For more than 30 years, starting in 1970, the Carnegie Museum of Art played a key role in Pittsburgh’s film scene. Among the artists it inspired was Tony Buba.
The Carnegie’s program “was really important for people working in independent film,” said Buba, who was a film student at Ohio University when he began attending screenings and filmmaker talks there. In the days before home video — let alone YouTube or Vimeo — the museum’s theater was a place for the community to gather and share ideas.
It was at a 1979 Carnegie screening of one of his films, Buba said, that he met a visiting German arthouse filmmaker named Werner Herzog, who went on to champion Buba’s short documentaries about people in his hometown, Braddock. Thanks in part to that boost, Buba’s work went on to be screened at galleries and museums internationally, from the Museum of Modern Art to the Berlin International Film Festival.
Buba was among those who objected when, in 2003, the museum abruptly shuttered its film department. Twenty years later, he’s happy to help celebrate that history by curating the first annual edition of a new monthly film series there.
The eight Saturday screenings, running May through December, will feature 17 works drawn from a half-century of American independent films, with some of the filmmakers in attendance. Most are short documentaries, though the series includes a June 10 screening of George Romero’s cult-favorite 1977 vampire movie “Martin,” which was shot in Braddock (with Buba running audio for the production and playing a small on-screen role).
Other highlights include September's rare theatrical screening of “Seventeen,” a feature-length 1982 documentary by Joel DeMott and Jeff Kreiens about a group of seniors at a Muncie, Ind., high school that was produced for PBS but never aired because of concerns about vulgar language and depictions of interracial romance.
Many of Buba’s films about Braddock — his short character studies as well as feature-length works like the “Lightning Over Braddock: A Rustbowl Fantasy” and the more straightforward “Struggles in Steel” — explore the legacy and decline of heavy industry. Some of the films he chose for the Carnegie are in a similar vein, as well as “inspired by the spirit” of the museum’s own extensive film and video collection.
“What I’ve been most interested in is place — films relating to place, labor, identity, politics,” he said.
In July, “We Tell: 50 Years of Participatory Community Media, Wages of Work” showcases films by Philadelphia-based nonprofit Scribe Video Center including “Finally Got the News,” an hour-long 1970 documentary about the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, a grassroots labor movement in Detroit’s car factories.
August’s program spotlights films by Appalshop, a nonprofit media and arts center in Kentucky’s Appalachian coalfields. They include “Buffalo Creek Flood: An Act of Man” (1975), about a disaster precipitated by the collapse of a coal-waste dam, and “Chemical Valley” (1991), about a West Virginia community divided over the health and economic effects of a chemical plant. Both films were directed or co-directed by Mimi Pickering, who is scheduled to attend.
The featured October film is “Canners” (2014), Manfred Kirchheimer’s portrait of the men and women who make a living by collecting bottles and cans in New York City.
The series begins, however, by hearkening to a heyday of Pittsburgh’s own indie and experimental scene, the early and mid-1980s. Peggy Ahwesh will present “Vertie Opera,” “Paranormal Intelligence” and “Nostalgia for Paradise,” her trilogy of short Super 8 films documenting the lives of her friends in 1983. (Ahwesh, a Canonsburg native, went on to international acclaim for her work.) Also on the program is “The Suicide Squeeze,” Brady Lewis’ “whodunit” blending film-noir tropes with playful visual effects achieved on an optical printer to create a witty pseudo-narrative.
Buba, whose three-minute “Home Movie” rounds out the bill, said Ahwesh’s gritty approach and Lewis’s more formalist style helped define the kind of work being made in Pittsburgh at the time. “Both groups were providing such an energy that was inspirational for me,” he said.
The Carnegie said the film series will be annual, with a new curator each year. Most screenings are at 3 p.m. in the museum theater, except for “Martin,” which will screen in the evening in the outdoor sculpture court.
Admission to the films is $10 and is not included with museum admission.
