Filmmaker turns lens on artist for MVFF
Tiburon filmmaker puts lens on Phyllis Thelen for Mill Valley Film Festival
When Harris Cohen was growing up, watching movies was an escape fromtroubles and the world around him. It’s a love he’s carried with him throughout his life, except now he’s behind the camera making them.
The filmmaker is driven to tell stories of the people and things he finds interesting, like the late Greenbrae photographer Hans Roenau in “Hans” and the puppeteers behind Danville’s Fratello Marionettes in “Strings Attached.”
His latest short film, “Phyllis: A Self Portrait” reflects on the life and work of Phyllis Thelen, a Marin artist and a founder of nonprofit art organizations such as ArtWorks Downtown, Youth inArts and theMarinBallet Association. It can be seen at this year’s Mill Valley Film Festival online from Oct. 9 through 18 as part of the 5@5Kilburn Towers program. This is the fifth movie he’s shown at the festival. After studying in the theater arts department at the University of California, Los Angeles, Cohen, 83, had a long career in television, working as a cameraman and producing, directing and editing news stories for the “CBSEveningNews withWalter Cronkite” and NBC’s “TheHuntley—Brinkley Report,” as well as creating hundreds of short-form documentaries.
He lives in Tiburon with his wife, artist Cynthia Jensen.
In 1983, he foundedMagnetic Image Video, a video production equipment rental and crew services business, then based in
San Rafael, and has created numerous videos for nonprofit organizations pro bono.
Q What inspired your latest film?
AI’ve known Phyllis for many years, since 2003. We did a video on Art Works Downtown together. And it was motivated by my wife telling me, who has known Phyllis for years — she’s also an artist and has collaborated with Phyllis in the past — that Phyllis was having a retrospective of her works at ArtWorks Downtown earlier this year. This was about seven or eight months before it happened. Then, it was shown at the party and at Art Works Downtown on loop while the retrospective
was open.
Q What did you learn about her during filming?
A the coming other in She’s nicest the because way a filmwho way. dynamo, when There’s whatever says, I but see someone in “I her she go the wants, that same I’ll charm do it.” I that fell under those other people did. And having interviewed her children — she raised four — they all said they had an idyllic home life. She had enough energy and presence to be a great mom, as well as an artist and, of course, the founder of these organizations.
QWhat are some of the other films you’ve shown in the Mill Valley fest?
AFirst one was in 1983 when the festival was young and the venue was the clubhouse at the Mill Valley golf course with about 50 people. It was “Return to Angel Island.” I took an elderly Chinese man who had been quarantined on Angel Island when he first came to the United States fromChina to the barracks he lived in, and got his take on what it was like to be there. Another one, “No Pl8s,” that’s an homage to the abandoned cars that were on the streets in San Francisco.
QWhat made you fall in love with documentarystyle filmmaking?
AIt was in a way a short hop from the news features I was doing, like “On The Road With Charles Kuralt” for CBS and occasionally “60 Minutes” jobs. The big thing I had to get used to was that with news you can’t control things, but magazine format you can. You can say, “Go back and do that again.”
QIt seems like Marin has inspired some of your work.
AWhen I made the move in 1969 to Marin County, it was like a rebirth, and things were so much more interesting from a standpoint of people, what people did and value systems. Sticking your lens into someone’s life or hobby and telling their story, all that made for great fun going to work.