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FILM
Midge Mackenzie remembered
BY LOREN KING

In the close-knit, everybody-knows-everybody world of documentary filmmaking in Boston, Midge Mackenzie cut a striking figure. Arriving from New York as a visiting fellow at Harvard University in the early 1980s, Mackenzie quickly became known in the filmmaking community as much for her style — Stetson hat, cowboy boots, wild jewelry, a quick wit, and a cantankerous streak — as for her prolific body of work. The award-winning film director, producer, still photographer, writer, social activist, and founding board member of the New England chapter of Women in Film and Video died of cancer in January at the age of 65, in her home in London.

Born in London in 1938, Mackenzie was best known for Shoulder to Shoulder, the 1975 WETA/BBC Masterpiece Theatre documentary series that chronicled the much-overlooked story of the Women’s Social and Political Union’s militant campaign for the vote in England and the brutal punishment they endured. The project — which she undertook with an all-female crew — took seven years to complete. By the end, Mackenzie was an expert on feminist history, and wrote the companion book to the series.

Mackenzie moved to the US to work for Screen Gems, a division of Columbia that produced television specials. Her focus was the 1960s-era art community in New York City. Robert Joffrey of the Joffrey Ballet was so impressed with Mackenzie’s experimental film techniques in these specials that he asked her to produce and stage Astarte, a multimedia rock ballet. It was her work on that project — which made the cover of Time magazine — that cemented her reputation as an innovative artist.

She directed the first Dorothy Arzner Film Festival, named for the only female director working in Hollywood at the advent of talking films. Mackenzie’s major film credits include I Stand Here Ironing, based on the short story by Tillie Olsen; Women Talking, the first film about the "new wave" of feminism in America, with Kate Millett and Betty Friedan; Prisoners of Childhood, a four-part series inspired by Alice Miller’s books; and The Sky: A Silent Witness, a documentary about human rights produced in collaboration with Amnesty International.

One of Mackenzie’s final projects, a trilogy about remote communities in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, screened in 2002 at Harvard’s Carpenter Center. Another project, about the work of maxillofacial surgeon Iain Hutchison, which includes Mark Gilbert’s paintings of Hutchison’s patients, screened in 2002 at London’s National Portrait Gallery, as part of the touring exhibition "Saving Faces."

A memorial service, "Midge Mackenzie Remembered," will take place at the Coolidge Corner Theatre, on Saturday, April 17, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. The event, which will include clips from her works, is free.


Issue Date: April 16 - 22, 2004
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