Jim Rutenbeck - From WV Company Town to Sundance
Jim Rutenbeck, (jrutenbeck@gmail.com) like Barbara Kopple and many other filmmakers, began his film career in West Virginia. He made “Company Town” in 1984 and the rest is history. (see below) He is presently working on a film about a working class Catholic church in Lawrence, Mass. with funds from the Sundance Institute Documentary Fund.
I have been showing “Company Town” around the state again - at the First Paden City Labor Day Film Festival, at the Sutton WV Filmmakers Film Festival and elsewhere. I even chose it as one of the “ten essential films about WV” on my WV/Appalachian film website.
Rutenbeck returned to WV years latter as part of another great film he made, “Raise the Dead.” The preacher he profiles ends up in War, McDowell County giving a sermon. The spring WVIFF screened the film several years ago.
Title: Scenes from a Parish
a 90 minute documentary by James RutenbeckThe one-liner for the film is:In a hard-pressed city north of Boston, nine Catholics face obstacles that threaten to break apart the fellowship they seek. Background
Ten years ago, I experienced a strange and powerful epiphany. Roused from my sleep in the middle of the night, I was overcome by the raw love of God. I’m not the supernatural type: this vision came to a mid-career filmmaker, someone more likely to chase leftover film stock than an encounter with God. Suddenly everyday life felt heightened. Daily routines, like breaking bread at dinner, seemed sacramental. At the local Stop & Shop, I felt at one with the produce packers and clerks, who greeted me with wary smiles. I became a suburban mystic, elated and connected. But I was alone in my spirituality.
“Scenes from a Parish” is grounded in my desire to reach beyond myself and find communion with the saints—the unsung and the unlikely, the forgotten and marginalized. I found them at Saint Patrick’s Parish, a Catholic church in Lawrence, the poorest city in Massachusetts. Lawrence’s unemployment rates are twice the national average, and three out of four of its children go to bed hungry each night. Formerly a mill town, today the corner store is most likely to be a bodega in this majority Latino city.
“We have all known the long loneliness and have learned that the only solution is love, and that love comes with community,” Catholic activist Dorothy Day once said.
But in a city like Lawrence, Day’s vision is an elusive ideal.
Themes, Approach & Visual Style
“Scenes from a Parish” is 90-minute television documentary with multiple characters, story lines and points of view, all rooted in the commonalities of a specific time and place – and faith. In the face of poverty and a shifting population, Saint Patrick’s Parish offers local residents the constants of faith and belonging. Each of our characters is drawn to the parish by the universal human desire for community, to be a part of something greater than oneself.
But fellowship is mediated by personal circumstances. Each character must confront a range of obstacles that threaten to break apart the fellowship they seek.
The film’s essential question is whether socially isolated parishioners can find a way out of their loneliness and enter into a communal experience. But in a place polarized by class, ethnicity and language, is a common identity even possible?
The underlying theme of the possibility of community resonates beyond Saint Patrick’s; this film is a case study about the future of us all. Our nation is similarly experiencing anxieties and tensions as immigrants from diverse parts of the globe are transforming the country in multiple ways—and often the places where these changes are first felt are poor and struggling communities such as Lawrence.
We are in the fourth year of production. Our style is observational; access to and intimacy with our characters is central to the filmmaking approach. We travel in two-person crews and shoot in wide screen Digi-cam format, often relying on available light. This format is light sensitive, and it has allowed us to capture many spontaneous and visually arresting scenes.
Structure
The stories of the film are told in cinema-verité sequences, narrated in voice-over drawn from interviews with a diverse group of characters. The film narrative unfolds chronologically in a three-act structure. In the first act, Father Paul O’Brien is introduced as an idealistic and irreverent priest seeking to unify a fractured parish. His vision is challenged by a shrinking majority of Irish-American parishioners who cling to a memory of what the church once was. But he has support from Peggy Oliveto, an outsider to the parish who believes God has led her to Lawrence to help the poor. Over the next three years, they will come to realize the full implications of this mission.
As the film progresses, we introduce three lonely characters through whom the friction between the church and individual, old and new, public and private, unfold. Both Bobby McCord, who appears mentally unstable, and Elvys Guzman, a former gang leader, seem threatening to other parishioners. Rosaura Vasquez, a recent immigrant from the
Dominican Republic, overcomes her fears and joins the Anglo church choir, but privately wrestles with other conflicts. A close study in conflict, the film’s structure is dictated by the organic pacing of each character’s personal journey.
Project Status
Over the last four years we have raised $90,300 of a $230,000 total budget. We have shot 150 hours of digital video and anticipate three or four more shooting days to complete production in March 2007. We have nearly finished a rough cut seeking funds for final editing, music score, color correction, sound mix and other post-production related expenses. We will also create a “Scenes from a Parish” website. We will finish the film in December 2007.
Director
James Rutenbeck produced and directed his first independent film, “Company Town”, in 1984. A portrait of an abandoned coal town in central West Virginia, the movie grew from his experience as an Appalachian Teacher Corps intern. After completing a Master of Science in Visual Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Rutenbeck directed his second film, “Losing Ground”, a portrait of an Iowa farm family. The hour-long film screened at the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, Museum of Modern Art in New York, Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston and Centre Pompidou in
Paris, as a selection of Cinema du Reel. In 1999 he completed work on “Raise the Dead”, about holiness preachers in rural Appalachia. Awarded “Best Independent Film” at the 1999 New England Film Festival, Raise the Dead screened at the Museum of
Fine Arts in Boston and at festivals such as Cinema du Reel, Lussas, DoubleTake and Margaret Mead. He is currently four years into production of “Scenes from a Parish”, an exploration of the lives of nine characters from a working-class Catholic parish in
Lawrence, Massachusetts.
Rutenbeck has received grants for his work from the Sundance Institute, Southern Humanities Media Fund, LEF Foundation, Latino Public Broadcasting, Massachusetts Cultural Council and numerous humanities foundations.
Rutenbeck is also an editor of television documentaries for PBS, BBC, Channel Four (UK) and Showtime. His credits include the Emmy-winning Siamese Twins for the PBS series NOVA and “City of Hope” for the Blackside series America’s War on Poverty, which received DuPont Columbia Journalism Award in1994. Other editing credits include “Home Before Dark”, an independent feature produced by Scout Productions, winner of “Best Independent Film” at the 1996 Hamptons International Film Festival.
Angelica Allende Brisk (Co-producer) has been an award winning independent producer and a freelance editor since 1991. Ms. Brisk’s independent production credits include Sex Without Love, a poem by Sharon Olds, Never Met Picasso, Next Stop Wonderland and 16 Decisions, an international festival favorite exploring a Bangladeshi woman’s social charter. As a staff producer for La Plaza at WGBH in Boston, Ms. Brisk has written, produced and directed several half-hour documentaries for local and national broadcast.
Tina Nguyen (Co-producer) worked as a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times for five years after graduating from the University of California. As a reporter, she covered a wide array of beats, including local politics, crime, education and Asian American affairs. Seeking longer-format journalism, she later turned to documentaries and has been working on high-profile documentary series for Nova and “New Americans” for Independent Lens.
Stephen McCarthy (Director of Photography) is a Boston-based cinematographer whose work ranges from feature length documentary films and television series for PBS, HBO, and BBC-TV to short segments for Sesame Street. His talent has yielded such programs as the Peabody Award-winning PBS series “Vote for Me!” and MTV’s Real World/
Boston. Mr. McCarthy’s most recent work includes Kinsey and “Bubble Boy” for American Experience and Everest 2006 Project for David Breashears.
Boy from “Company Town”(1984)
