Jill Godmilow

Jill Godmilow has earned a substantial reputation as a producer/director during more than three decades of film and video-making. Her Antonia: A Portrait Of The Woman, (co-directed with folk singer Judy Collins in 1973) was the first independently produced American documentary to enjoy extensive theatrical exhibition in the United States and broadcast in eleven foreign countries. It received an Academy Award nomination and the Independent New York Film Critics Award for Best Documentary. In 1984, her feature about the Polish Solidarity movement, Far From Poland, was heralded for breaking new ground in the documentary genre with its radical deconstructive approach and juxtaposition of fact and fiction. Her feminist/modernist "fiction" Waiting For The Moon, about the lives of the famous literary couple, Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein, won 1st prize at the Sundance Film Festival in 1987 and enjoyed extensive theatrical and video distribution. In 1995, she completed the feature film, Roy Cohn/Jack Smith - a cinematic translation of performance artist Ron Vawter's extraordinary solo theater piece about two infamous queers - the closeted back-room politician, Roy Cohn, and the flamboyantly gay underground filmmaker/performance artist, Jack Smith, both of whom died of AIDS in the late 1980's. Her 1998 film, the provocative What Farocki Taught, contains an exact replica of the German filmmaker Harun Farocki's 1969, black & white film Inextinguishable Fire - about the production of Napalm, the abuses of human labor, and about documentary filmmaking - sets a challenge to the left liberal documentary to re-think its strategies. In 2002 Jill completed her 3 disc DVD called Lear '87 Archive (condensed), a 6 hour, indexed study of the premier performing ensemble, Mabou Mines, and their work on the controversial 1990 production of King Lear, which completely gender-reversed Shakespeare's play and transposed it to America in the 1950's. The archive is an intimate portrayal of their theatrical labors... a master class, of sorts, in avant garde performance work. Check out Jill Godmilow's website at http://www.nd.edu/~jgodmilo/ (09/20/02)

Far From Poland
A film by Jill Godmilow, 1984, 109 min., Color
When denied visas to shoot in Poland, a filmmaker, steeped in the documentary traditions of the left, decides to construct her film in New York City. ...