Rider Senior Will Show Documentary at Famed French Film Festival
Patty Wittenburg had only produced one previous documentary when she was approached with an idea for another. Wittenburg’s first effort, Life in Production, earned praise from her professor, Shawn Kildea, who then suggested the possibility of an independent study project to the then-junior Radio and Television Communications major. The task: chronicling the life and work of photojournalist Graeme Phelps “Flip” Schulke, whose images brought the Civil Rights movement into millions of homes far removed from the front lines.
Rider University already owned the rights to Schulke’s digital archive, Kildea explained to Wittenburg, so they would have access to thousands of the legendary lensman’s compelling, poignant and innovative images. The story of Schulke’s career can be seen through the shots; all that was needed was someone to tell it. Wittenburg was immediately sold.
“We started work on pre-production last spring, and were planning to fly to talk to him, but then we received word that he had passed away,” Wittenburg said of Schulke, who died on May 15, 2008, at Columbia Hospital in West Palm Beach, Fla., at age 77. “But once we started talking about it, we decided that this was now really the best time to talk about and remember his life.”
A year later, Wittenburg will become the first Rider student ever to have a film screened at the world-famous Cannes International Film Festival when the Stills of the Movement: The Civil Rights Photojournalism of Flip Schulke debuts on May 13. The 29-minute documentary, co-produced by Wittenburg and Kildea, chronicles the career of the legendary lensman, whose photographs of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., civil rights demonstrations, protests and riots, and other iconic figures of the movement such as boxing great Muhammad Ali, gave people from every corner of America a glimpse into the struggles of African-Americans to attain equality in the turbulent 1960s.
Wittenburg and Kildea, along with executive producer Dr. Barry Janes, professor of Communication who served as Wittenburg’s independent study adviser, also scored a coup by having veteran actor John Amos narrate Stills of the Movement. Amos, a New Jersey native and longtime resident, catapulted to fame in the mid-1970s by playing James Evans Sr. in the innovative television sitcom Good Times, and sustained it in the role of Kunta Kinte in the groundbreaking ABC miniseries Roots. More recently, he played the recurring character of Adm. Percy Fitzwallace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on The West Wing.
“His stepson was actually a student at Rider, so there was some connection already,” Wittenburg explained. “But when we showed him part of the documentary and asked if he’d like to do it, he said he liked it a lot and thought it would be a great project.”
Stills of the Movement was submitted to the Chapman University Dodge College of Film and Media Arts, who coordinates an annual screening for student filmmakers at Cannes. “They have an immense film program, and they accept submissions from other schools,” Wittenburg said.
Through the North Hollywood, Calif.-based Northbound Entertainment, 30 students attend Cannes for the Chapman Festival, where their films are shown on a continuous loop for the duration of the Cannes Film Festival. There, Northbound works on placing the students in jobs in the film industry after they intern for the company for the two weeks in France. “I’d love to be a producer after I graduate,” said Wittenburg, who will join the group late in the day on May 15, hours after earning her diploma from Rider.
Though she was previously unaware of Flip Schulke by name, Wittenburg found herself amazed by how many of his photographs she recognized once she began to study his body of work. “I was a lot more familiar with him than I realized,” she said.”
Schulke was the only photographer who managed to be present at the wake of slain civil rights leaders Medgar Evers in 1963, following his assassination by Ku Klux Klan member Byron De la Beckwith. “Evers’ widow, Myrlie, wrote that when she saw Schulke there, she was angry to see not only a photographer there, but a white one,” Wittenburg explained. “She yelled at him, but when Schulke lowered his camera, Myrlie saw his tears, and all her hate left her body at that moment.”
Earlier, Schulke had established a friendship with King that extended back to 1958, when he was sent to photograph King for a story in Ebony magazine. In Stills of the Movement, Amos details an exchange between King and Schulke in March 1965, toward the beginning of the march on Birmingham, Ala., from Selma. As Amos tells the story, police were beating a child with a club, and Schulke stepped in to pull back an officer’s weapon when King said to him, “We as a people have been beaten down and murdered for hundreds of years. Your job is to document what is happening to us. You cannot be a participant.”
By that time, King had welcomed Schulke into his circle, and he became the principle chronicler of the struggle to achieve racial integration across the United States. Following King’s murder, Schulke’s heartrending shot of a tear rolling down the veiled cheek of King’s widow Coretta Scott King illustrated her grief on the April 19, 1968, cover of Life magazine.
Schulke earned further renown for his iconic shot of Muhammad Ali, clad only in boxing trunks, shadowboxing at the bottom of a swimming pool. He was also one of the first photographers admitted into the Texas Book Depository in Dallas following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Wittenburg says that Stills of the Movement is not completed, but that the present, 29-minute version to be screened at Cannes was cut to that length for a reason. “We have hundreds of hours of film, but to qualify in the ‘short film’ category for festivals, it has to be less than 30 minutes,” she explained. “If we expand it to more than 60 minutes, it will be considered a feature film.”
While each of her crew members – students who worked in production for grades – logged approximately 150 hours each over the length of Wittenburg’s two independent studies, production on Stills of the Movement will continue. Just weeks ago, Myrlie Evers-Williams agreed to be interviewed by Wittenburg, who conducted all of the film’s talks. Wittenburg says that there is no shortage of material in the effort to lengthen the film. “There are so many stories we could have told,” she said. “But there just was not the time in this cut.”
