Julia Reichert, 76; honored for her documentaries
Julia Reichert, a filmmaker and educator who made a pioneering feminist documentary, “Growing Up Female,” as an undergraduate student and almost a half-century later won an Academy Award for “American Factory,” a documentary feature about the Chinese takeover of a shuttered automobile plant in Dayton, Ohio, died Thursday at her home in nearby Yellow Springs, Ohio. She was 76.
Steven Bognar, her husband and filmmaking partner, confirmed the death. The cause, diagnosed in 2018, was urothelial cancer, which affects the urethra, bladder, and other organs. She learned she had non-Hodgkin lymphoma in 2006.
Ms. Reichert, a longtime professor of motion pictures at Wright State University in Dayton, was at the forefront of a new generation of social documentarians who came out of the New Left and feminist movements of the early 1970s with a belief in film as an organizing tool with a social mission. Her films were close to oral history: Eschewing voice-over narration, they were predicated on interviews in which her mainly working-class subjects spoke for themselves.
“Growing Up Female” (1971), which she made with her future husband, James Klein, a classmate at Antioch College in Ohio, was selected by the Library of Congress for the National Film Registry in 2011.
Her documentaries “Union Maids” (1976), made with Klein and Miles Mogulescu, and “Seeing Red” (1983), also made with Klein, were nominated for Academy Awards.
Both mix archival footage with interviews. “Union Maids” profiles three women active in the Chicago labor movement during the Great Depression. “Seeing Red” portrays rankand-file members of the Communist Party during the 1930s and ’40s.
Ms. Reichert was again nominated, in 2010, for the short documentary “The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant,” which she directed with Bognar, her second husband.
“The Last Truck” documented the closing of an automobile assembly plant in Moraine, Ohio, some of it clandestinely filmed by workers inside the plant. The movie served as a prologue to “American Factory,” which Netflix released in conjunction with Barack and Michelle Obama’s fledgling company Higher Ground Productions, and which won the 2019 documentary-feature Oscar.
Reviewing the film in The New York Times, Manohla Dargis called it “complex, stirring, timely and beautifully shaped, spanning continents as it surveys the past, present and possible future of American labor.”
The movie is suffused in ambivalence. Having purchased the same plant documented in “The Last Truck,” a Chinese billionaire converts it into an automobile-glass factory and restores lost jobs while confounding US workers with a new set of attitudes.
In 2020, Ms. Reichert and Bognar were invited by comedian Dave Chappelle to document one of the outdoor stand-up shows he hosted during the COVID-19 pandemic from a cornfield near his home in Yellow Springs. The two-hour feature, “Dave Chappelle: Live in Real Life,” had its premiere at Radio City Music Hall as part of the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival.
Although Ms. Reichert addressed a variety of social issues in the documentaries she directed and produced, her enduring interests were labor history and the lives of working women. Her last film, “9to5: The Story of a Movement,” directed with Bognar, brought those two concerns together, focusing on the organizing of female office workers beginning in the 1970s.
Julia Bell Reichert was born June 16, 1946, in Bordentown, N.J., a city on the Delaware River about 8 miles southeast of Trenton. She was the second of four children of Louis and Dorothy (Bell) Reichert. Her father was a butcher at a neighborhood supermarket, her mother a homemaker who became a nurse.
One of the few students from her high school to go to college, Ms. Reichert was attracted to Antioch because of its cooperative work-study program. Her parents were conservative Republicans, but once she was at Antioch, Ms. Reichert’s political orientation shifted left. She canvassed for the Democrat, Lyndon B. Johnson, during the 1964 presidential election and hosted a feminist program, “The Single Girl,” on the campus radio station.
After making “Growing Up Female,” which was originally intended for consciousnessraising groups, she and Klein founded a distribution cooperative, New Day Films, which focused on bringing new documentary films to schools, unions, and community groups.
The couple collaborated on the documentary “Methadone: An American Way of Dealing,” in addition to “Union Maids” and “Seeing Reds.”
Ms. Reichert started a filmmaking program at Wright State University with Klein. She also directed a quasi-autobiographical feature film, “Emma and Elvis” (1992), written with Bognar, about a married documentary filmmaker who becomes involved with a young video artist. Although the film received only limited distribution, critic Jonathan Rosenbaum praised it in The Chicago Reader for “making a filmmaker’s creative/midlife crisis meaningful, engaging and interesting.”
Ms. Reichert’s most personal film — the first she directed with Bognar — was “A Lion in the House,” a documentary about children with cancer completed in 2006 after having been in production for close to a decade. It was inspired in part by her adolescent daughter’s struggle with Hodgkin lymphoma. Her daughter recovered, but after the film was completed, Ms. Reichert was herself diagnosed with cancer.
“A Lion in the House” won multiple awards, including a Primetime Emmy, the 2006 Sundance Film Festival grand jury documentary award, and the 2008 Independent Spirit Award for best documentary.
Ms. Reichert’s marriage to Klein ended in divorce in 1986. She married Bognar, who she leaves, in 1987. She also leaves her daughter, Lela Klein; three brothers, Louis, Craig, and Joseph Reichert; and two grandchildren.
In an e-mail, James Klein wrote that he and Ms. Reichert “came of age with a sense that it was only through community that the type of work we wanted to see being made could happen.”
“And Julia really lived her beliefs,” he added.