Montgomery Fellow David Grubin, an Emmy Award-winning producer, writer and cinematographer who has won numerous prestigious awards for his documentaries, gave a speech "Presidents on Film" to an audience of approximately 30 people yesterday afternoon in Cooke Auditorium.
After an introduction by College Provost Susan Prager, Grubin, who started his career as a cameraman and has since made over 100 documentaries, spoke about the significance of making films and showed clips from several of his documentaries on American Presidents.
As a filmmaker, he said he sees his role as that of a storyteller as most people only care about historical facts when they are embodied in stories. To tell these stories, Grubin said he wants his documentaries to work like novels.
"Americans need to know their history and this is a great way to do it," he said.
His aim in making documentaries about presidents, Grubin said, is to show the internal life of the president on film, and how his personal interests affected his politics.
The first film clip, from his documentary on Theodore Roosevelt, was meant to portray the brooding, melancholy side of the Roosevelt's personality in a letter the president wrote to his son expressing doubt about his election victory.
The next film clip showed Franklin D. Roosevelt's struggle to conceal the difficulty he had in walking.
Grubin described filmmaking as close to the oral tradition of story-telling, as films, through their use of pictures as well as the spoken word, are more emotional and direct than books.
"Films are really closer to the method of poetry," Grubin said, "A good history film makes ideas visceral."
Documentaries can signal speculations on presidents' motivations to the audience, Grubin said, as such stories "thrive on ambiguity and complexity."
He compared the function of a historical documentary to 19th century gatherings in which people turned out to listen to politicians speak.
Grubin also mentioned the purpose music can serve in films.
"Music reaches the mind beyond words," he said, adding that music can add a sense of immediacy and make the past come alive in films.
Grubin also showed a film clip focusing on the Civil Rights movement in Alabama during Lyndon Johnson's presidency to illustrate that films are "highly personal business."
"Every filmmaker brings himself to the film," he said.
Grubin said he had disliked President Johnson before making the film, but then changed his mind.
"In the 1960s, I was outside the White House looking in," he said. "By making the film, I was able to get into the White House looking out and that helped me to emphasize with him."
The filmmaker's task is to hide himself and his craft, he said, as making a history film is partly an act of the director's imagination. The frequently held belief that there is only one interpretation to history gives films an air of authority, Grubin said.
"Film is very seductive stuff," he said.
The director's responsibility, he said, is not to "let the desire for a good story skew the record."
The last film clip, from Grubin's current project, a documentary on Abraham Lincoln and his wife, had never been shown before. The film, set in 1864, the third year of the Civil War, is an effort to depict "Lincoln both as a tenderhearted, compassionate man, and hard as nails," Grubin said.
The difficulty in making documentaries lies in choosing emblematic facts to include without allowing the film to become loaded down by the weight of too much information.
"A film cannot be as expansive or leisurely as a book," he said, adding that books and films are perfect complements for each other.
As a producer, Grubin has won every major award in his field, including two George Foster Peabody awards, two Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University awards, and eight Emmys.
As a writer, he has won the Writer's Guild Documentary Award twice and the Emmy Award once, while he received three Emmy nominations as a director and one Emmy and five Emmy nominations as a cinematographer.
He is currently producing a six-hour biography of Abraham and Mary Lincoln Todd -- A House Divided -- and a four-hour film on Napoleon for PBS.
