By Annette Hinkle
As a genre, documentaries have gained traction in recent years and today are offered in more mainstream theatres than ever. But still, for those who love documentaries, most of them remain elusive — screened in limited release or at far flung film fests. And when you’re talking about documentaries more than a few years old, they become even more difficult to find.
Which is really why the Hamptons Take 2 Documentary Film Festival (HTFF) was born. The brainchild of local filmmaker Jacqui Lofaro, as the name implies HT2FF is all about giving documentaries new life. While these days, YouTube may be a source for some of these films, rarely does an opportunity come along to see them on the big screen.
But next weekend, the Take 2 Film Festival returns for its fourth year with a full day of screenings at Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor on Saturday, November 19, 2011 (the program will be repeated the following day at the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center). Lofaro explains that each film in the festival was either made by a filmmaker with local ties or offers a locally relevant story. While documentaries from all of Suffolk County are eligible for consideration in HT2FF, many of them have specific East End connections.
Among them is “Suzanne Farrell: Elusive Muse” a 1996 documentary by the late Anne Belle of Remsenburg which was produced by Catherine Tambini. Tambini a Hampton Bays resident, is probably best known for her 2004 documentary “Farmingville” which she co-directed with Carlos Sandoval. The film garnered much attention and told the stories of residents, day-laborers and activists caught up in the illegal immigration debate on Long Island.
But it was with “Elusive Muse” that Tambini really cut her teeth in the world of documentary filmmaking.
“Elusive Muse” offers the story of Farrell, a young dancer from Cincinnati who was plucked from obscurity in 1960 to become a principal dancer in New York under legendary master George Balanchine or “Mr. B” as he was known to the dance corps.
“She joined New York City Ballet at 16 and she rose fairly quickly,” explains Tambini. “Suzanne became the one [Balanchine] wanted to work with. He fell in love with her and focused his attentions on her. He wanted to marry her but she fell in love with another dancer, Paul Mejia, and married him.”
So Balanchine stopped putting Mejia into the ballets he normally danced and Farrell gave Mr. B an ultimatum — either her husband would dance or they would both quit. Balanchine refused and Farrell and Mejia left the company.
“They reconciled years later and came back,” notes Tambini. “It was a very turbulent time. Balanchine had a hard time working in those years when she was gone.”
“Elusive Muse” was the third of three films made by Belle about Balanchine and his dancers — the first was “Reflections of a Dancer: Alexandra Danilova” a 1987 film about Danilova, a prima ballerina who left her native Russia with Balanchine in the 1920s, and the second was “Dancing for Mr. B: Six Balanchine Ballerinas.”
For Tambini, the world of ballet was a new one when she met Anne Belle in 1990. At the time, Tambini was working as an assistant production designer on feature films and was looking to transition to a career that didn’t require her to be on the road. She and Belle instantly hit it off and began working together on “Elusive Muse,” which was released in 1996 and nominated for an Academy Award for best documentary feature. The film’s cinematographer was Don Lenzer, another East End resident.
Tambini recalls that though the structure of the film was initially focused on Farrell’s career, that shifted when the actual process began.
“Once we started looking at her interview, the love story and the triangle became so prevalent that we felt it was the natural thing to hang the story on,” says Tambini. “What started out as one film, turned magically to another.”
But Tambini and Belle found that getting the story from Farrell did not happen quite so magically.
“Suzanne is very reserved,” says Tambini. “For one interview, we went back three or four times, each time we thought we had it, and when we looked at it in the editing room, it was not quite there.”
“The last time she really gave up all the goods,” adds Tambini. “When she broke down, she talked about the relationship in the classroom and working privately with Balanchine. She told of the night of the break-up when they removed her costume. It was so vivid. We had both read her book, and in it, she tells the story, but not in the way you get in the film. It’s so much more gratifying in the film.”
While at it’s heart the film is a love story between a master and his muse, it was not one that played out as Mr. B would have liked.
“I think she loved him, but not in the way he wanted,” explains Tambini. “She did love him dearly but she was not romantically in love with him. She didn’t want to be forced into it and didn’t want to be the next Mrs. Balanchine.”
“She went back into the company after five years and Balanchine created some of his most amazing masterworks based on her in those remaining years,” says Tambini. Among them was Don Quixote which Balanchine himself danced.
By the time Balanchine died in 1983, Tambini notes that he and Farrell had definitely reconciled.
“His passing was very difficult,” she adds. “He was so instrumental in her life.”
Though long retired as a dancer, for the last decade Farrell has headed her own company, The Suzanne Farrell Ballet at The Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. And though Farrell won’t be in Sag Harbor for next weekend’s screening, Tambini who will be present, remarks that “she likes the fact [the film’s] getting new attention.”
And that is the point of HT2FF.
“Even people who are not dance lovers love this story,” explains Tambini. “It opens a window into the creative process. It tells a great story, it’s contemporary and feels up to the moment.”
While Anne Belle, who became a mentor and close friend to Tambini, died in 2004, Tambini is finalizing a video deal to have all three of Belle’s films re-released for new audiences. On a local level, Belle’s films are likely to be of interest to residents here as Balanchine is buried in Sag Harbor’s Oakland Cemetery (so is Alexandra Danilova, who died in 1997). And rumors have circulated of a mysterious woman in a black veil who has been seen arriving at the cemetery in a limousine to lay flowers on Balanchine’s grave. Could it be one of the former six Balanchine dancers perhaps? That may turn out to be another film.
A HT2FF pass is $35 which includes admission to all films both days. An evening ticket is $20 available only at the box offices.
HT2FF will host a separate gala at Guild Hall on Friday, November 18, 2011 at 5:30 p.m. to celebrate the life of filmmaker Richard Leacock, who died in March at the age of 89. The British born Leacock was a pioneer of “direct cinema,” and had connections to the East End (son Robert lives in Water Mill, and Sag Harbor filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker was a collaborative partner). A cocktail reception and screening of Leacock’s films (“Happy Mother’s Day” a 1964 film about the Fischer quintuplets and “Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment” a 1963 film shot in the Oval Office of President John F. Kennedy), will be followed by a panel discussion with Pennebaker, editor Pam Wise and his children, Robert and Victoria Leacock Hoffman. Tickets are $75. For more information on the festival visit www.ht2ff.com.
Top: Suzanne Farrell and George Balanchine rehearsing "Don Quixote" in 1968.
