A MEMORIAL TRIBUTE TO DAN GEORGAKAS (1938–2021)

Cineaste Editors Recall One of This Magazine’s Most
Important and Longest-Serving Editors and Contributors

Tribute to a Cineaste Stalwart
by Gary Crowdus, Cineaste Founder and Editor-in-Chief

It would be impossible, in this brief space, to fully describe the formative influence of Dan Georgakas on the development and growth of Cineaste, or to fully acknowledge his accomplishments and activities in so many fields as author, editor, historian, journalist, college professor, film festival organizer, and so on. Dan was a classic polymath, knowledgeable in many subjects, including labor and working-class issues, anarchism and revolutionary politics, Native American history and culture, cinema, poetry, literature, health and longevity, and his birthplace of Detroit. Above all, as a child of immigrants, Dan had a fierce pride in his Greek ancestry that manifested itself in many of his efforts and that eventually led to his recognition as a leading scholar of Greek history, culture, and politics.

I met Dan in New York City in 1969, just two years after I founded Cineaste, while I was a film student at New York University. He was nearly a decade older than me, and more widely read and educated than myself at the time. We discovered that we both had grown up in working-class families in Detroit, but had never met there, although it’s possible we both saw films at Wayne State University’s Monteith Film Society or attended sessions at the downtown Artists’ Workshop. Our discussions made it clear that we saw eye to eye on many issues related to film and politics, although I was also aware of his expertise in so many other areas. Indeed, throughout our decades-long friendship and collaboration, I always looked up to Dan as a sort of wiser, older, more experienced brother.                     

Since I knew Dan had been in Greece in 1962–63 on a Fulbright Scholarship, and so had been there during the Lambrakis Affair and had definite views of the right-wing machinations behind that political assassination, I invited him to join me to interview Costa-Gavras during the filmmaker’s visit to New York for the premiere of Z (1969). That positive experience encouraged me to invite Dan to join the Cineaste editorial board, and his name first appeared on the masthead in our Summer 1970 issue. In subsequent years, Dan and I interviewed Costa numerous times, and became good friends with the filmmaker, who wrote about Dan’s passing in a recent email to me: “I had admiration for his work, his personal history. He was also a good friend and the encounters with him were a real pleasure.”

Throughout subsequent decades, Dan contributed scores of articles, reviews, and interviews, and co-edited two anthologies of The Cineaste Interviews. Dan also collaborated with me on organizing special supplements and critical symposia on films we regarded as major events, such as Oliver Stone’s JFK and Spike Lee’s Malcolm X, among others. Dan also joined me for interviews with Francesco Rosi, Jack Lemmon, Paul Schrader (as ex-Detroiters, we had a few bones to pick with him on Blue Collar), and Spike Lee, among many others. We always worked hard on our preparation for interviews, aiming to ask questions most other interviewers never posed. As Dan wrote in the introduction to the first volume of The Cineaste Interviews, we regarded them as “literary forms rather than public relations or informal journalistic events…a critical tool to address questions of form and content…and to establish a kind of data bank from which responsible criticism can draw.”

Dan suffered a major heart attack in 2007 and was in intensive care for three months. In the following years, he followed a strict dietary regimen and took prescribed medications. In those years, he benefited from the loving care and companionship of his wife Barbara Saltz, who also worked with Dan on administrative matters for Cineaste, including managing our mailing list, soliciting advertising, and handling subscription renewal mailings. Gradually, out of medical necessity, Dan was forced to shed many of his administrative chores, but he continued until his death to serve as a Consulting Editor, commenting on manuscripts, making the occasional contribution, and often offering tough judgments on initial drafts of Editorials.

I recently noted again an inscription Dan had written in my copy of one of The Cineaste Interviews volumes: “These have been fruitful years.” They were, indeed, Dan, thanks in no small part to you. It’s a cliché to say so, but you will be sorely missed.

Dan Georgakas: A Cineaste Original and an American after My Own Taste
by Roy Grundmann, Cineaste Contributing Editor

When I came to Cineaste as a summer intern in the late 1980s, I expected American publishing to be synonymous with a certain glamorous corporate formality. Once I realized the magazine was a not-for-profit quarterly published out of the apartment of its Editor-in-Chief, it became easier for me to understand why its staff members, especially Dan and another beloved member of the editorial team, the late Robert Sklar, would show up at the magazine’s tiny office, located on the corner of Park Avenue South at Union Square, dressed in baggy T-shirts, sneakers, and torn, paint-blotched shorts. Slightly clichéd as it may sound, Cineaste has been to American film criticism what one of its editors’ championed films, Salt of the Earth, has been to American film. Dan’s casualness, approachability, and pragmatism were part and parcel of his personal-is-political approach to life. These qualities found expression in, among other things, his mane of white, shoulder-length hair and his at times provocatively casual sartorial choices—signifiers of a humble background and a profoundly leftist outlook on American politics, history, and social life. 

Dan understood the complexities and challenges of balancing one’s political convictions with specific actions, which allowed him to provide valuable guidance to the magazine over many years. Along with his Greek parentage and left-wing views, this understanding of politics and its vicissitudes fueled Dan’s interest in the multifaceted work and storied life of American stage and film director Elia Kazan (the son of ethnic Greeks born in Turkey). When as a graduate student I developed an interest in Kazan’s career, Dan’s article, “Don’t Call Him Gadget: Elia Kazan Reconsidered” [Cineaste, Vol. XVI, No. 4, Fall 1988] a feature-length review of Kazan’s recently published autobiography, A Life, was the first commentary on Kazan that helped me put this fascinating artist in perspective. It was never easy to get one’s mind around Kazan’s contradictions, especially his controversial status as a friendly witness to HUAC and his leaving the Communist Party in the mid-1930s after party leaders urged him and other members of the Group Theater to stage a political takeover of the Group. Upon rereading the piece, I am struck once again by Dan’s clarity of thought and his nuanced yet matter-of-fact, approach to a highly complicated subject. Dan often surprised me with his disdain for party-line thinking.

A year and a half ago, in what turned out to be my final correspondence with Dan, I sent him an article from the left-wing political magazine Jacobin, titled “Why We Can’t Support Police Unions.” The article had been penned in response to police unions’ staunch resistance to more oversight in the wake of police clashes with Black Lives Matter activists following the killing of Eric Garner and the protests in Ferguson. Jacobin’s take on the issue, so I thought, was worth entertaining. Dan’s response was cogent and characteristically unorthodox: “I disagree with this general take,” he wrote. “Accomplishes nothing, just self-righteous posing. An expelled union doesn’t go away, especially if it has loyal membership.” I will remember Dan as someone whose political smarts were inseparable from his personal principles, a combination from which Cineaste and its editorial staff benefited for decades.

Dan Georgakas: Cineaste Will Miss You
by Andrew Horton, Cineaste Associate

Dan was a friend, an international cinema expert, a defender of working people’s rights, an expert on living a healthy life to age one hundred and beyond, a celebrant of Hellenic-American culture, and someone who could retain his sense of humor even in the worst of times. As a member of the Cineaste editorial board for many decades and in more recent years as a Consulting Editor, Dan helped Editor-in-Chief Gary Crowdus on so many levels, including writing reviews and articles, proposing subjects, doing research, finding other writers for the journal, and conducting interviews with numerous filmmakers around the world. In addition, Dan co-edited two collections of The Cineaste Interviews (1983 and 2002), anthologies that featured many filmmakers discussing their work and expressing their views on the art and politics of cinema, including Costa-Gavras, Bernando Bertolucci, Jane Fonda, Lina Wertmüller, and John Sayles, among many others. 

But we must also at least briefly acknowledge Dan’s accomplishments beyond Cineaste, including Detroit: I Do Mind Dying: A Study in Urban Revolution (1975), his perceptive and powerful history (co-authored with Marvin Surkin) about the political development in the auto industry of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement and the League of Revolutionary Black workers in his hometown during the Sixties and Seventies. The city also figured prominently in his memoir, My Detroit: Growing Up Greek and American in Motor City (2006) in which he explores the complex nature of being Greek and American in values, outlooks, influences, and more. As he commented about his bicultural roots, “Life had greatly improved for all of us as a result of the leftist reforms of the 1930’s, and I wanted to accelerate that kind of change.” Further afield was his fascinating page-turner, The Methuselah Factors: Learning from the World’s Longest Living People (1995), a book he researched by traveling to countries around the world including Ukraine, Peru, Turkey, and beyond to interview long-living folk about their diets, lifestyles, and respective social and cultural environments.

I was always impressed, throughout the forty years I was friends with Dan, with the extensive teaching he did on cinema and culture, including New York University, Columbia University, the University of Massachusetts, Queens College, and the University of Oklahoma, thus building strong relationships with students, whatever their majors, races, or backgrounds. I was especially proud when Dan agreed to write an essay on Greeks and humor in cinema for A Companion to Film Comedy, the anthology I was co-editing with Joanna Rapf in 2013 for Wiley Blackwell Books. Dan delivered an extremely informative essay that grew out of a review of My Big Fat Greek Wedding that he had written for Cineaste in 2003. In that essay, “Ethnic Humor in American Film: The Greek Americans,” he succeeded in pulling together numerous perspectives and details in based on his lifetime learning as a Greek American. He even devised his own critical method for determining the merit of the films he discussed. As he wrote midway in his essay:  

When My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002) became a box office smash, in a review in Cineaste I expressed my exasperation about what seemed to be a paucity not simply of films featuring Greek Americans but the general paucity of films about European immigrants to America. To determine if my sense of exclusion was correct, I resolved to ascertain exactly how many Hollywood films contained Greek American characters. To give more meaning to the numbers, I decided to rank each film from GGGG to G. This was not a quality rating but an indication of how important the ethnic dimension was to the film.

Dan’s essay, as did much of his work, marvelously succeeded in combining his cinematic and ethnic concerns.


Remembering Dan Georgakas
by Cynthia Lucia, Member of the Cineaste Editorial Board
 

Dan’s many accomplishments as a historian, author, and activist have rightfully been recognized, praised, and honored on these pages of Cineaste, to which he devoted decades of talent and commitment. Like all of us, Dan treated Cineaste as an extension of family. And, as in all families, we would discuss, debate, passionately argue for this or that position—and then forgive and make up. I recall one very contentious debate over a Cineaste cover decades ago, when Richard Porton and I argued strongly for featuring David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ (1999) on the cover, and Dan vehemently opposed it (at this point, it’s hard to recall what fueled our desire or Dan’s opposition!). We all felt a little bruised for a while, but it didn’t take long until we were back to business as usual. Along with Founder and Editor-in-Chief Gary Crowdus, Dan, who served as Treasurer of the magazine for many years, was one of the mentors to whom those of us who were slightly younger looked for wisdom and advice. I so valued periodic phone conversations with Dan over this or that issue that had arisen within the Editorial Board, and I remember that, when I was visiting his beloved Greece for the first time to cover the documentary film festival in Thessaloniki, he called me to be certain I was doing okay and enjoying my stay. Not only did gestures like that one express Dan’s friendship and support, but his playful streak also provided light-hearted moments of fun at our meetings. I can still hear Dan wryly exclaiming, “Oh, come on, Gary,” as we’d all laugh across the table.

In his good-natured humor, Dan suggested that his dog Trixie and my cat Lulu “write” a pro/con review of Chris Noonan’s 1995 film Babe, about a farm pig who aspires to be a sheepdog (or, should I say, sheep-pig). “A Couple of Furry Black and White Pets Sitting Around and Talking About Babe” (Cineaste, Vol. XXII, No. 2, Summer 1996) was one of those genuinely enjoyable Cineaste experiences made possible through Dan’s easy-going, imaginative spirit. It also was an expression of Dan’s abiding love for animals. He and his life-partner Barbara Saltz adopted Trixie—a maltreated pit bull—who became a most gentle pet in their care. When we’d have occasional summer meetings on Fire Island, Trixie would participate, duly ignoring my cat and patiently indulging those Editorial Board members who wanted to pet or embrace her. When Dan and Barbara retired from the New York Metropolitan area to live in Amherst, Massachusetts, Dan would marvel at the moose who had dropped by for a look at their yard before breakfast and at the uniquely beautiful “nonurban” birds that were there to be treasured. While Dan’s intelligence and wisdom are qualities I will always remember, it is also this gentle support and deep kindness that I will never forget.

Remembering Dan
by Louis Menashe, Cineaste Associate

Way back, when I was just a casual reader of Cineaste, a review of Elia Kazan’s Viva Zapata! caught my attention. Written by Dan Georgakas (I noticed the Greek surname), it defended the film against critics who faulted its historical errors. I think Dan appreciated the film, as I did, for its populism and for conveying the spirit of the Zapatista rebellion against repressive institutions, if not for its historical accuracy. That was my superficial first experience of Dan. I’m grateful I eventually got to know the man directly by way of two of the routes we each traveled. Here is how Dan put it in the lovely inscription to me in his superb memoir, My Detroit (about growing up Greek and American in his native city): “From a time before Thessaloniki plus Cineaste brought us together.” Dan was a vital part of the magazine for its many decades of publication, while I became one of its reviewers and Associate Editors. I didn’t have many contacts with him, but they were always resonant.

From a few business meetings and some after-meetings chats, it didn’t take long to discover that this poet, writer, teacher, critic, and activist had a dry, caustic wit; left-leaning politics (empirically expressed, i.e., never any BS); a fierce opposition to hierarchies, political or otherwise; straight-ahead strong opinions about many matters, large and small; and that he wore his Hellenism proudly. As for the Thessaloniki connection, that might have come from his understanding of my Sephardic background with its roots in the famed port city of northern Greece. Both my parents were born there, were Greek citizens, and I imagine that made me in Dan’s eyes something like an “Honorary Greek.” He was also very keen on fostering good relations between Jews and Greeks and abhorred any evidence of Greek anti-Semitism such as that displayed by the neofascist “Golden Dawn” party. (Dan was featured as a commentator in a documentary film about the party, Golden Dawn, New York City.)

Ever generous with his time and attention, Dan helped me publish a short memoir about my visits to Thessaloniki in an important Greek American journal. Moreover, he read and offered on-the-mark observations about my own book-length memoir. He saw some parallels in our life journeys of trying to mesh political activism with professional obligations like school or university teaching. I think Dan succeeded in doing that, well beyond expectations. At a festival of Greek films in New York honoring him in 2018, Dan was hailed as “one of the best-known intellectuals in the Greek diaspora.” His gifts came, in part I think, from something he cited in his memoir: Yes, he was like other Americans in speech, dress, etc., “but many of us retained a certain cultural distance, a way of looking from another perspective that only the children of the foreign born can have.” It’s a wonderful insight.

I watched Dan on stage from afar in my balcony seat at that festival in his honor, but the last time I saw him up close was much earlier, fittingly enough in Thessaloniki, at dinner, just the two of us after some screenings at the Thessaloniki Film Festival. With our ouzo came grilled octopus. “How delicious,” I commented. Of course, Dan said, “It’s Greek!” I’ll always remember that.

Dan Georgakas: An Independent Greek American Radical
by Leonard Quart, Contributing Editor

Dan Georgakas was born in Detroit and grew up working class Greek American. Dan played a central role in the running of Cineaste over many decades and was an editor since 1969. He wrote a number of books—the best being his autobiography, My Detroit: Growing Up Greek and American in Motor City, which depicts his early years in Greektown and his profound relationship with Greek American identity.

Dan and I were never intimate, but he was a friend and colleague for whom I had very warm feelings. He and I shared a number of dinners over which we discussed politics and the running and the future of Cineaste. He was politically radical, but one grounded in logic, facts, and common sense rather than resorting to rhetoric or abstraction in dealing with political issues. I didn’t agree with all the political positions he took—he was usually to my left and often much less concerned with electoral politics than I was, but his perspective as an independent, nonsectarian radical was always reflective and well- reasoned. He was never a political romantic swayed by utopian notions, but always earthbound and very pragmatic.

When it came to running the magazine, his financial advice and calm persona ably assisted the dedication, vision, and commitment of Cineaste’s Founder and Editor-in-Chief Gary Crowdus. At meetings, Dan always offered cogent and sensible analysis and suggestions, and was committed to the magazine’s insistence on clear and accessible prose. In addition, he promoted the idea of the magazine’s reaching out to people who were neither film academics nor professionals, but just knowledgeable readers who were passionate about film. A vision I shared. He always opposed Cineaste being dumbed down, or in any way turned into an adjunct of the movie industry, producing critical puff pieces or homages to stars. He wanted the magazine to preserve its independence, tough-mindedness, and integrity, and to avoid compromising its aesthetic standards. Thus, films that shared some of the magazine’s politics, but were mediocre, were never reflexively praised. Throughout its existence, the magazine centered its articles and interviews on narrative films and documentaries that challenged the status quo politically and aesthetically. Because of Gary’s intense commitment and Dan’s shrewd and strategic assistance, Cineaste has survived since the Sixties, while many other film magazines have ceased publication—an extraordinary feat.

Dan had a deep and complex take on his being second-generation Greek. He writes revealingly: “We might be indistinguishable from other Americans in terms of dress and speech, but many of us retained a certain cultural distance, a way of looking from another perspective, that only the children of the foreign–born can have.” He also tellingly wrote: “As a child of immigrants, I was not programmed to consider all things American as normal and positive. This made it easier to go against convention.” He maintained his links to the Greek community for the entirety of his life, including serving as editor of the American Hellenic Institute Foundation’s American Journal of Contemporary Hellenic Issues, and writing and lecturing on Greek culture and politics.

What I most remember about Dan was that he projected self-confidence without being overbearing. He always gave one the feeling of a man at peace with himself as he got older. I will miss him.

Remembering an Editorial Colleague and Friend
by Leonard Rubenstein, Former Editor of Cineaste

I met Dan through Cineaste, on the board of which I joined him as an editor from the late Sixties until the mid-Eighties. I remember that at editorial meetings I found myself agreeing with and supporting Dan’s views and positions. As an editor, I thought there was an undue fascination at the time with an independent filmmaker who was making a feature film about a group of guerrillas in Latin America and, although the film was never finished, his supporters were clamoring for our coverage of his progress and his writings on film theory, articles that were long and turgid. This whole business seemed to Dan and me a bad hangover from the days of the magazine’s origins at NYU film school, and so we argued against this material clogging up our pages. Our instincts may, in part, be due to the simple fact that Dan and I used to deliver Cineaste to various bookshops, including the Gotham Book Mart, Cinemabilia, and Spring Street Books in Dan’s car. It was a full day’s work, and we became good friends and felt we had to make the magazine more popular. The Vietnam War was a major issue in those days, and there were often heated discussions about the ambiguity of a film like The Deer Hunter. Dan and I usually found ourselves on the same side of the debate.

In the years before 1989, there were film studios in Eastern Europe which explicitly dealt with both past and current political issues. Dealing with censors and unspoken bans was tense but not even the most doctrinaire Stalinist bureaucrat could applaud corrupt practices. Negotiating those limits could lead to acknowledged masterpieces. Almost every year there was a recognizably worthwhile film from Poland, Czechoslovakia, or Hungary, so we would review those films and/or interview the directors and writers. Sometimes a film from the Soviet Union, Cuba, Yugoslavia, or even East Germany attracted critical attention. We also covered the films from Western Europe and England where politics and history were frequent themes for both feature films and documentaries. Our articles about these films and filmmakers encouraged us and Dan was able to secure an interview with Jane Fonda.

Dan was instrumental in getting the magazine to cover more popular films, and we soon had a back page of capsule reviews of mainstream films. At one point, we even made money from these pieces when they were reprinted. Dan always encouraged me in my writing and frequently found or suggested outlets for my material. Eventually, I wrote a book in 1979 about spy films [The Great Spy Films, 1979], my favorite genre, which led to writing assignments, some of which came through Dan, Gary, or Karen Jaehne. Dan’s writing ranged from two volumes on indigenous peoples and Black auto workers in Detroit to American left-wing issues, and then to healthcare and the larger Greek American community, which grew out of his work on Greek filmmakers starting with Costa-Gavras, Theo Angeloupolos, and others. Costa-Gavras’s films spanned three continents, as well as a wide range of political topics. One of the best editions of Cineaste featured a number of articles and interviews dealing with Missing [“The Missing Dossier,” Vol. XII, No. 1, Fall 1982].

Eventually, by the early Eighties, there were enough interviews to put together a book-length collection, which Dan initiated and on which he did the bulk of the work. It was about that time, too, that it became noticeable that US cable-TV companies and the

BBC were churning out programs that were more interesting than many of the films playing in local theaters. I remember watching PBS stations for shows like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1979) and Edge of Darkness (1985), and few contemporary motion pictures could compete with I Claudius (1976). About this time, Dan had moved out to New Jersey, but I was often a guest for dinner parties at his house and we maintained our friendship. Later, he moved to Amherst, and I fear I visited Massachusetts only once, though we often spoke on the phone and saw each other at special events in Manhattan.

Dan always lived up to the widest and best definitions of Colleague, Comrade, and Friend.

Copyright © 2022 by Cineaste Magazine 

Cineaste, Vol. XLVII, No. 2