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Wide Angle 21.2 (1999) 3-7



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Introduction:
A Festschrift in Honor of George Stoney

Barbara Abrash and Cara Mertes

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"Ideally, [media] for social change is a device for promoting understanding and action...You are collecting evidence; you are encouraging witness; you are emboldening ordinary people to 'go public'."

George Stoney, Turn on the Power 1

George Stoney, in a career that spans more than sixty years, may be said to be an embodiment of the documentary tradition. Though we were familiar with his career, nothing quite prepared us for the complexity of his work or the extent of his influence, which was revealed as we culled through manuscripts, documents, and the many responses to our calls for original material. Again and again, we were struck by the range and depth of his friendships, as well as by his enduring commitment to media in all forms, for the community, and by the community. Teacher, media maker, and activist, he has long been a familiar and dynamic presence, from Brazil to Ireland, from the Flaherty seminars to local public access stations. What is less evident in this very visible life is his enduring contribution to the institutions, practices, and programs that sustain alternative media.

Stoney is a paradox. Not an academic, he is a distinguished faculty member of New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. 2 He does not call himself a scholar, yet he is the subject of significant media scholarship. He does not answer [End Page 3] to the description of auteur, yet he is the director and/or producer of over fifty films and videos. "A very happy collaborator" is George Stoney's description of himself. Our challenge has been to create a journal as multi-faceted as he is; one that reflects his unique combination of theory and practice, individual commitment and community involvement, and that respects his insistence that it takes many voices to tell the story. In this spirit, what you will find here is a gathering of voices that evoke the work, principles, and web of relationships that comprise a portrait of the man.

George Stoney, a man who still writes letters on a manual typewriter and eschews email, has nonetheless been working across "multiple media platforms" all his life. As a journalist, photographer, broadcaster, filmmaker, and videomaker, he has boldly taken up technologies--from typewriters to radio to cameras to digital video--for social communication. His work has been shown on 16mm film in church halls, on Hi-8 video in the jungles of Brazil, and on national television. His documentaries, All My Babies, VTR St.-Jacques and How the Myth Was Made, stand as influential markers in the history of documentary film. His search for noncommercial public venues for expression and exchange led to [End Page 4] the creation of public access television. It also informed the production and outreach campaign of The Uprising of '34. His is an astonishing legacy that reaches across a century of communications revolutions.

Stoney's approach to the uses of media may seem idealistic in these cynical, corporate times. At the same time, it is entirely appropriate in a globally interconnected world in which activists are using old and new media to advocate for human rights, HIV treatment, labor issues, and anti-globalization efforts. Basic issues of fairness and equity, classic concerns of documentary films, have been placed on the international agenda. "Letting people speak for themselves," George's deceptively simple but powerful motivation, is an increasingly radical proposition.

Dirk Koning, manager of the Grand Rapids community media center, shares this story about George: "I call this," he says, "the Stoney Factor. Last year, George got on an elevator I was on at the 11th floor. He said, 'Dirk, I need you to do something for me.' I said, 'Sure George, what's up?' He said, 'There's a Brazilian delegation in the lobby that asked me to speak at a nationalorganizing conference for community television, but I'm preparing to go toIreland and I think it...

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