An American Artist Is Captured On Film

By An Award-Winning Filmmaker

By Shannon Hicks

Amber Edwards calls George Segal “the elder statesman of New Jersey artists.” The internationally celebrated Mr Segal captured people in his bronzes and plaster figures in the daily acts of living. His life-sized works present people who are standing behind the counter of a diner, driving or riding on a bus, hanging letters on a movie theater marquee. They can be seen around the world and are popular as tourist attractions at the FDR Memorial in Washington, D.C., the Holocaust Memorial in San Francisco, and New York’s Port Authority Bus Terminal, among dozens of other locations.

When filmmaker Amber Edwards began working on her latest project, a documentary about the life of the artist, she never dreamed it would turn into a beautiful piece of art itself. The Newtown resident also never imagined her subject would not be around to enjoy the final version of the film that took over two years to complete. George Segal died in June 2000, during the same time Ms Edwards was working on the rough cut of what has become George Segal: American Still Life.

The film is a fantastic look into the life of someone who has been an American icon, whether people realized they were looking at and enjoying his work or not, for over 50 years. Visitors may not realize who did the work they are looking at, but his work leaves lasting impressions.

Segal’s sculptures at the FDR Memorial, for instance, have become almost standard images of what many people think of when envisioning the Depression since the FDR_monument opened in 1997. Segal was commissioned to create three sculptures and came up with “The Breadline,” depicting five men in tattered overcoats and hats humbly waiting in a 1930s urban breadline alongside a brick building; “Applachian Couple,” with a poor farmer standing behind his wife, who is sitting in their one possession, a chair; and “Fireside Chat,” which presents a man sitting in a chair listening intently to one of President Roosevelt’s famous radio speeches.

Amber Edwards lives in Newtown with her husband, the writer Justin Scott. She moved into Newtown full-time last year, and continues to commute to work at NJN Public Television in New Jersey when her job requires her to be on-site. Most of her work, including the final cutting for the George Segal documentary, can usually be done at home.

Her previous documentaries have included The Dancing Man — Peg Leg Bates, a 1992 PBS project; Vladimir Feltsman in Moscow, a 1993 PBS project; Against the Odds: The Artists of the Harlem Renaissance, a 1994 PBS project; and Into the Light, a short documentary completed in 1996 concerning the birth of the film industry in New Jersey.

Her 1998 film Quicksand & Banana Peels: A Year in the Life of Two Principals was the winner of CEN’s Program Award for Public Affairs. Her works have been screened at festivals in New York, Paris, Montreal, Amsterdam, St Petersburg, Sydney, and Sweden. She has won five CINE Golden Eagles, eight regional Emmy Awards, and awards from Columbus International Film Festival, Chicago International Film Festival, and National Educational Media Network.

Since 1998 she has also been the host and producer of NJN’s Emmy Award-winning program State of the Arts, which interviews major figures of fine and performing arts and also presents segments on cultural issues and events.

Ms Edwards served as producer, director, writer and editor for George Segal: American Still Life. She spent hundreds of hours researching the life, career, and what has become the legacy of George Segal.

“I was very surprised with his patience with us,” Ms Edwards said last week. “He was very generous, and he really did you the courtesy of thinking about your questions before blurting out an answer. It was pleasurable to work with him.”

Work on the project began in March 1998, after a major Segal retrospective had been presented at the Hirschhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. “I remember thinking we were the right people to do a retrospective documentary on him,” Ms Edwards said of Mr Segal, who was a 50-plus year resident of New Jersey and someone who made himself very accessible to others long after he became an artistic household word.

The film crew’s final work with Mr Segal was in November of 1999. Shortly after that, he was hospitalized, and never recovered. It turns out that the casting session that was shot that month, when Mr Segal was working on a piece called “42nd Street Deli,” would be for the last sculpture the artist completed before the artist’s death.

“To us, he was always lively, vigorous, mentally alert, and hell-bent on working,” Ms Edwards wrote in a note she posted on the PBS Web page (www.pbs.org/georgesegal).

George Segal had been diagnosed with cancer ten years ago and at the time had been given two years to live. Ms Edwards only learned of that at Mr Segal’s funeral.

“Whatever he knew about his health, he never let on to us,” Ms Edwards recalled last week.

George Segal: American Still Life presents interviews with the artist himself and his wife, Helen, including a wonderful story of the first time the couple experimented with the gauze strips that would become the base of Mr Segal’s work for the rest of his life.

There are interviews with critics and art historians including Barbara Rose, Sam Hunter, and Pierre Restany. There is a priceless segment between Segal and a young Mike Wallace, and in a brave step away from turning her work into a purely worshipful film, Ms Edwards also included comments from the art critic Hilton Kramer, who was not exactly a fan of Segal’s work.

“Hilton Kramer did not like George Segal’s sculpture,” and he made no bones about saying so, Ms Edwards said. “He did, however, like George’s drawings. This offered a clear-eyed look at George as an artist.

“[Hilton] has a lot of integrity,” the filmmaker continued. “It wouldn’t have been fair not to have included him. He brought a lot to the film.”

Local Premieres On

Large & Small Screens

The one-hour documentary will receive its area premiere on Sunday, April 29, at 2 pm, when it is shown at Yale Center for British Art as part of Film Fest New Haven 6.

The festival is a three-day event which is returning to the arts and entertainment district of New Haven for the sixth time this year. George Segal: American Still Life was selected from over 400 entries. Festival director Nina Adams says she and the volunteers and jury who screen every one of the films entered into the festival look for something new.

“What I’m looking for are either films with something very new to say, like introducing us to someone new or a new concept; saying something in a new narrative way; or saying something new visually,” Ms Adams, who has served as the festival’s artistic director for four years, said Monday morning. “In other words, I want to see that remarkable spark of creativity that an enormous number of filmmakers have.

“There is a remarkable quality to [the George Segal] documentary,” Ms Adams continued. “She doesn’t just show the art of George Segal. She also tells us about the man and the times he lived through, and that’s not easy.

“You come away with a portrait of an artist that has a richness, a depth, that you don’t always see. She didn’t just show us a sculptor,” Ms Adams added.

The New Haven festival will feel like a homecoming for Ms Edwards, a graduate of Yale University.

“There’s an exciting part about Amber being here, because she is a Yale graduate,” festival director Nina Adams said this week. “But we do not choose films on the basis of local, Yale or Connecticut connections at all. However it’s very exciting that we do happen to have someone from Yale, and her film is going to be screened at YCBA, which is a new venue for us.”

Following its presentation at the New Haven film festival, George Segal: American Still Life will be shown on PBS (WNET-13; Charter Communications channel 13) on Sunday, May 6, at 7 pm. The film will also receive its southeast premiere that weekend when it is screened on Saturday, May 5, during the 4th Annual DoubleTake Documentary Film Festival in Durham, N.C.

For information concerning New Haven Film Festival 6, call 203-776-6789 or visit www.filmfest.org.