Film Notes: AN EVENING WITH NORMAN WEISSMAN
AN EVENING WITH NORMAN WEISSMAN
7 p.m. Wednesday, February 28, 2018
53 Wall Street Auditorium
35mm and 16mm documentaries and industrial films from the 1950s-1970s, with an intriduction by Brian Meacham and a Q&A with director Norman Weissman
Film Notes by Brian Meacham
PDF
Norman Weissman (born 1925) wrote, directed, and produced hundreds of works for film and television over a 42-year-long career. After graduating from Dartmouth College in 1948, he began making films for clients ranging from government organizations like the United States Information Agency, the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Air Force, and the Department of Labor; to corporations including Pfizer, Georgia Pacific, IBM, and Shell Oil; as well as health advocates including the National Heart Association and the Cerebral Palsy Foundation. In 2017, Weissman donated a collection of more than forty film prints and videotapes of his work made between the late 1940s and early 1980s to the Film Study Center. Weissman is also the author of six books, including the memoir , published in 2009.
All fims directed by Norman Weissman unless otherwise noted. Special thanks to Arnold Gorlick.
AN ADVENTURE IN FRIENDSHIP (1949, 22 mins, 16mm)
Weissman’s first film resulted from a collaboration between the Big Brother Movement (which funded the film) and New York City’s juvenile court system. It casts a neo-realist eye on the story of Bill, who finds trouble “in the deep shadows of the city,” and finds a way out through the his new Big Brother.
THE SCHOOL OF THE OZARKS (1953, 11 mins, 35mm)
One of the most popular documentary films made for the United States Information Agency for dissemnination in Europe during the Cold War, THE SCHOOL OF THE OZARKS shows how rural communities were transformed when a new generation was educated in modern farming methods.
EVERYBODY KNOWS (Dir. Richard Galbreath, with story and screenplay by Norman Weissman, 1958, 15 mins, 16mm)
Sponsored by the Community Relations department of the Borg-Warner corporation, this film depicts the relationship between individual productivity and prosperity, demonstrating that “what everybody knows” can be destructive to a nation’s economic health.
HERE TO THERE (1965, 12 mins, 16mm)
Shown at the 1965 New York World’s Fair, this film made for the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority celebrated the network of new bridges, tunnels and expressways connecting New York City to suburban communities. An indirect tribute to the leadership of Robert Moses, the controversial planner most responsible for this transformation.
IT HAPPENED IN HOLLAND (1970, 12 mins, 16mm)
A Paramount Pictures short subject, distributed alongside feature films, this travelogue, financed by the Netherlands National Tourist Office, takes a lighthearted tour through Holland, showcasing tulip pickers, a timetraveling Dutch Master, a blind carillonneur, and a group of young women giving chase to a young man through the streets of the city.
IMPULSE '90 (1969, 22 mins, 16mm)
A “rock-and-roll money management lecture” distributed to labor unions and high schools, IMPULSE ‘90 was designed by the Credit Union National Association to reduce the unrestrained impulse-buying of their membership. The film ends with some sound advice about the coming “cashless society” and some prescient thoughts on online shopping and banking.
Presented in the Treasures from the Yale Film Archive series with support from Paul L. Joskow '70 M.Phil., '72 Ph.D. Printed Film Notes are distributed to the audience before each Treasures screening.
