Children Make Movies

Oscar nominated documentary short from 1965

Documentary about the strained relations that Latin America has with the United States. Halleck says at the beginning that the images of Latin America she saw in Hollywood films didn't match the reality she knew growing up in Cuba. She then uses footage of old Hollywood films, newsreels and corporate advertising films to show that, even in the early 20th century, these problematic relations between Latin America and the US were well known to Americans, even if they didn't want to recognize them.

A performance by Margo Lee Sherman, Christian DuPavillon, and Kenny Eisenstat based on a dream that Elka Schumann had about the French Revolution. Originally filmed in 16mm in Glover Vermont. Direction by Peter Schumann. The digital version was edited by DeeDee Halleck and Mary Feaster in 2019.

A film about a Ukrainian woman who was an ardent supporter of the Soviet Union. She bakes pirogi and speaks of her life. She was the cook at a popular Ukrainian cafeteria on the Lower East Side for years and later ran a boarding house on the Burlingham Road near Bloomingburg, New York. Music by the Penny Whistlers.

A pentacostal baptism service at a large church (former movie theater) in the South Bronx, shot 1977, edited 1979. Begun as a landscape film about the destruction of the Bronx in the 1970s. Camera: Richard Serra, DeeDee Halleck, and Babette Mangolte, Jane Warrenbrand, Stuart Math, and Ted Glass.

Judith Williamson examines consumer culture in America, from the multiplication of products and their functions to capitalism’s colonization of the body. What is the meaning of freedom in modern day America? Is it the freedom to change the world or the freedom to change our socks?

Fantastical, larger-than-life puppetry and rambunctiously playful choreography is framed against an Edenic backdrop of Vermont farm country in George Griffin and DeeDee Halleck’s luminous, lyrical short film, which documents the 1974 edition of the Bread and Puppet Theater’s annual Domestic Resurrection Circus, taking place soon after the company’s relocation from downtown Manhattan to the rural New England enclave where it remains headquartered to this day.

A documentary about the Bread and Puppet Theater made from over 200 hours of footage shot at the Bread and Puppet Domestic Resurrection Circus from 1990-1998. Neither a straight documentary nor an “educational” rendition of theater history, Ah! is more like a Bread and Puppet film, one that captures the spirit and essence of this influential theater group.

Historian, political philosopher, environmentalist, and anarchist Murray Bookchin demonstrates how Time magazine obliterates time in this 1982 episode of Paper Tiger Television. Time is soothing. The events in Time look nothing like the events experienced by those at them. The news in Time happens elsewhere, happens to others. Time is reliable. It comes each week, and with it, past, present, and future merge to the point of disappearance. Like television, Time lulls readers into complacency because the news is given an even, consistent tone. All issues are treated the same, with the same bland distance. Time makes a reality so unreal, so colorless. The news in Time comes written and photographed in a comforting tone that treats events as inconsequential and thus encourages a notion of not just a false sense of security, but a sense that our actions are without consequence.

Paper Tiger Television is a public-access television series created in 1981 by a New York–based media collective led by DeeDee Halleck. Produced with a low-budget, do-it-yourself aesthetic, the series features artists, scholars, and activists critically examining mainstream media, often by analyzing newspapers, magazines, or television content on camera. Distributed through public-access channels and grassroots networks, the program became an influential example of alternative media, promoting media literacy and challenging corporate control of information.