Union Maids | |
---|---|
Directed by | Jim Klein Miles Mogulescu Julia Reichert |
Produced by | Jim Klein Miles Mogulescu Julia Reichert |
Cinematography | Tony Heriza Sherry Novick |
Edited by | Jim Klein Julia Reichert |
Distributed by | New Day Films |
Release date |
|
Running time | 50 minutes |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Union Maids is a 1976 American documentary film directed by Jim Klein, Julia Reichert and Miles Mogulescu. It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. [1] [2] The film was based on the three women from Chicago in the labor history book Rank and File by Staughton Lynd and Alice Lynd.
In 2022, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". [3]
Like many of her other films, Julia Reichert used a collaborative, nonhierarchical model of filmmaking during the production of Union Maids. She and James Klein shot the documentary on video rather than film. This allowed them longer interviews with their subjects, which, also, allowed the three women to better shape their interviews, and thus their contributions to and representation in the film. Also, shooting on video allowed Reichert and Klein to use student cinematographers, as they could watch the video live and give real-time direction without wasting expensive film stock. [4]
Errol Mark Morris is an American film director known for documentaries that interrogate the epistemology of their subjects, and the invention of the Interrotron. In 2003, his documentary film The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. His film The Thin Blue Line placed fifth on a Sight & Sound poll of the greatest documentaries ever made. Morris is known for making films about unusual subjects; Fast, Cheap & Out of Control interweaves the stories of an animal trainer, a topiary gardener, a robot scientist, and a naked mole-rat specialist.
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Julia Bell Reichert was an American Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker, activist, and feminist. She was a co-founder of New Day Films. Reichert's filmmaking career spanned over 50 years as a director and producer of documentaries.
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