Ebert Center Screening: "Kartemquin’s Labor Films: Stories of Working in America"
Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum, 600 S. Gregory, Urbana
The 2024 Roger Ebert Lecture and Screening will be held October 17-18 in the Knight Auditorium of Spurlock Museum.
Join us for "Kartemquin’s Labor Films: Stories of Working in America," which will screen The Last Pullman Car (1983, 56 minutes, directed by Jerry Blumenthal and Gordon Quinn, written by Jerry Blumenthal, Greg LeRoy, Gordon Quinn, and Jenny Rohrer) and scenes from Hard Earned, a six-part Al Jazeera series about living on low-wage work in America (40 minutes). A brief Q&A will follow.
Angela Aguayo, associate professor of media and cinema studies, will provide an introduction. Roger Ebert Lecture presenter Patricia Aufderheide—along with Kartemquin Films founding member Gordon Quinn—will share some background about the screenings.
About the Screening
In Kartemquin Films’ six decades of documentary film production, its storytelling about working people and their struggle for dignity stands out over time. In a field where the terms of work and the movements to organize labor are rare subjects, Kartemquin has tackled the big questions, with a Midwest focus.
This screening showcases work from two very different moments in the evolution of documentary storytelling. Made at a moment of industrial crisis in 1983, The Last Pullman Car charts the co-formation and co-collapse of an industry and a union, and reached a nationwide audience on public TV. Its sharp analysis and vivid history are all the more relevant today. The 2015 series Hard Earned follows five families, all trying to thrive on survival wages. Shown on the short-lived Al-Jazeera America cable channel, it drew on Kartemquin’s long tradition of cinéma vérité to give viewers an inside look at daily life among the fifth of Americans who work all day, to make too little for basic needs.