" of our urban environment that has contributed so much to Portland's distinctive quality of life. Less well known is the fact that he innovated ways of using film and public television to accomplish those goals. Coming to Portland in the late 1950's Deinum defined for himself a unique role as a public intellectual. He found ways of speaking to multiple constituencies, and forged the means of getting those constituencies to speak with one another--to engage in public conversation about our conduct of civic life. Deinum had worked in his native Friesland, a region of the Netherlands, with documentary filmmaker Joris Ivens, and formed a lifelong commitment to a realist aesthetic. He had served with the OSS in WWII. Then, with degrees in journalism and film from Stanford and UCLA, he had worked with Fritz Lang in Hollywood and gone on to teach at USC, where he curated the Farmington Collection of film periodicals and books from around the world, before he was dismissed. More than a year passed before a job offer came, despite Deinum's international stature in film scholarship. Thanks to his colleague, Lester Beck, he was hired jointly by the Portland Extension Center and Multnomah County Library, to "undertake a study of film resources and uses in the Portland area and to organize a program in documentary films." For an impassioned advocate of documentary, it was a job made to order--exciting and challenging at once. In 1957 the U.S. was still immersed in the Cold War, but times were changing. Andries Deinum instituted a film series in Portland's central and branch libraries that offered Portlanders a "Window on the World." Within a very short time citizens who looked through that window found themselves enriched in vision and understanding, as much by Deinum's presentation as by the films. One of those people was Rachel Griffin, a curator at the Portland Art Museum, who invited him to speak in conjunction with an exhibit of Van Gogh's work. Deinum's lecture on "The Life and Character of Van Gogh" delivered in his delightfully Dutch accented eloquence, was received by an audience hungry for ideas after the long cultural drought of the 1950's. The City Club requested a repeat performance and the text was circulated in print as well as broadcast on KOIN radio. I am certain that part of what inspired the audience, was the degree to which Deinum himself embodied the qualities he attributed to Van Gogh, whom he described as: "a man of telling intellectual powers, well read with a disciplined mind, a lucid philosopher, a man with strong social belief, a man whose every act was a moral act, " [whose] very existence was an implied threat to his surroundings, a man wide open to the universe, committed. A man whose ethics became his aesthetics. First and foremost, as a professor of Humanities, Deinum taught classes in film and related topics for more than twenty years at Portland State. I first encountered him in 1958 when he was presenting (at the height of the cold war, a series on Russian History Through Film).I signed up for his first class in the Art of Film Those classes drew hundreds, perhaps thousands of students. But Deinum's interests extended well beyond the classroom, even while he drew the community in. He engaged with issues of the day, in ways that raised the level of public discourse throughout the city. In the process he exposed ineptitude and ignorance within political structures, as when he confronted then Mayor Terry Schrunk and the City Council over Police censorship of Louis Malle's film The Lovers in 1960. As a scholar and public intellectual, Deinum's approach to film was broadly humanistic. But while he could speak eloquently in defense of the art of film, it was the task of film fired his energies. Deinum quickly attained national recognition in the area of Continuing and Adult Education. He saw Oregon's nascent public television system as "the heartland of extension activities for the future--a way to counter increasing mass illiteracy." Channel 10, operated by the state system of higher education, held the potential for innovative local production and scholarship to engage the public mind, and facilitate discussion of social, economic, environmental and cultural issues. In the fall of 1961 Deinum launched a weekly television program called Speaking for Myself, a loosely formatted presentation of personal essays, reflections on a variety of local and cultural concerns, aimed at sparking discussion. And spark discussion they did, as Deinum's reputation and ideas found a fruitful intersection with individuals throughout the community concerned for Portland's future. He catalyzed and helped guide the way toward enhancing the city culturally, architecturally and socially through urban planning. He worked tirelessly to generate city-wide conversations about the look and feel of the city. The centerpiece of that work became a new television show called Urban Mosaic, offering "weekly scrutinies of our immediate environment and its impact on human values." Production of the show required a cinematographer with a sensibility and energy to match his own, and in 1965 Deinum brought filmmaker, Tom Taylor to Portland. Tom was one of his former students from USC, and someone he knew could handle the work of community involvement demanded by the show, and also teach classes in film production as part the Center for the Moving Image that Deinum aimed to establish at Portland State The Center for the Moving Image offered its first official program in the fall of 1969. In its first year it produced a film that won Honorable Mention in the National Student film Festival. Before the program was cut by Portland State University in 1981, it had achieved a unique status of having done more with less than any film program on the West Coast. I t was the most complete, professional filmmaking and film studies program in the Northwest. CMI students were awarded four National Endowment for the Humanities grants, as well as a prestigious American Film Institute production grant, and other grants from the Oregon Council for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts. Students produced an average of two hours of sponsored films per year for over forty sponsoring agencies, output that surpassed all other West coast schools, including USC and UCLA. Nearly a third of Oregon's media professionals had studied at CMI. Former CMI students went on to teach film production and film studies throughout the region on all levels. BY 1981 CMI had taught most members of the filmmakers in the schools program. CMI graduates also found positions in public television, in film archives, the Museum of Modern Art, Library of Congress, as independent producers and in the Hollywood film industry. Yesterday I got a call from Bill Bowling who has made a career and gained distinction as a location manager and assistant director in Hollywood. He called to send his greetings to this gathering, and he told me he had just been to see a fabulous show at the Getty Museum. It was an exhibition of new work by video artist Bill Viola. And he asked me, "Who do you think was listed in the credits as Director of Cinematography? Harry Dawson, another CMI graduate." Center for the Moving Image operated in many ways like an early public access center. It was program that embodied a vision of how media could serve the public interest. It was open to anyone who wanted to register for advanced filmmaking. It generated creative energies that nourished one another. CMI laid the foundation for the Northwest Film and Video Center, which Bob Summers and I founded in 1971, and for the Media Project that followed, for the vital creative media community we have today, and for the film audience that sustains it in Portland. Now, teaching film classes at Portland State University, I find myself sustained and still awed by Andries Deinum's vision of the role of film, and media in civic life, and by Tom Taylor's extraordinary spirit and vitality in the practical realization of that vision. Both of these men, as uniquely "unthreatened" individuals demonstrate for us relevant and purposeful ways of speaking for ourselves, of confronting corporate media's control of our theaters and public airwaves, and bringing ethics and aesthetics to bear on public life. Copyright ©2003 by Brooke Jacobson Dr. Brooke Jacobson teaches film and cultural studies at Portlland State University and is President of PSU Faculty Association, Local 3571 of the American Federation of Teachers. © Copyright 2000-2004 by West by Northwest.org