Corte Madera Resident Takes Documentary to Tiburon International Film Festival

This article was originally published in Larkspur-Corte Madera Patch on April 9, 2011. Mindy Steiner's documentary "Positive Negatives: The Photography of David Johnson" will be shown at the Smith Rafael Film Center this Sunday, April 15, at 4:15 p.m.

Mindy Steiner is having a hell of a weekend. OK, her 30-minute documentary, "Positive Negatives: The Photography of David Johnson," actually premiered at the end of January, at the San Diego Black Film Festival — but Monday night, it’s in the Tiburon International Film Festival.

Both Steiner and her subject live in Corte Madera, so “the big one for us is the Tiburon festival,” says Steiner. “We’ve been talking about this film for a year, and all our friends and relatives and acquaintances and coworkers in Marin have been saying, ‘When can we see it?’”

Steiner's film is showing today at the Sacramento Film Festival and tomorrow it’s at the Roxy as part of the San Francisco International Women’s Film Festival. Later this year, there’s the Langston Hughes African American Film Festival, in Seattle.

Steiner’s film is about the first African American photographer to study with Ansel Adams. That was in 1946, at the California Institute of Fine Arts (now San Francisco Art Institute), when Johnson was 19. Johnson's wonderful black-and-white photographs of daily life in San Francisco’s Fillmore District in the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s gained renewed attention in 2001, with the Fillmore District episode of the KQED-TV series "Neighborhoods." That led to a 2005 book on the era when the Fillmore really was a Jazz District: Harlem of the West, by Elizabeth Pepin and Lewis Watts, which features many of Johnson’s photos.

“What sets his photographs apart,” says Steiner, “is that they show — in the midst of discrimination in jobs and housing and (in the ’60s) the Fillmore being bulldozed and the locals sent to live in Hunters Point — people eating food, dancing, getting married, having families, shopping, listening to music — just living their lives. He captured a huge part of American history through his lens. I wanted to be involved in getting his story told.”

Steiner came to filmmaking by way of the Western Athletic Clubs (Bay Club Marin, San Francisco Bay Club), where she was one of four owners and, until she retired in 2009, the chief financial officer. By then living in Corte Madera, her son and daughter grown and gone, Steiner was “playing around with videos,” making short training films and fitness-oriented documentaries (among them a 15-minute history of fitness from World War II to the present) for Western Athletic, as well as wedding-highlight videos for friends.

That year, she met Johnson at Hillside Church in eastern Corte Madera, where she’d long been friends with his new wife, Jackie. By then, galleries were interested in showing his work. Steiner filmed Johnson speaking at the Togonon Gallery in San Francisco and the Opal Gallery in Atlanta “and that became the crux of the film.”

Steiner, who used to write songs and was once in an all-girl Christian band (“I don’t really like performing; it’s too nerve-wracking”) is the first person I’ve known to compare filmmaking with songwriting: “You’ve got the introduction; the verse, when you’re telling the story; the chorus, when you give the theme; another verse; back to the main theme — you can go back and forth like that — and then there’s the crescendo and bringing you home to the end. I think this little film does that.”

And meeting Johnson has opened the door to more than one little film.

“There were originally 32 photography students under Adams during the ‘golden decade of photography,’ between 1945 and 1955,” Steiner says. “We know the whereabouts of 10 who are still alive.”

By “we,” she means Jack Fulton, who leads the photography department at the S.F. Art Institute; the two plan to collaborate on several more documentaries. “Of those 10, we’ll probably document the seven local ones: two more in Marin, three in San Francisco, and one in Berkeley.”

They’ve gotten a grant and are planning the first film, on San Francisco’s Charles Wong, who “has great shots of Chinatown in the ’40s. He created photo series and wrote prose for every picture.”

While the Tiburon film fest is “a true United Nations of cinema,” according to Via
magazine, “showcasing films from around the entire world,” it features a Marin filmmaker series as well. On Monday night, three other local filmmakers will also show short films: Nicholas Carmen’s Piano Fingers; Diana Paul’s Birth: A Human Rights Issue; and Steve Gatlin’s music video White Trash Blues.

April 7, 7 pm, Tiburon International Film Festival, Playhouse Theater, 415.381.4123; www.TiburonFilmFestival.com.