Church bells are ringing, and light flashes in mysterious ways across a black-and-white palette. The moon is seen through tree branches and reflected off water. A beautiful woman seems to be waking from a dream, and what sounds like the singing of angels can be heard.
The camera pans to the towers and rosette window at Sagrada Familia, the famous unfinished cathedral in Barcelona, Spain, designed by Antoni Gaudi. Before it became a UNESCO World Heritage Site, it was a setting for filmmaker Albert Nigrin and his wife/muse/star Irene Fizer. The young couple traveled to Barcelona twice in the early ’80s, shooting in the dawn hours before the masses arrived. Aurelia, made in Super 8 mm, invokes the spirits of the hallowed site.
Aurelia Irene Fizer. Photo by Albert Nigrin
The camera lens speaks to the apertures in windows and doorways, cutting to scenes of feet fleeting up the spiral staircase, focusing on patterns in the building elements. The filmmaker employs one of his favorite techniques, having an actor hold a round mirror toward the camera – it becomes a portal to another world, echoing the orb of the moon.
If Nigrin’s name sounds familiar, it’s because he is the founder and executive director of the NJ Film Festival. In that position he has unrelentingly nurtured and promoted independent filmmakers through the decades. The long-time Rutgers professor put his own filmmaking on a back burner to help others. (Disclosure: Nigrin once screened my documentary on the artists of Roosevelt, N.J., so I know first-hand how he takes care of filmmakers, promoting them to local media, getting them interviews on radio and TV.)
Now Nigrin is having a retrospective, including some of his earliest works, such as Aurelia, as well as a few just completed films (Pizzica, Lamiai, and Cold War Blues will all be premiered), to benefit the New Jersey Media Arts Center. The ticketed event takes place Friday, September 27, 7 p.m., in Voorhees Hall #105/Rutgers University, 71 Hamilton Street, New Brunswick.
Cold War Blues. Photo by Albert Nigrin
“Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake,” Henry David Thoreau wrote. Watching Nigrin’s films indeed feels like being in dreams awake. “Dreams serve as content for my experimental films,” admits Nigrin. “I keep a notebook handy to jot down the good dreams.”
In Dream Screen Nigrin employs prismatic and strobe effects to reinforce that dream state. Pizzica comes from a folk dance in the 1400s in Southern Italy. “Though there are several different theories about its origin, the most accepted story is that this dance could fight off the poisonous bite of a tarantula,” says the winner of a 2002 New Jersey State Council on the Arts Media Arts Fellowship. Nigrin has also received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts/ American Film Institute Mid-Atlantic Media Arts Fellowship Program and the Ford Foundation. His films/videos were screened as part of the 2004 Enter The Screen: Experimental Film program in Changzhou, China; the 2005 Floating Images: Experimental Film program in Shanghai, China; the 2006 Toronto Images Film Festival; and the 1998-2001 Big as Life: An American History of 8mm Filmmaking Retro at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Born in Charlottesville, Virginia, Nigrin and his family lived in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and Staten Island, places his father’s career in pediatrics and endocrinology took them. “My childhood was fairly carefree and my folks were loving and supportive,” he recounts. (And they appear in the credits of his films.)
The family spoke French – his Turkish parents had attended French schools in their native country — and shared a passion for cinema. “My dad took me to see lots of action-adventure movies. He didn't like seeing heavy, existentialist films, so most of the movies we would see were like The Vikings with Kirk Douglass, Kelly's Heroes with Clint Eastwood, and The Battle of Britain. I even got to see some of the early James Bond films. I think Thunderball was the first one I saw with my folks in the theater in 1965.”
Nigrin recalls it being “pretty eye-opening for a 7-year-old.”
“Then, when I was 8, my folks took me to see Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey. It spooked me out a bit when I first saw it at the St. George Theater on Staten Island. I was worried about the lead astronaut Dave Bowman as he made his way into deep space all by himself. It was presented in Cinerama which was super widescreen. I had never seen a curved screen before. That film definitely left a mark and it is no accident I teach it in many of my cinema studies classes.”
Portrait of Yazmin. Photo by Albert Nigrin
His own filmmaking began in 1978, creating synch-slide shows for his brother’s progressive jazz fusion band. “I would project the images behind them while they played.”
A passion for playing soccer might have derailed his film career. “I was good enough to be named a high school all-star and hoped to become a professional but blew out my knee and that was the end of that.”
When he saw Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon in a graduate film class in the early 1980s, “I was hooked. I knew I wanted to make experimental dream films like hers.”
After earning a bachelor's degree in French literature and history at Binghamton University in 1980 – he spent his junior year in Paris and Aix-en-Provence — Nigrin was awarded a teaching assistantship at Rutgers. En route to earning a Ph.D. in French Literature, he switched gears and went on to get an MFA in visual arts with a concentration in filmmaking at Rutgers’ Mason Gross School of the Arts.
Nigrin met his wife, Irene Fizer, on the steps of the Gardner Sage Theological Library in New Brunswick. “It was love at first sight — lightning bolts and all that stuff. Irene was my first muse and she starred in my earliest films.”
Fizer, an English Professor at Hofstra University, is a frequent collaborator. “Irene has always been my main collaborator and partner. After I finish a shoot I show her the rushes and after I finish an edit, she is the first to see it. She always has great ideas and suggestions.”
In 1982, Nigrin took $300 of his own money to rent a few projectors, rounded up fellow movie buffs, and screened films of Man Ray with half the image on a makeshift screen and half on a blackboard in a classroom, giving birth to the New Jersey Film Festival. The New York Times called it "a seat-of-the-pants" film series. The New Jersey Media Arts Center was founded in 1992 as the non-profit 501(c)3 organization to run the New Jersey Film Festival.
Four decades after its inception it’s still going strong. The benefit screening will help fund a new assistant director position for the festival.
Pizzica AF Mylar Crop. Photo by Albert Nigrin
At the end of the day, Nigrin and Fizer go home to a ranch house in Somerset, nestled in bucolic woods. They are surrounded by thousands of books and media in formats ranging from Super 8, 16 mm, VHS tapes, and DVDs to Blu-Ray. “I tell my friends that my home is a bit like Charles Foster Kane's warehouse seen at the end of Citizen Kane where you have the place filled with art objects, books, and mementos.”
Orson Welles is a frequent lecture topic for Nigrin. “Orson Welles was truly a genius and everyone should see Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons as well as The Lady from Shanghai and Touch of Evil!”
Among Nigrin’s passions is the rescuing of cats. He co-founded Scarlet Paws Animal Welfare Network to help find homes for abandoned or stray cats on Rutgers' campuses. Nigrin estimates they have rescued 150 cats in the last 30 years. Those that are too wild to adopt out will live out their lives in a shelter on the campus. “I am no longer rescuing cats as it is so overwhelming,” he says tearfully, recalling feline companions he has mourned, “but I still help to feed them.”
At a point in life where he could pare down to the essentials, Nigrin says the trinity of teaching, running the festivals, and making his own films feed into each other. If he had to sum up his mission, it would be to “turn people on to different types of films, art, and music. I love sharing.”
The Fall 2024 New Jersey Film Festival takes place on select Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays between September 6-October 18, 2024.
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