Film : Mingei’s Film Festival to Star U.S. Craftsmen

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the Mingei International Museum of World Folk Art, situated in the unlikely setting of the University Towne Center mall. As part of the celebration, the first of what is planned as an annual film festival, offering an eclectic selection of short films focusing on crafts people from around the world, will be presented.

In the 1970s, Jack Ofield, festival coordinator and consultant to the Mingei, organized the International Craft Film Festival in New York. That festival had the same program of films playing to sell-out crowds for four years. Now the Mingei, with its emphasis on folk art from around the world, provides Ofield with the perfect backdrop for the revival and expansion of the original festival.

Sitting among the toys from the dismantled exhibition in the Mingei office, Ofield discussed the rebirth of his craft festival.

“Some of the films are from the original festival and some of them are new,” Ofield said. “We are really starting out again though, and this time it will be an annual festival. This first year will be invitational. We’re inviting people and films that we know. The second year and from then on will be open.”

Ofield is most excited by the fact that besides showcasing films in an annual screening, the museum will also be working to create a film archive.

“The museum wants to begin to acquire an archival range of these prints so that they can have them available and have good prints so that other people who might want them could have them available and won’t have to go through what we’re going through to find these films.”

Ofield has had to track down film makers and obscure distributors. He has even had to coax film labs into letting the festival strike new prints of films that film makers have abandoned because they cannot afford to pay the lab storage costs to ransom their original material back.

Working with museum director and founder Martha Longenecker, Ofield hopes that each session will provide the museum with a few films that can be added to the archives. Ofield, who is a film maker himself, also sees the screenings as a chance to help film makers get exposure for their films and to get some financial returns.

The festival, which runs Saturday and Sunday at Sherwood Hall in the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, will offer 13 short films. One of the highlights will be Ofield’s “Scoop Shovel Maker,” which focuses on Harvey Ward and comes from a longer PBS special about indigenous U.S. crafts people.

The 90-year-old Ward uses an ax to make scoop shovels out of a single piece of wood. The shovels are a colonial tool, but the Du Pont factory in New Jersey found it the perfect tool for shoveling gunpowder because it does not create sparks.

Ofield, who now lives in San Diego, made the film to examine the differences between the individual craftsman and the factory worker. He shows how Ward takes about an hour to make one shovel. Then, he cuts to a shovel foundry where they produce 600 shovels a day and where the workers “just run from machine to machine.” When Ward saw the film, he was fascinated by his industrial counterparts.

Ofield stumbled upon Ward by accident, but he found him the perfect subject, a true craftsman who did not look upon his work as art.

“We were looking for the sort of person who is a true folk artist . . . not looking for art in his work yet doing it as something he knows how to do, that he learned from his father and has nobody to pass it on to. But I guess he passed it on to me, to my camera.”

Though the films all deal with crafts, none is a mere how-to film.

“That’s one sort of thing that we didn’t want,” Ofield said, “We’re not trying to teach. (We want films) that show what people are doing and that are inspirational.”

In this festival, Japan provides considerable inspiration. In “Handmade Japanese Paper,” “In Praise of Hands” and “Hands,” film makers pay homage to some of the Living National Treasures of Japan.

Ofield explained that in Japan, “They have a number of people there who they’ve designated like national monuments. They call them ‘Living Treasures.’ They’re carrying on these crafts. They have a place to work for life and they train apprentices. They’re keeping their culture alive in that way.”

“Life” photographer Eliot Elisofon contributes “The Glassmaker of Herat,” which focuses on a father passing on the ancient way of glass making to his son. Elisofon shot the film in Afghanistan just before the Soviet invasion.

Ofield, whose graying hair contrasts with his boyish, inquisitive face, spoke eagerly and optimistically about the event:

“Being the first year, you don’t know what you’re going to strike. But it’ll be something that they can see here that they cannot see anywhere else. It’s exciting to think that right now people are making films that they will be submitting to us for the next festival. People are very inspired to make films.

“There are a lot of people who will travel across the desert to see these films, and then there are people who just wonder what it is, who think it might be a good idea but aren’t sure. But they are willing to give it a chance. That would be the audience that would be nice to get.”