Keynote Speaker at Boston University
on Aesthetic Realism & Eli Siegel
By
Karen Van Outryve
In this holiday season,
which begins before Thanksgiving with National Hunger and Homelessness
Awareness Week, I am very affected by how much college students want
to do something to aid fellow Americans, thousands of them children, who
are hungry and homeless. Recently at Boston University’s Community Service
Center, incoming freshmen attended educational workshops and participated
in a week-long outreach project of volunteer work in food banks and shelters.
They came to deal with the effects of a failed economy—and this year, through
an historic keynote address, they learned the cause, and the one convincing,
practical solution.
The keynote speaker was
Ken Kimmelman, Emmy award-winning filmmaker and consultant on the faculty
of the not-for-profit Aesthetic Realism Foundation in New York. He has
addressed conferences of the National Student Campaign Against Hunger and
Homelessness at the University of Maryland, the Campus Outreach Opportunity
League at Harvard University, and recently Dickinson College in Carlisle,
Pennsylvania.
What he said in his stirring
address to 700 students, administrators and others who filled the auditorium,
was new, groundbreaking. He spoke about what he’s learned through his study
of Aesthetic Realism, the philosophy founded by the American educator and
poet, Eli Siegel (1902-78). Students heard this question asked by Mr. Siegel,
which is the crucial ethical question for our nation today: “What does
a person deserve by being alive?”
Still from film "What
Does a Person Deserve?" Photo by Robin Nelson.
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“As I saw homelessness becoming a staple
in America,” said Mr. Kimmelman, “I knew this question had to be made conscious
in people’s minds…honestly asked and answered by Americans, including our
government officials.”
Four of Mr. Kimmelman’s films
in behalf of social justice were shown, including his award-winning public
service film now airing on CNN, “What Does A Person Deserve?” A powerful
montage of black and white photographs set to stirring music by composer
Edward Green, the film shows the ravages of homelessness, while also revealing
the dignity of those who are forced to endure it, and ends with these words
by Eli Siegel: “The world should be owned by the people living in it....All
persons should be seen as living in a world truly theirs.”
Along with CNN, this film,
sponsored by many organizations including the National Coalition for the
Homeless, Food Chain and the Harburg Foundation has been aired on major
television stations around the country. |
“It means a lot of me,” said
Mr. Kimmelman, “that through my work in film I can be useful to people.
I’d always wanted to make films for social justice, but it was when I began
to study Aesthetic Realism that I learned principles that could really
make for change in the world.”
The Fight between Respect and Contempt
He spoke about the need to understand that there is a
fight in every person between respect and contempt. “The only reason there
is homelessness in America is because our unjust economic system is based
on contempt –the ‘addition to self through the lessening of something else’.”
Mr. Kimmelman explained that
economics arises from individual selves, and a system where one human being
is encouraged to exploit the labor of others for his own profit and aggrandizement,
is contempt. People have to know where this economic injustice begins in
order to change it permanently.
“Like families all over America
today,” he continued, “I saw my parents struggle to make ends meet. I wanted
to do something to make the world better, and thought as a filmmaker I
could be useful. But I was also terrifically competitive.”
He spoke courageously
of the fight in himself and what he learned in Aesthetic Realism lessons
given by Mr. Siegel, who asked him kind, critical questions like these:
“Do you believe you wage a contest between
yourself and everything else?”
“In some way are you more fortunate than others?
Do you have contempt for people who are not financially all right?”
“What’s more important to you, being all you can be, or beating out other
people?”
Answering these questions, said
Kimmelman: “was the beginning of a huge change in my life and my work as
a filmmaker!" He spoke about the Aesthetic Realism statement that the desire
to like the world on an honest basis, is “the largest purpose of every
human being” and the one opponent to contempt.
From the desire to like the
world, Mr. Kimmelman said, have come “all the great contributions to humanity.”
And contempt, which can be so ordinary, is “at the heart of all the cruelties
and injustices in the world—slavery, racism, poverty, war—and economic
injustice.”
Three Short Films against Racism
As part of his talk, Mr. Kimmelman also showed three short
films he had made against prejudice and racism, saying: “In every instance
of ethnic prejudice or racism, wherever it takes place, this is what occurs:
you triumphantly belittle someone with a different skin color, or language,
or cultural background, because you see them as standing for a world other
than yourself, which you dislike, and lessening them, you feel, makes you
a big shot. Contempt gives one an immediate pleasure—the feeling
of superiority—but contempt, I’ve seen, not only makes a person stupid,
but is the most hurtful, dangerous thing in every person and makes us despise
ourselves.”
The three films are: The Heart
Knows Better, which won the Emmy in 1995 for outstanding public service
film, and two films produced for the United Nations: Brushstrokes, a humorous
animated short for children, showing the absurdity of prejudice, and Asimbonanga,
based on a song against apartheid written by South African musician Johnny
Clegg and sung by Joan Baez. The students responded enthusiastically.
“They loved those short films,” said Ellen Reid coordinator for the event.
The Individual and the Community
He also spoke about Community Service in relation to this
principle of Aesthetic Realism: “Every person is always trying to put together
opposites in himself.” A large question Community Service brings up, he
explained, is the relation of Community and one’s Individuality.
This subject, he said, was discussed
in an Aesthetic Realism class in which Ellen Reiss, the Class Chairman,
asked: “As we think of community, how do we see our individuality,
how do we see our private self? People can be engaged in certain
work, but when you are alone…you can feel you’re a different person. Are
they two different worlds – my individuality and my usefulness to the community?”
Said Mr. Kimmelman, “Where these
opposites are not one there will be patronizing. We have to feel that being
useful to others is the same as our individual expression, taking care
of just ourselves. In order to see with as much feeling and depth as possible
the men, women, and children you will be working with,” he concluded, “I
suggest that you think of one of these persons, and write a 500 word soliloquy:
what this person thinks to himself or herself, his or her hopes and fears,
what opposites he or she is trying to put together—try to see from their
depths, as a novelist or a playwright would. I also recommend that each
of you keep a journal, and write a sentence about something you learned
from each person you are useful to. This is the aesthetic way of seeing!”
“What Does a Person Deserve?”
was shown as well during a workshop given by Mr. Kimmelman in which a paper
by his colleague and NYC Planner Barbara Buehler, was also read: “Housing:
A Basic Right, An Urgent Need, A National Priority.” The exuberant response
to both these events is in what Leslie Stierman, one of the Coordinators
said, “Students just couldn’t stop talking about these presentations. They
made them aware of things they’d never thought about before!”
“Economics,” Kimmelman
said “begins with individuals. If people are really against contempt, and
learn to see other human beings with respect—as having insides, hopes and
feelings as real as their own, homelessness will be a thing of the past!”
Throughout the evening, the
audience was rapt. “Thank you,” said one student afterward, and added,
“It was so encouraging. It had me see how much can be done to benefit people.”
Ken
Kimmelman is president of Imagery Film Ltd., and is on the faculty of the
not-for-profit Aesthetic Realism Foundation. He has won numerous awards
including the 1995 Emmy for Outstanding National Public Service Film for
the anti-prejudice "The Heart Knows Better," shown on television,
in movie theatres and sports stadiums worldwide, including at Yankee Stadium
during the World Series. He also won an Emmy in 1997 for his contributions
to Sesame Street.
| Karen Van Outryve is a poet and Aesthetic Realism consultant whose articles on hunger, homelessness
and the economy, including those written with her husband, architect Anthony
Romeo, have been published in many newspapers. |
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