Howard Guttenplan and the Millennium Film Workshop will be forever
inextricably linked.
With absolute devotion until the very end, Howard dedicated his energy
and expertise to keeping the Millennium going.
With inexplicable grace he withstood the recent indignities he was
made to suffer.
During his tenure as Executive Director, Howard single handedly
demonstrated acute discernment
in his "Personal Cinema" programs which made a place for the most
accomplished and celebrated film artists
to project their work in close proximity with totally unknown makers
of consequence.
In a kind of fearless visionary egalitarianism Howard insisted on a
monthly Open Screening program
which functioned as an important portal for the self-taught, socially
misaligned and/or politically maladroit outsider
to be discovered and to assimilate into the experimental film
community regardless of resume or lack thereof.
Howard's Millennium was open to both the big fish and the little fish,
the somebody's and the nobody's
in vibrant aesthetic exchange.
His great love was not film per se but the continuum of the
experimental film medium,
the linked progression of forms from one artist to another over time,
with invention and innovation as its most telling attribute.
The Millennium Film Workshop Archives will testify abundantly to the
astonishing procession of makers
who made this love manifest. Howard welcomed and treated each of these
artists with uncommon respect.
Howard's own film oeuvre is a shining example of what is possible
when one is totally dedicated to a highly evolved form of truth and
beauty.
In all these ways he changed my life.
-DB
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