Hommage à Haskell Wexler

Un grand cinéaste et un grand homme nous a quitté.

Cinéma du réel avait projeté son œuvre passionnante, engagée et militante en 2015, en présence de son amie et proche collaboratrice Pamela Yates, avec laquelle il avait également réalisé son dernier film Rebel Citizen, co-produit par Cinéma du réel.

Pamela lui rend hommage :

Haskell Wexler was my life-long friend and mentor.

Haskell was well known as the Academy Award-winning cinematographer of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Bound for Glory, but his incredible body of work making political documentary films over seven decades is less known.

For more than 30 years I’d been having conversations with Haskell about life, love, politics and cinema, and what it means to be a politically engaged documentary filmmaker. Every morning when Haskell woke up, he railed against the injustices in the world and what we have to do to end them. Earlier this year, I filmed one of our conversations over several days and turned it into a documentary called Rebel Citizen. In Rebel Citizen, he told some great stories: Did you know that in 1963 Haskell made The Bus, a film about a group of civil rights activists as they traveled overland from California to the March on Washington where Martin Luther King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech? This documentary has great resonance with today’s Black Lives Matter movement. He made a host of films about US intervention in Latin America, in Nicaragua and Brazil. These films profoundly affected how I chose to take artistic risks as a committed filmmaker.

His fearlessness was contagious: His film Underground about the radical Weather Underground fugitives (which he made with Emile Di Antonio and Mary Lampson), cost him his job as the cinematographer of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, when the FBI came to the set to investigate him (Bill Butler took over as cinematographer). Yet he never stopped making risky documentaries. Haskell was one of our most honored elders at 93 years old. He fought for social justice up until the day he died.

Pamela Yates, Director

Plus de témoignages : http://www.documentary.org/blog/friends-and-colleagues-remember-haskell-wexler