https://www.dignitymemorial.com/obituaries/staten-island-ny/robert-haller-10175717
We are very sad to hear about Haller. He has been one of the mainstays of avant-garde film for five decades. My wife, Louisa, and I have worked with him off and on since the early '70s. The last time we saw him was in October of 2019, at the memorial service for Gerry O'Grady at Anthology. Haller was one of the two supporting pillars of the earliest days of Pittsburgh's avant-garde film culture--Sally Dixon was the other. Together they invented, developed, and held together, through thick and thin, the Carnegie film program and Pittsburgh Filmmakers. There were other good people in the invention of PF, but Haller was essential, and probably the most travelled. He never missed any of the film conferences at Buffalo, and he was assiduous in documenting them, as well as many other such events, photographically. He is the unofficial photographer of record for that period of the takeoff of the avant-garde film movement, a period when image-device culture was not a "thing," and images of that culture were rare. Haller's many photographs of film people such as Brakhage, Baillie, Schneeman, Snow, Ken and Flo Jacobs, Emschwiller, Sharits, Frampton, Gehr, Kubelka, Blue, Paik, Shigeko Kubota, the Vasulkas, the Heins, and many other artists, as well as the many institutional leaders of the movement, are surely the major visual record of avant-garde film culture in the two or three decades before cell-phone photography. We have lost so many people from Haller's generation recently, and Haller and Sally are among the most painful for us. Haller was one of the most unassuming leaders I've known. In spite of his modesty, he was always a leader. When he hosted one of the most important planning meetings of the media-arts-center movement in the '80s, he made sure that there was a verbatim record of the entire two-day discussion among about 20 of the leaders and funders of the major media centers in the country--every single word is on the printed record. (A hard copy of that conference record is one of many such things in a collection I deposited a couple of years ago at Anthology--thank you, Anthology!) We miss, appreciate, and celebrate his life. Ron and Louisa Green [https://dux7id0k7hacn.cloudfront.net/as/assets-mem-com/cmi/7/1/7/5/10175717/20210509_144036641_0_orig.jpg/-/robert-haller-staten-island-ny-obituary.jpg?crop=%28153.541015625%2C103.91666666666666%2C542.833984375%2C435%29&cropxunits=619&cropyunits=464]<https://www.dignitymemorial.com/obituaries/staten-island-ny/robert-haller-10175717> Robert HALLER Obituary - Staten Island, NY<https://www.dignitymemorial.com/obituaries/staten-island-ny/robert-haller-10175717> Anthology lost one of its most important, devoted, and well-loved staff members yesterday, with the passing of Robert Haller (1942-2021). Robert was a fixture at Anthology since 1980, when he first arrived in New York for a four-year stint as Anthology’s Executive Director. www.dignitymemorial.com
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