DeeDee Halleck

I was looking for interesting material on Peter Schumann and Bread & Puppet theater when I stumbled upon DeeDee Halleck's website. Halleck is an independent film/video maker and media educator who has devoted her professional/political life to fighting for community access to media technologies. She also has cool glasses. Her earliest film, "Children Make Movies" (1961) involved children scratching the emulsion off of 16mm film stock (McLuhan took this film on his lecture circuit), and she later became co-director of the Child-made Film Symposium throughout the 70s. She's also one of the women behind Paper Tiger Television, a low-budget public access cable TV show featuring a wide range of radical programming. These might be strange things to pluck out from such a long and fruitful career, but they're the parts of her bio that, predictably, I gravitated toward.


Halleck has made two films about Bread & Puppet, neither of which I've seen. The most drool-worthy of these seems to be her 1975 film (with experimental animator George Griffin) entitled "Meadows Green." On her website the film is described as "juxtaposing graphics and fragments of shows" to create a vision of the Bread & Puppet Resurrection Circus, a peace happening staged in protest of the Vietnam War. How could this film not also have a cool soundtrack? (It probably doesn't even have any music, but please allow me my fantasy.) I haven't been able to find much of her work online, apart for the following mid-80s Paper Tiger production. Trippy! (the kids cooking show around five minutes in is classic.)