UC Press Blog

This post was originally published by the Center for Media and Social Impact and is shared here with permission.

For decades, our own Patricia Aufderheide—who founded this organization’s precursor, the Center for Social Media—has chronicled, studied, and impacted the global community of documentary storytellers who seek to speak truth to power and uphold democracy. In her new book, Kartemquin Films: Documentaries on the Frontlines of Democracy (University of California Press), she brings readers into the six-decade history and living story of the longest-running independent documentary production organization in the United States, Kartemquin Films—a colorful, eclectic journey that unpackages, as she writes, “How filmmaker-philosophers brought the dream of making documentaries and strengthening democracy to award-winning reality—with help from nuns, gang members, skateboarders, artists, disability activists, and more.” In so doing, she also charts the story of U.S. indie nonfiction from the middle of 20^th century to the contemporary age of the form, interviewing  and citing dozens of filmmakers, activists, and historians.

CMSI interviewed Patricia to learn more about the book, her motivations, and the stories readers can’t miss.

What moved and motivated you to write this book about Kartemquin Films? 

Kartemquin’s history and my own have intertwined over the years, as we always shared a common vision of the role of documentary as both a democratic act and a medium that can inspire people to understand themselves as democratic citizens. Media are the circulatory system of any society. What we know about each other and the world becomes our reality. Great documentaries tell true stories in ways that not only let viewers imagine themselves into the story, but also imagine the issues and challenges of that story as part of their own world, and their own issues and challenges to address with democratic action.

I first met Kartemquin’s cofounder, Gordon Quinn, in 1978 when I was the cultural editor of In These Times, a proudly democratic socialist newspaper that also aspired to enter the circulatory system of the society. It was a time of tremendous social ferment, with anti-war and anti-colonial movements, groups like the Black Panthers, Young Lords, Young Patriots, and many others, and the budding signs of the environmental movement. Like Kartemquin, in the midst of enormous turmoil, In These Times was staunchly anti-sectarian. We were covering the political career of Bernie Sanders when he was still a town council member in Burlington, VT! But even more impressive, Gordon had filmed Bernie when they were both students at the University of Chicago, as Bernie was leading a protest against racist housing policies. (This footage ended up getting used in Bernie’s 2016 presidential campaign.) Gordon Quinn convinced me to focus on documentaries as a form, and to participate in media activist movements, including the filmmakers’ movement that created the Independent Television Service. He’s still telling me what to do. Well, sometimes.

Kartemquin Films has an amazing, improbable history over six decades. It’s produced films as different as Hoop Dreams, Minding the Gap, Vietnam Long Time Coming, Eating Up Easter, Unapologetic, and ’63 Boycott—all of which won major awards. Its films have been seen on PBS, NBC, A&E, Al Jazeera America, and Hulu. It’s been a collective, a production house, a media arts center. Its filmmakers use vastly different approaches. But everything Kartemquin does is under the umbrella of the notion that documentaries serve democracy. It rejected sectarianism in the 1970s, sappy sentimentalism in the 1990s, and cheap sensationalism today.

Instead, its filmmakers commit to a compassionate intimacy in storytelling, where the respect for the participants is as evident as the respect for the viewers. And they commit to the notion that people can understand problems systemically while seeing them through the lens of human experience.

That is a story that is really worth telling. And I’ve been meaning to tell it for—oh, at this point, it’s been decades. I’m grateful that I finally got the time and had the resources (thanks in no small part to my academic job at American University!) to do it. I owe a lot of people a big debt in the process, not least the 40 people who work or have worked at Kartemquin who spent hours of their lives talking to me and the good people at Washington University of St. Louis, where they have roomfuls of Kartemquin archives and took time out from cataloguing it all to hunt up what I asked for.

With Kartemquin’s origin and evolution came essential norms, practices, and ways of “doing” documentary with community engagement at the heart. Share some of Kartemquin’s pathbreaking practices, in your view, and how and where and why we can see them at work in indie doc practice and output today? 

Kartemquin’s engagement strategies have always been built into the process, because of Kartemquin’s vision. They are integral to every project, appropriate to that project’s mission, within the larger vision of documentary for democracy. Kartemquin has indeed been pioneering, but I would say the real work was in integrating the commitment into everything, including design of the products.

For example, its first film, Home for Life, was produced for an old-age home that wanted a positive profile. The filmmakers wanted to follow the lives of the residents without comment, to show how a well-run group home for the aged works–knowing that most viewers would not want to live in one, no matter how well run. The film could not help but raise questions in viewers’ minds about how the real problem of care for those impaired by age-related conditions is and should be addressed in a democracy. Drexel Homes executives faced down howls of complaint from board members, by arguing that it was a leader in the kind of services it provided, and the film’s fair and independent perspective gave that claim credibility among its peers. The film was circulated within the world of providers, social workers, and policy advocates, and resulted in both local improvements in the home it was filmed in, and also changes in the industry. So it fulfilled its objectives. (And it’s still watched!)

The mid-1990s public TV series, The New Americans, couldn’t be more different. The series followed several immigrant families through their journey of arrival and adjustment, starting in their home countries, before they left. Viewers experienced the wrenching sadness of leaving family and friends, the frustration and confusion of an unfamiliar bureaucracy, the befuddlement of culture shock, the pride of achievement and the hard choices.

The series also had a huge outreach campaign for which separate funding was raised, from the Annie E. Casey Foundation. Kartemquin employed Active Voice, the pioneering strategic communication firm for documentaries, to coordinate it. The group began work on the campaign two years before the series was shown, and it was designed in part through focus groups with representatives of target constituencies for change: providers of immigration services, social workers, and policy advocates. The series interwove the stories of several families, and was thus unworkable for a lot of educational, organizing and motivational work. For those purposes, Kartemquin created out of the raw materials special modules focused on three areas: education (targeting teachers of immigrant students), civic engagement (targeting the immigrants themselves, to encourage their democratic participation), and inter-ethnic dialogue (aimed at people in communities where immigrants go). Module-enabled and problem solving-focused discussions resulted in changes in how service providers and social workers did their work, and gave advocates new tools for engagement.

Finally, Kartemquin works in partnership with other organizations to produce timely work. For instance, by 2016 the Illinois legislature had not passed a budget for two years, with right-wing legislators holding it hostage for anti-labor clauses. The consequences for Illinois residents were terrible and immediate—among the affected were meals-on-wheels services, adult education, at-risk youth programs. But they might be hard to see for anyone not experiencing them. Kartemquin filmmakers worked with In These Times journalists to produce the timely reporting series Stranded by the State, a short-film series that lives on an In These Times website, on YouTube, and was run on Illinois public TV stations. The news series met viewers wherever they were, including on their phones. This was journalistic work that had an immediate purpose, providing Illinois citizens with a vivid understanding of the implications of legislative failure.

Why and how is it essential – TODAY, not as history – to spotlight the powerful role that independent documentary storytelling plays in an open society? 

This is an inflection point in the nation’s history. We have to choose between the promise of democracy (I say “promise” because we are all working to make that promise more real than it actually is today) and the very real threat of authoritarianism. Political leadership that deliberately represented government as “the problem” for decades is now reaping the whirlwind, as authoritarians–as well as the genuinely unhinged–seize the moment. We have never needed more to understand ourselves as active members of a democratic public. Everything is at stake.

Independent documentarians have evolved a sophisticate storytelling craft, and impact and engagement has become both a community and a field of professional practice. Public television provides both funding and a nationwide audience for the strongest documentaries, and that is partly due to filmmaker activism like the Kartemquinites have done. As a recent CMSI report makes clear, documentaries are part of the toolkit for a stronger democracy. And Kartemquin is a shining beacon of that practice.

What is your favorite Kartemquin story in the book, if you can even narrow it down to one? 

Oh, there are so many! A lot of revelatory anecdotes were about the building where Kartemquin was housed for almost 50 years. It was a ramshackle old house where the first floor had been converted into a storefront, which became their screening room. In the 1970s, gang members used to graffiti the building. One day, Judy Hoffman, who is an awe-inspiring filmmaker, a labor activist and a Kartemquin OG, invited them to watch a film that she and others had made, Trick Bag. It’s different members of a white working-class left-wing group talking about how racism is a trick to pit the working poor against each other. Those stories are amazing, by the way. They’re all so young, and so smart, and so perfectly 1970s Chicago working-class. Well, the gang members watched the film, and at the end one of them said, “Hey, that’s how it is!” Gordon remembered how the kid said it, “as if we hadn’t noticed.” And guess what, they didn’t graffiti the house again. I guess that’s also a good example of impact!

What might documentary film aficionados or scholars be surprised to learn when they read your new book? 

I think a lot of people who care about documentary don’t realize how important Kartemquin has been, both in the Midwest, where it’s an anchor institution for independent media, and nationwide. Just to pick one example, Kartemquin was the Midwest center for left-wing filmmakers in the 1970s. Julia Reichert and Jim Klein interviewed the women of Union Maids there, and developed the film with Gordon Quinn and Jerry Blumenthal’s input, and the Pacific Street collective folks, including Marc Weiss originally, worked on Red Squad and later Anarchism in America. Jill Godmilow worked with them for The Popovich Brothers of South Chicago. It’s been an incubator for diverse voices, including Bing Liu, who was in a cohort of Kartemquin’s Diverse Voices in Documentary and made his Oscar-nominated Minding the Gap there.

Kartemquin has innovated in documentary style, and gotten those innovations on national TV. The New Americans was a TV documentary series at a time when that was such a crazy idea that public TV struggled mightily with how to program this novel beast of a program. Now everybody wants doc series. Steve James in Hoop Dreams broke the sound barrier for documentaries, with a powerful model of how to do character-driven documentaries with profound social insight. It was Kartemquin that made his career possible; Hoop Dreams was made over seven long years, during which Kartemquin kept it alive. Nobody, most of all Gordon and Steve, thought a movie like that could go theatrical and make a huge amount of money. But when it did, suddenly the “unfundable” character-driven doc was fundable. Steve has told compelling stories with profound social significance AND audience appeal again and again, and he has become one of the grand old men of American documentary. But Kartemquin was essential to his rise, which he has honored in many ways, including working with and through Kartemquin when he doesn’t have to these days. Steve continues to innovate; he’s making unforgettable TV series, including my favorite of his Kartemquin works, America to Me—a 10-parter on how a high school established to model integration has ended up de-fact segregated on the inside.

Even more remarkably, Kartemquinites have left their mark not only on filmmaking, but on the very structure of the film community. When Kartemquin became a media arts center in the 2000s, it opened up a film-in-progress screening to the film community nationally, with input from all Kartemquin members, including interns. People came from all parts of the country for that privilege. Kartemquin had an important role continuously over the ten years it took filmmakers to push for and make possible ITVS, and has repeatedly mobilized filmmakers nationally when it has needed to be defended. Kartemquinites were active in the effort to create Chicago public access TV. And Kartemquin was crucial in filmmakers’ adoption of the Documentary Filmmakers’ Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use, which directly was responsible for changing insurance practices for documentary, and thus the chance for filmmakers to employ fair use in broadcast and cablecast documentaries. Most recently, Kartemquin was one of the first endorsers of the Archive Producers Alliance’s forthcoming statement on ethical use of generative AI in documentary.

Kartemquinites don’t just make films that support democracy. They also act in their own daily lives as members of the filmmaking public, building institutional strength, supporting and encouraging ethical practice, and finding community.

Kartemquin has been a hidden national treasure of the documentary film community, and my hope for this book is that it stops being hidden. Because we need more of what Kartemquin does well.