EVENT INFORMATION
Rothstein’s First Assignment – Appalachian Studies Film Series
2011 | 72 min | Movie
Please note: this movie begins at 2:15 pm.

Dr. Katrina Powell, co-producer

In October of 1935, the FSA photographer Arthur Rothstein came to the mountains of Virginia for his first assignment as a professional photographer. He was sent to Virginia to photograph residents before they would be moved to make way for Shenandoah National Park. Rothstein was at the beginning of one of the most storied careers in American Photography. At the FSA with Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans and others, he would produce the most important photographic record of the American Depression.

Director Richard Robinson (The Beekeepers) retraces Rothstein's steps by interviewing descendants of the mountain people and beautifully weaving them together with a 1964 audio interview of Rothstein, archival newsreel footage, and clips from the specious documentary "Hollow Folk."

During the course of his research, Robinson discovered evidence that Rothstein's images were not pure documentation. Instead, they were often staged for the camera. Digging beneath the official story, the film unearths an unsettling link between propaganda and documentary, and raises troubling questions about the photographer's complicity in the displacement of thousands of people for "progress."

Robinson's most chilling discovery, though, is the forced institutionalization and sterilization of mountain residents as part of a eugenics program where over 8,000 individuals were sterilized. This fascinating film challenges the viewer to consider the complexity behind images that are viewed as historical truth.
Show Times:
Saturday March 11, 2017
2:15PM - Admission is Free