Uploaded 1 December 2001
‘Marvelous,’ Erik exclaimed. ‘Just what we want – we should congratulate ourselves.’
Hundreds of Bruce Hardings’ photographs chronicling the Flaherty Seminar were splayed across my rustic wood dining room table in my home in the woods in upstate New York. We had finally selected the 75 that would be published.
Ruth Bradley, the editor of the film journal Wide Angle, a Ohio University graduate student, and two Ithaca College undergraduates huddled around Erik as he sorted through these pictures and recounted stories of the filmmakers who spurred cinema into something more than entertainment: Satyajit Ray, Robert Drew, George Stoney, Bill Greaves, Joris Ivens, Chris Marker, Julia Reichert, His impeccable sense of detail and his masterful storytelling – his mind was like a CD ROM- transported us right smack in the middle of an international documentary film history that lived, breathed, coursed through us. We felt part of something larger than ourselves. Erik had conjured up a comraderie across borders and styles – an international affinity group that anyone with passion and a vision beyond themselves could enlist in.
We were editing the special Wide Angle issue to celebrate four decades of the Robert Flaherty Seminars – a history Erik had shaped through his administrative and curatorial vision for over four decades. The Flaherty Seminars are the longest running independent documentary exhibition in the world, founded by Robert Flaherty’s widow, Frances, in memory of Robert’s love of cinema as an art and his passion for talking about cinema with those younger than him. We felt lost, overwhelmed by hundreds of photos, too many decades of material, boxes of documents, and over one hundred writers ranging from filmmakers to the most theoretical academics. We were editing reams and reams of words and documents into some coherent history that could simultaneously revel in its incoherences and non-linearities. How to make a history from this mess?
As we shaped and copy edited essays, we quizzed: how do you edit so fast, so adroitly? He responded: ‘well, always have a running start to a piece, so that the reader wants to jump on a moving train.’ It was early morning, the sun streaming through the skylights. Our morning coffee and tea sent little plumes up to meet the sun’s rays. I noticed then that Erik was wearing a sweater with an insignia on the left side, a pen with wings. He told us that this was his writer’s sweater. That pen with wings served as an icon of Erik’s impact on our lives: you would learn take flight with ideas and trust the ride.
Erik had noticed Ruth and I hesitating and arguing over which pictures to select for publication. He interrupted like an Olympic coach coaxing worn out athletes on writing, thinking, and clarity. He interrupted: ‘Use your intuition and go with your first reaction to the material. If you ponder too long, you beat the life out of the idea and risk making a mistake.’ Never a long lecture, never a criticism, always something short, to the point, and epiphany-like – zen koans of the ethical intellectual life. Erik’s editorial vision was flawless, spontaneous, and always, always laser-sharp.
After one of those long days of editing the Flaherty issue, my neighbors and long-time Flaherty like-minded souls Phil Wilde and Ann Michel dropped by for a barbecue. We started to discuss public health and educational and engineering media – my partner teaches public health, Annie and Phil produce educational media. Erik noticed that all of our insider documentary gossip was boring Stewart, my partner. He launched into the story of a public health campaign for syphilis in the late 1940s undertaken by Columbia University. Erik worked on the campaign, penning a ballad for distribution in jukeboxes across the country called ‘That ignorant cowboy.’ You can read the fuller narrative of its creation in his autobiography, Media Marathon, but what that book won’t tell you is this: that night on my porch in upstate New York, crickets chirping and stars overhead, Erik sang us – without hesitation and without missing a word or a beat – the entire song. We not only did not know that Erik wrote lyrics, we did not know he could sing.
I was first introduced to Erik through his path breaking books, which were required reading in college and graduate school in the 1970s: Tube of Plenty: The Evolution of American Television, Documentary, Indian Cinema, The Sponsor: Notes on a Modern Potentate. I underlined, memorized, analyzed, inhaled these books. They inspired me to work in and write on documentary. They moved me to become a historian. Erik once told me that to be a media historian meant joining that strange monastery of souls who like to find structures and stories in the chaos of old documents.
I first met Erik himself when I was writing my dissertation. He never remembered this meeting, but I did. I was at a Flaherty in the early 1980s as a graduate student. I had received a grant-in-aid to attend this legendary event. I was in awe: Erik Barnouw, the man who I had underlined and memorized, had sat beside me at breakfast with his plate of fried eggs and bacon. I gushed, ‘I am so honored to meet you.’ He said, ‘Why? Did you think I was dead?’ He must have been around 70 then.
He asked questions about my research. I bemoaned the marginal status of documentary and archival film history. I complained about how my graduate program often left me feeling lonely and battered, an outsider to the disciplines of media and film studies. I grumbled, ‘there is just so much to dig.’ He suggested: ‘Then start digging. Get out your shovel. And don’t feel so lonely, you are not alone.’ These sentences transformed into my scholarly mantra. But beyond me, Erik’s clear, persuasive, eye-opening writing inspired hundreds of other media historians to dig and mine the seams he opened. A discipline – media history – was forged.
Just last week, a postcard arrived in my office mailbox from a colleague from graduate school, a media historian now a senior faculty member at a western university. We had spent hours in graduate school plotting how to make media history more political, more urgent, more salient in the field. We had shared many political struggles, walking picket lines when our teaching assistants union went on strike, marching against U.S. intervention in El Salvador, agitating for collectivity among graduate students. It said, ‘one of us has died. Without his books, the field would be lost. Tube of Plenty was the most important book I read in graduate school.’ This card reminded me of the messages that Erik would sometimes send me.
Over the two decades I knew Erik as a scholar, curator, mentor and friend, I was always honored to receive his blessing for a piece of writing he deemed ‘marvelous.’ Often that word appeared handwritten in a card featuring one of Erik’s watercolors of rural Vermont. He liked to paint watercolors, he said, because, unlike writing, you can’t keep on editing them. Once the paint dries, the image is done and one moves on. That one word inscribed in his card signified the piece had passed Erik’s test for urgency, integrity, and writing not contaminated with jargon.
Erik’s writing , and his gentlemanly and always gracious esprit de corps, evoked a sense of joint purpose and robust community among his readers and his colleagues. I remember Erik discussing the Flaherty seminar as a group of ‘like-minded souls who gathered together,’ but I also heard him use this same expression for writers he knew, filmmakers he admired, projects that impressed him for their guts, moxy and beauty. Everyone wanted to sit with this master storyteller so they would not feel alone and vulnerable to the forces that lashed against them like a tempest: media conglomerates, attacks against the arts, no funding, no audience, too many political attacks, commercialization. Like a Zen master, Erik more often than not mobilized poignant examples from media history or his own life to prod us to figure out something for ourselves.
Erik served the field as a kind of cardinal giving blessings and teaching obliquely, a master of the bon mot and the wittily turned phrase that held deep epistemological, political, and philosophical truths. He had the ability to distill and condense and crystalize thoughts that made being around him feel like the world – and documentary – was not all that overwhelming. At nearly every Flaherty he attended, he would always give what he called ‘the closing benediction.’ He had an ironic edge to his stature in the field, accrued not only from many books but from having lived through most of media and documentary history. He knew media and documentary film not as movements or theories, but as people consumed with ideas about the world. At the end of each seminar, a wrap-up session is held, where seminarians can process the week of seeing films and arguing about them. At the end of the session, Erik would stand up, and tell a story about Chris Marker’s time at the seminar in the 1970s.
At this seminar, recalled Erik, a young filmmaking student, awed by Marker’s brilliant, complex editing structures, asked ‘Mr. Marker, how do you edit all of these disparate materials together?’ Marker replied, ‘I get lost and then find my way out.’ Erik would then administer the final blessing to the seminar: ‘Now, get lost.’ A short story, a koan of sorts, suggesting that the only way to really know something and learn anything was to get lost in the material and invent a new route out, to trust in not knowing as a way of learning how to know. Last year (2000), I went to the seminar, and one of the board members actually told this same story as a closing missive. It was not plagiarism, or stealing someone’s thunder, as much as it was passing down the folktales that taught us to let go of our previous conceptions and continually see anew. I called Erik and told him that one of the Flaherty board members had done his story, and he simply replied: ‘it’s not really my story or my benediction, these are words to be used when useful.’
In 1995, Erik and I curated the entire history of documentary film in no less than six programs to celebrate the 40thanniversary of the Flaherty Seminar. After the first program, Erik chided me for excessively lecturing the audience about Robert Flaherty and his film, Nanook of the North – that urtext of documentary. He remarked ‘remember, let the films do their work, let the audience discover on their own. Step back and it will happen.’
Later that week, Somi Roy, the other programmer, Sally Berger, then the executive director of IFS, and I sensed a brewing unrest about race among Flaherty seminarians. We reorganized the screenings to short circuit this conflict. In a summit meeting over a picnic table, we consulted Erik and George Stoney. They were stunned: why would we even contemplate such a reactionary, anti-democratic tactic? Erik proclaimed, ‘absolutely not. You will not change the program. This is good, we want things to boil up. Our job is to make things on the edges rise to the top. Without conflict there is no change.’ We stayed with the original program on political compilation films. A furious debate about race and representation erupted – sparked by the last film, Erik’s Hiroshima Nagasaki 1945 (USA 1970), which ends with an image of the atomic bomb. Some felt that the film misrepresented the Japanese as victims. Erik never debated, just told stories about the film’s production and the expose of the hidden footage of the effects of the bombs. Afterwards, we figured out a new strategy. Erik congratulated us with one word: ‘Marvelous.’
On 19 July, Erik Barnouw died at his home in Vermont. His wife Betty was at his side. Erik had an inoperable cancer and had been in hospice. Betty says he was ready for life’s next adventure. He was 93. Erik was a legendary, foundational presence in our field. He was the preeminent media historian of the twentieth century. His scores of books include The International Encyclopedia of Communication, Conglomerates and the Media, Tube of Plenty: The Evolution of American Television, The Magician and the Cinema, Documentary, The Sponsor: Notes on a Modern Potentate, and History of Broadcasting. His memoir, a compelling and eye-opening journey through his amazingly rich and full life, entitled, Media Marathon, was published in 1996 by Duke University Press. Just a few months ago, Erik published Media Lost and Found with Fordham University Press, a collection of his essays. All of these books constitute the bricks and mortars of communications. They are classics. Erik often told me that one can never give away enough books – ideas must circulate, they are not to be hoarded.
When I called him a year ago to share the good news that the Institutional Histories project he co-edited with Scott MacDonald, Ruth Bradley and myself would become a book series dedicated to the untold histories of the international, non-profit media arts sector, he elatedly confirmed ‘marvelous – this work must be done.’ And then he urged us to always follow our intuition – and make sure he did not have to plow through thousands of pages of manuscripts.
Erik’s life, however, was not confined to the academy. His film, Hiroshima Nagasaki 1945 is still widely taught thirty years after it was produced, and rated by many international film scholars to be the most significant and far reaching anti-war film ever produced. It influenced scores of filmmakers around the globe. It promotes peace.
Erik’s professional life was as variegated and diverse as the scholarship, films and videos he championed. He worked as an ad writer, an actor, a radio writer, a director, a producer, television writer, a journalist, a songwriter, a curator, a filmmaker, an archivist, a union official, a board member of many media organizations, a consultant on many film projects, a film preservationist. Erik served as the unofficial ambassador of the independent media world since the 1950s, way before the term ‘indie’ meant anything. Up until his death, he was a constant advocate for independent media work, in all genres – work of heart and guts. He was generous, always engaged and delighted by new projects and new makers from all across the globe. In his 90s, he kept watching and listening, excited about new developments and new makers.
His selections as a curator changed how we think about media history and media art. He was open to anything, and everything, as long as it roused the soul. Erik served as the first President of International Film Seminars as well as the first chief of the Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division at the Library of Congress. He curated more Flaherty Film seminars over the course of forty years than anyone can remember. He carved out space for documentary filmmakers from all over the globe to engage in dialogue and debate. He thrived on their polemics.
In 1990, the Robert Flaherty Seminar assembled a documentary summit in Riga, Latvia with Soviet Glasnost filmmakers and American independent filmmakers. The revolutions in Eastern Europe were barely a year old. The Soviet team insisted, contra to Flaherty templates, on academic presentations in addition to the films. Erik was approached to deliver the keynote. He graciously replied, ‘I would be delighted to listen to other scholars – younger than me – deliver papers.’
The cinema theater in Riga was freezing – a serious fuel shortage plagued Latvia. At that seminar, we watched Soviet documentary films for eight days, wearing headsets to hear the English translation. Some Latvian and Estonian filmmakers surmised a Soviet plot to freeze them out of independence. Others blamed the bad roads. We all hauled blankets from our rooms in the Cinematographers Union Summer House to the theater to stave off the chill. We brought cognac. We brought cigarettes. Anything to stay warm as this exciting new documentary cinema unspooled before us, fresh excavations from the USSR’s recently opened archives and freshly-hewn public sphere. Erik sat transfixed through miles and miles of Glasnost documentary films with Betty, whom he introduced as ‘his new bride.’
As many scholars, media arts professionals, archivists, preservationists and makers know, Erik had a special and unique relationship to emerging scholars and to expanding the field of film and media history. He constantly shuttled between writing about the past, present and future of media, presenting new work, and archiving old work. He was a scholar who loved makers and a maker who loved scholars.He co-edited the monograph, The Flaherty: Forty Years in the Cause of Independent Cinema, with me, the first institutional history published by the journal Wide Angle. Two Ithaca College interns worked side by side with him on that project, three generations of media scholars typifying Erik’s insistence that the torch for independent, non-corporate media be passed on to the next generation. The two students wanted pictures taken of Erik, the two faculty, and themselves. They asked Erik to sign his books.
Erik’s life and writing spanned both the twentieth century and the history of modern communications. He was born during the era of primitive cinema and the nickelodeon, and lived through the rise of radio, the film studios, the television networks, cable, satellite, 16mm, camcorders, digital video, computers, and the internet. The day after he died, filmmakers, archivists and media scholars spread news of his passing on the internet. Betty told me Erik would have loved that – a new communications network to bring news and people together. Over one hundred emails flooded my inbox: messages arrived from filmmakers, scholars, curators, writers, archivists, journalists, editors, ex-students from all over the United States, England, Australia, Mexico, Bolivia, Canada, France, India, New Zealand, Japan, the Netherlands, and South Africa. They reflected how Erik’s writing served as a kind of lighthouse for their work, beaming out messages of both warning and comfort. Perhaps the internet, then, was another pen with wings, convening like-minded souls.
Beyond these accomplishments that exceed what one can imagine finishing in one lifetime, Erik was a compassionate, ethical, and clear-headed visionary in the media arts and archival worlds. He was an academic who spanned the archival, festival, production, and art worlds. He was a writer whose work knew no boundaries between professional and amateur, between the commercial world and the art world, between fiction and non-fiction, between the experienced and the emerging. Erik’s humor and wit still ring in many of our ears, like the sound of the ocean in a conch shell.
Above all, Erik’s legacy resonates to insist that optimism, generosity, and unbridled enthusiasm and inquiry for all human effort – whether in media or life – are, finally, the only media that really matters. All of us in the fields of film, television, video, communications and new media will miss him. But I suspect his spirit infuses hope into all of our classrooms, our archives, our productions, our writing. Like a clear, cool wind, it clears out the pollen, pushes us to engage a clearer vision, and reminds us that communication is truly about connecting with people across any divide.
In June, I phoned Erik to discuss some projects. I cherish this conversation about how to preserve the memories and histories of international independent media and scholars, curators, librarians, distributors, and filmmakers – those marvelous, like- minded souls whom Erik championed with his pen with wings. As we said good-bye, he instructed, ‘Patty, well, we must carry on.’ So now, as I pay homage to Erik, I share his last words with you: ‘Carry on’.
Erik Barnouw: a partial listing of works (based on holdings of the Library of Congress.
Erik Barnouw, Handbook of Radio Production; An Outline of Studio Techniques and Procedures in the United States. Illus. by Victor Barnouw. (Boston, Little, Brown, 1939).
[Companion volume to the author’s Handbook of radio writing. “‘Sink or swim, or, Harry Raymond’s resolve,’ radio sketch by Neill O’Malley and Erik Barnouw, based on the novel by Horatio Alger, Jr.”: p. [261]-293. [Published October 1939 … Revised edition published April 1947, revised 1949]
Erik Barnouw (ed) Radio Drama in Action; Twenty-five Plays of a Changing World. (New York, Toronto, Farrar & Rinehart, Inc. c1945).
[Columbus day, by Orson Wells, Robert Meltzer and Norris Houghton.-Will this earth hold? By P. S. Buck.-The battle of the Warsaw ghetto, by Morton Wishengrad.-Mister Ledford and the TVA, by Alan Lomax.-Open letter on race hatred, by W. N. Robson.-Bretton Woods, by Peter Lyon.-The last day of the war, by Sgt. Arthur Laurents.-A child is born, by S. V. Benét.-The halls of Congress, by Joseph Gottlieb.-Radioman Jack Cooper, by Hector Chevigny.-Concerning the Red Army, by Norman Rosten.-Inside a kid’s head, by Jerome Lawrence and R. E. Lee.-London by clipper, by Norman Corwin.-Japanese-Americans, by Harry Kleiner.-The lonesome train, by Millard Lampell.-The “Boise”, by Ranald MacDougall.-Grandpa and the statue, by Arthur Miller.-Booker T. Washington in Atlanta, by Langston Hughes.-North Atlantic testament, by Father T. J. Mulvey.-Typhus, by B. V. Dryer.-Pacific task force, by T/Sgt. Lawrence Lader.-Against the storm, by Sandra Michael.-The Negro domestic, by Roi Ottley.-Japan’s advance base: the Bonin Islands, by Arnold Marquis.-The house I live in, by Arch Oboler.]
Erik Barnouw, Mass Communication: Television, Radio, Film, Press: The Media and their Practice in the United States of America. (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, c.1956).
Erik Barnouw, The Television Writer. (New York, Hill and Wang, 1962).
Erik Barnouw and Subrahmanyam Krishanaswamy, Indian Film(New York: Columbia University Press, 1963) [revised 1980].
Erik Barnouw, A History of Broadcasting in the United States. (New York: Oxford University Press,1966-70).
Erik Barnouw, Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film(New York: Oxford University Press, 1974) [revised 1976, 1983, 1993].
Erik Barnouw, Tube of Plenty: The Evolution of American Television (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975.)[revised 1977, 1982, 1990]
Erik Barnouw, The Sponsor: Notes on a Modern Potentate(New York: Oxford University Press, 1978).
Erik Barnouw, The Magician and the Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981).
International Encyclopedia of Communications (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, c1989).
Erik Barnouw and Patricia Zimmermann, eds., The Flaherty: Four Decades in the Cause of Independent Cinema (Wide Angle(17)1-4), (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1995).
Erik Barnouw, The Evolution of American Television Sound Recording (New York: Grolier Educational Corp. [distributor], 1975).
[Broadcast historian Erik Barnouw, author of Tube of plenty, discusses the early years of television. He sees the period of the blacklist as television’s darkest hour and praises Edward R. Murrow for standing up to the right-wing zealots. Recorded October 20, 1975, in New York City].
Erik Barnouw, House with a Past (Montpelier, Vt.: Vermont Historical Society, c1992).
[The author’s purchase of a stone house in Vermont, a former Mormon place of worship, leads him to investigate its history and that of the Mormon Church.]
Erik Barnouw, Media Marathon : A Twentieth-Century Memoir. (Durham: Duke University Press, c1996).
Erik Barnouw (et al) Mary Pickford-Her Times, Her Films [sound recording], c1983.
[A symposium on the film actress Mary Pickford, America’s sweetheart. Held in conjuction with the dedication of the Mary Pickford Theater in the Library of Congress. Includes both morning and afternoon discussions. Recorded Tuesday May 11, 1983, in the Mary Pickford Theater, James Madison Memorial Building, Library of Congress.
Erik Barnouw (et al) Remarks made at the D.W. Griffith centennial program at the Library of Congress, April 1, 1975 [sound recording]. Recorded in the Coolidge Auditorium, Library of Congress, April 1, 1975.
Philip H. Reisman, interview with Erik Barnouw [sound recording]. 1968. [Gift given in 1988 to the Library of Congress by Erik Barnouw for inclusion in the Archive of Recorded Poetry and Literature. Recorded Aug. 13, 1968, in Mexico.]