On Saturday, June 7th, at 7pm, acclaimed filmmaker Donna Deitch visits the Film-Makers' Cooperative to present a program of her early works from the 1960s and '70s on 16mm, in addition to her deeply personal and moving documentary from 1998, Angel on My Shoulder.

Donna Deitch earned international recognition and widespread acclaim for her 1985 feature film Desert Hearts, a 1950s-set romantic drama based on the novel The Desert of the Heart by Jane Rule. Deitch’s film, which won the Special Jury Prize at the 1986 Sundance Film Festival, was groundbreaking for its sensitive and non-sensationalistic depiction of a lesbian romance. Decades since its premiere, Desert Hearts continues to influence and inspire legions of filmmakers and filmgoers, both within and outside of the LGBTQ+ community. In 2014, Indiewire dubbed it one of the 25 most important LGBTQ+ films of all time, and three years after it entered The Criterion Collection in 2017, The A.V. Club named Desert Hearts one of the 50 most important American independent films ever made.

The critical and commercial success of Desert Hearts set the stage for Deitch’s career as a narrative director of feature films and television shows. During its initial U.S. theatrical run, Desert Hearts caught the attention of Oprah Winfrey, who hired Deitch to direct her 1989 Emmy-nominated miniseries The Women of Brewster Place for ABC. Deitch went on to helm the dramatic feature Prison Stories: Women on the Inside for HBO in 1991, the independent thriller Criminal Passion in 1994, and the historical drama The Devil's Arithmetic for Showtime in 1999. She also directed episodes of ER, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Bones, Private Practice, and Grey's Anatomy, and reunited with Winfrey in 2016 on the OWN series Greenleaf.

Though Deitch may be best known for her narrative work, she began her career as an experimental and documentary filmmaker whose early avant-garde evocations (which have been distributed by The Film-Makers’ Cooperative since the 1970s) prove visually engaging, politically trenchant, and ripe for rediscovery. A graduate of UC Berkeley and the UCLA College of Fine Arts, Deitch’s background is in studio art and photography. This training is evident in such painterly meditations as 1970's She Was A Visitor — a rain-soaked, neon-tinged melange of highway, tunnel, and automobile lights — which was once described by Deitch as “an autobiographical space trip across the bridge of the midnight color” and plays like a melancholy successor to Marie Menken’s Lights. Similarly painterly is 1972's Portrait, wherein Deitch presents 15 minutes of rhythmic and dreamlike superimpositions replete with foreboding visual symbolism: tombstones, a hanging scarecrow, ocean waves crashing over a man’s nude body, a young woman’s wistful silhouette, a skyline of smokestacks, and birds and aircrafts in flight. Described by Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times as an “awe-inspiring, surreal allegory of man’s destruction of himself and his environment, expressed through haunting, superimposed images of overwhelming power and authority,” Portrait remains an indelible early work in Deitch’s oeuvre. (It was recently restored by the UCLA Film and Television Archive).

Deitch’s UCLA bio notes that “as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, she received her political education on the battlefields of People’s Park and Sproul Plaza.” This education is made apparent in Deitch’s shorts P.P.1. and Memorabilia, which fuse the evocative visual style of She Was A Visitor and Portrait with Deitch’s sociopolitical observations of Nixon-era America. Both P.P.1. and Memorabilia make use of a wire fence as a visual barrier, obfuscating and abstracting patriotic and militaristic imagery. The former film chronicles a “Mayjune” wherein “the people of Berkeley planted a part of a vacant land with trees and flowers and other living things for children and other living people,” ostensibly in the wake of the deadly People’s Park protest (a.k.a. “Bloody Thursday”) on May 15, 1969. The latter film finds Deitch’s camera gazing upon a graveyard through a wire fence, upon which a print of Nixon’s visage and the text "Wanted For Murder" hangs; in the foreground a tiny robot wobbles across the frame before collapsing.

These early films highlight Deitch’s visual poeticism, her interest in both the human and the inhuman(e), and the inextricability of the personal and the political. These qualities inform much of her work — including Desert Hearts and her 1975 feature-length documentary Woman To Woman, which explores the experiences of women from myriad backgrounds (the subtitle of the film is “A Documentary About Hookers, Housewives, and Mothers”). Woman To Woman caught the attention of none other than Gloria Steinem, who subsequently helped Desert Hearts get produced.

In addition to Deitch’s early works from our collection, The Film-Makers’ Cooperative is honored to present the filmmaker’s moving and deeply personal documentary Angel on My Shoulder on 16mm. This rarely-screened feature chronicles Deitch’s best friend, actress Gwen Welles’, battle with cancer. Welles co-starred in Desert Hearts, ten years after her BAFTA-nominated breakthrough role in Robert Altman's satirical epic Nashville (1975).

Program:

1. She Was A Visitor, 1970, 16mm, 3 minutes
2. Memorabilia, 1969/1984, 16mm, 6 minutes
3. P.P.1., 1969, 16mm, 6 minutes
4. Portrait, 1972, 16mm, 15 minutes
5. An Angel on My Shoulder, 1998, 16mm, 85 minutes

Total Run Time: 115 minutes.