Buirski, Nancy

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    Nancy Buirski, Award-Winning Documentary Filmmaker, Dies at 78

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    She won Emmy and Peabody Awards for “The Loving Story,” about a Virginia couple’s successful challenge to a ban on interracial marriage.Nancy Buirski, an Emmy and Peabody Award-winning documentary filmmaker whose eye was honed as a still photographer and picture editor, died on Wednesday at her home in Manhattan. She was 78.The cause had not yet been determined, her sister and only immediate survivor, Judith Cohen, said.After founding the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in 1998 at Duke University in Durham, N.C., and directing it for a decade, Ms. Buirski (pronounced BURR-skee) made her own first documentary, “The Loving Story,” in 2011.The film explored the case of Mildred and Richard Loving, who faced imprisonment because their interracial marriage in 1958 was illegal in Virginia. (She was part-Black and part-Native American, and he was white.)Their challenge to the law resulted in a landmark civil rights ruling by the United States Supreme Court in 1967 that voided state anti-miscegenation laws.The documentary, directed by Ms. Buirski, won an Emmy for outstanding historical programming, long form, and a Peabody Award. It premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York and made its television debut on HBO during Black History Month in 2012.“Drawing from a wealth of stunning archival footage,” Dave Itzkoff wrote in The New York Times. “‘The Loving Story’ recreates a seminal moment in history in uncommon style, anchoring a timely message of marriage equality in a personal, human love story.”Richard and Mildred Loving in “The Loving Story,” Ms. Buirski’s documentary about that Virginia couple’s successful challenge to a ban on interracial marriage during the Civil Rights era.Grey Villet, via Barbara Villet/Icarus FilmsMs. Buirski went on to seek more stories to tell, drawing on a wide range of voices and experiences.“Nancy was a completely original thinker and a visionary,” her frequent collaborator and producer, Susan Margolin, said in an email. “With every film she pushed the limits of the art form with her kaleidoscopic, unique approach to storytelling.”Ms. Buirski directed, co-produced and wrote “Afternoon of a Faun” (2013), about the ballerina Tanaquil Le Clercq, who contracted polio while on tour in 1956; and “By Sidney Lumet” (2015), about the acclaimed filmmaker, both of which were broadcast by PBS on “American Masters.”She also directed, co-produced and wrote “The Rape of Recy Taylor” (2017), about the 1944 kidnapping of a Black woman by seven white men. Despite their confessions, they were never charged, although in 2011 the Alabama Legislature apologized for the state’s failure to prosecute her attackers.The critic Roger Ebert called the film “a stiffing, infuriating marvel,” and it was awarded a human rights prize at the 74th Venice International Film Festival.Ms. Buirski went on to direct, co-produce and write “A Crime on the Bayou” (2021) about a 1966 altercation sparked by school integration, and “Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy” (2023), which explores John Schlesinger’s 1969 film starring Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman.She was also a special adviser to “Summer of Soul” (2021), Questlove’s Academy Award-winning concert-film documentary, based on rediscovered footage, about the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival.Years earlier, as a picture editor on the international desk at The New York Times, Ms. Buirski was credited with choosing the image that won the newspaper its first Pulitzer Prize for photography, in 1994.After seeking a photograph to accompany an article on war and famine in southern Sudan, she choose one by Kevin Carter, a South African photojournalist, of an emaciated toddler collapsing on the way to a United Nations feeding center as a covetous vulture lurked in the background.Ms. Buirski commended the photo to Nancy Lee, The Times’ picture editor at the time. She then proposed it, strongly, for the front page, because, she recalled telling another editor, “This is going to win the paper’s first-ever Pulitzer Prize for photography.”The photograph ended up appearing on an inside page in the issue of March 26, 1993, but the reaction from readers, concerned about the child’s fate, was so strong that The Times published an unusual editors’ note afterward explaining that the child had continued to the feeding center after Mr. Carter chased away the vulture.The picture won the Pulitzer in the feature photography category. (Mr. Carter died by suicide a few months later at 33.)Ms. Buirski was born Nancy Florence Cohen on June 24, 1945, in Manhattan to Daniel and Helen (Hochstein) Cohen. Her father was a paper manufacturer.After graduating from New Rochelle High School in Westchester County, she earned a bachelor’s degree from Adelphi University in Garden City, N.Y., in 1967.She worked as an editor for the Magnum photo agency before joining The Times.As a photographer she produced a book of 150 images titled “Earth Angels: Migrant Children in America” (1994), which vividly captured the children of migrant farmworkers at work during the day and attending school at night and dramatized the hazards they faced from poor housing, harsh working conditions and exposure to pesticides.Her marriages to Peter Buirski and Kenneth Friedlein ended in divorce. More

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      ‘Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy’ Review

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      A documentary examines how the winner for best picture of 1969 captured shifts in American life.How many ways did “Midnight Cowboy” occupy the nexus of the cultural changes of the 1960s? The documentary “Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy” cites plenty.The film was revolutionary in its depiction of sex, and particularly in its acknowledgment of the existence of gay life. It tweaked the movie-cowboy archetype at a time when westerns allegorized the United States’ involvement in Vietnam. Its screenwriter, Waldo Salt, had been blacklisted in the 1950s. It took advantage of the possibility of filming on location in New York and of capturing aspects of the city — such as hustlers and homelessness — that had scarcely been shown onscreen, or had been limited to experimental cinema. A late interlude in the film documented elements of the Warholian art scene.And in winning the Oscar for the best picture of 1969, “Midnight Cowboy” may have represented a rare instance of the Academy Awards’ accepting important shifts in American life. (Or perhaps the academy looked forward and backward simultaneously: Two interviewees note that John Wayne, a supporter of the war and an icon of a more conservative America, took best actor that year for “True Grit.”)Whether “Midnight Cowboy” deserves or can bear the weight that “Desperate Souls” accords it, the director Nancy Buirski presents these issues with a good mix of small-bore and big-picture insights and only the occasional overstatement or fuzziness. The documentary might have pinned down more clearly, for instance, why “Midnight Cowboy” received its X rating, later changed to R.But “Desperate Souls” convincingly argues that there’s no other time at which Joe Buck (Jon Voight) and Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman) could have become enduring movie characters, let alone have the tenderness between them depicted so subtly. (The documentary was inspired by Glenn Frankel’s 2021 book, “Shooting Midnight Cowboy: Art, Sex, Loneliness, Liberation, and the Making of a Dark Classic.”)Buirski’s film gives much of the credit to John Schlesinger, the celebrated British director who was shooting his first movie in America. “Desperate Souls” notes that in his next film, “Sunday Bloody Sunday” (1971), he would break ground again in showing gay life (and, through Peter Finch’s character, perhaps acknowledge some of his own outsider’s perspective as a gay, Jewish, relatively upper-class Briton).Interviewed in the documentary, Voight recalls making a facetious — but accurate — prediction to Schlesinger that they would live in the shadow of the movie. (He’s also shown in a screen test that makes you wonder how he got the part.) Schlesinger (who died in 2003) and Hoffman are heard in voice clips.But some of the strongest commentary comes from writers who can stand outside the film itself, like Charles Kaiser (author of “The Gay Metropolis”), the critic Lucy Sante and J. Hoberman, a regular New York Times contributor (whom I also know personally). All situate the film in a historical context, its importance in which, Sante suggests, came at least partly by chance: “When people express their own time, it’s generally by accident.”Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight CowboyNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘A Crime on the Bayou’ Review: Race on Trial

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      Nancy Buirski’s documentary deals with a civil rights case in 1960s Louisiana that wound up before the Supreme Court.As a documentary, “A Crime on the Bayou,” directed by Nancy Buirski, is dryly told, but it has a potent idea, which is to show how even bureaucratic aspects of the legal system in the Deep South in the 1960s could be weaponized against Black Americans. To paraphrase Lolis Eric Elie, a son of a lawyer involved in the events in the film, part of what made Jim Crow totalitarian was its arbitrariness: A Black man never knew when he might suddenly be accused of a crime.The supposed crime here occurred in 1966, when Gary Duncan, a 19-year-old fisherman in Plaquemines Parish, La., intervened in a potential skirmish between two of his young relatives, who were students at a newly integrated school, and a group of white boys whom the relatives thought were trying to start a fight. Duncan says he touched a white boy’s arm. For that, he was charged with simple battery. The case wound its way to the United States Supreme Court, where Duncan won a right to a jury trial not previously guaranteed in Louisiana’s state courts.These events are recounted principally by Duncan himself and his lawyer, Richard Sobol, who died last year. Other major voices in the film are Elie and the civil rights lawyer Armand Derfner. Sobol, who was Jewish, recalls being targeted by Leander Perez, the parish’s racist and anti-Semitic political boss. And in covering the repercussions of the branching cases, “A Crime on the Bayou” shows how superficially straightforward, courageous acts — like refusing to plead guilty unjustly or defending the unjustly accused — are hard.A Crime on the BayouNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. In theaters. More