Edward Ralph Pincus (July 6, 1938 – November 5, 2013) studied philosophy and photography at Harvard, and began filmmaking in 1964, developing a direct cinema approach to social and political problems. He has producer-director-director of photography credits on eight of his films and has been cinematographer on more than a dozen additional films. Pincus also authored Guide to Filmmaking (1968) and co-authored The Filmmaker's Handbook (1984 & 1999). He was born in Brooklyn, New York.Pincus started and developed the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Film Section. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship (1972) and several National Endowment for the Arts grants. He was Visiting Filmmaker at Minneapolis College of Art and Design and Visiting Filmmaker for three years at Harvard.After completing his best-known work, Diaries, he moved to Vermont and became a farmer until returning to film in 2007. Ed was known as a leading cut flower Peony producer, who influenced many future generations of farmers and contributed greatly to the Association of Specialty Cut Flower Growers. Pincus died November 5, 2013 of leukemia in Roxbury, Vermont.
[on his Vermont farm, while co-directing his last film, weeks before he died] Look up at those leaves and then frame them with your fingers. Now, when you remove the frame, don't they look different from before?
2
[re Diaries (1982)] A crew of one meant that intimate relations could be filmed in a documentary. Films could be shot over a long duration without skyrocketing costs. I decided to do an experiment. I would film for five years, not look at the footage, leave it in the can for five more years and then edit.
3
The personal is political.
#
Fact
1
While filming in the South in the 1960s for his film Black Natchez (1967), he met Dennis Sweeney. Sweeney later became increasingly mentally unstable and threatened Pincus and his family to the point where they had moved to Vermont nd ed was commuting to his work in Cambridge, MA. By 1980, Dennis Sweeney had become so unhinged that he killed convicted of a former Democratic congressman Allard Lowenstein in his Manhattan office.
2
Ironically, on November 9, the New York Times published a story about Pincus collaborating on a new documentary with Lucia Small, which dealt with the sudden death of her two close friends, as well as with Pincus's own struggles with terminal illness. But this pre-written print article made no mention of Pincus's death, which had occurred just days earlier, on Nov. 5.
3
Pincus left filmmaking in the 1980s and spent almost 30 years operating a flower farm in Vermont. He also became a black-belt instructor of the aikido.
4
Graduated from Brown University in 1960 with a philosophy degree and later added a master's degree in philosophy from Harvard, where he also studied photography. Later taught at Harvard in the 1980s after leaving M.I.T. where he had helped star the film school.
5
His father, Julius, ran a silk and textile business where his mother, Anne, sometimes worked.
$14 Million
