Helen Whitney
Emmy-winning Documentary Filmmaker
“[Whitney's] work resonates with concern for the human condition.”
—NY Times
“When you wade into telling a story of faith, you are in very, very deep water very, very quickly. I've never seen anyone negotiate it better than Helen Whitney.” —Ken Verdoia, KUED
Helen Whitney has worked as a producer, director, and writer for documentaries and feature films since 1971. Her films have been featured on ABC's Closeup and PBS's American Masters, as well as on FRONTLINE, and have ranged over a wide variety of subjects, among them: youth gangs, presidential candidates, the mentally ill, a Trappist Monastery, the class structure of Great Britain, homosexuals, and the photographer Richard Avedon. Whitney’s recent films explore the spiritual landscape, reflecting her passionate personal interest in the religious journey. These include FRONTLINE pieces such as: John Paul II: The Millennial Pope; Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero; and a four-hour special, The Mormons. Whitney’s most recent project, A Time To Love And A Time To Hate, is a four-hour PBS documentary special about Forgiveness in the personal and the political realm. It will be aired in 2010.
In 1977 Whitney directed First Edition, which was nominated for an Academy Award for best short documentary. Her film American Inquisition, awarded the Edward R. Murrow Award for Excellence in Journalism, became the subject of a very famous case about First Amendment rights, examining how McCarthyism had affected the small town of Fairmont, West Virginia. Her documentary Homosexuals aired in 1982 on ABC News Closeup, breaking ground as the first documentary about gay life in America to be shown on network television. Youth Terror: The View From Behind the Gun, called "the most disturbing and dramatic news program ever seen on American commercial television" by TIME Magazine, explores the lives of New York gang members and juvenile delinquents.
Widely respected for the integrity of her work, Whitney's documentaries and features have received many honors, including the Humanitas Award, and the prestigious duPont-Columbia Journalism Award. She has won one Emmy and one Peabody, and been nominated for six Emmys and an Academy Award.
An eloquent speaker, Whitney presents on the filmmaking process as well as the specific topics and themes explored in her extensive variety of films.
About FAITH AND DOUBT AT GROUND ZERO (2002)
"What was it we saw on Sept. 11? Was it the true face of evil? Was it the face of religion? And where, if one is a believer, was God? Indeed, if one is not a believer, did Sept. 11 make the idea of God that much more of an impossibility? Or was there something in the human response to the tragedy that suggested transcendence?
In Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero, FRONTLINE producer Helen Whitney sets out to discover how the religious beliefs—and unbelief—of Americans have been challenged since the events of Sept. 11. Through interviews with priests, rabbis, and Islamic scholars, victims' families and World Trade Center survivors, writers and thinkers, atheists and agnostics, this two-hour documentary explores whether, and in what ways, Americans' spiritual lives may have changed on that day." —PBS.org
About RICHARD AVEDON: DARKNESS AND LIGHT (1996)
Vividly portrayed in this American Masters Special, photographer Richard Avedon shoots for two different worlds. Primarily, he is a fashion photographer, having worked for various magazines for more than 50 years. Of particular note is the description of photographing Natassja Kinski, a shoot that took two hours of her lying naked on a cement floor as they tried to coax a snake up her body. As a fashion photographer, Avedon became known for his sense of movement and the energy he captured in each image; he gets exquisite models to leap, move, and flip their hair. His second, and perhaps lesser-known, body of work is art photography, including portraits of the famous and the unknown, with a signature style of photographing his sitters on a white background with no props. This documentary ably captures the tension between these two directions in his work by overlaying the positive and negative viewpoints about his photography in a collage of voiceovers. We learn how Avedon views his role as a photographer, and that for him the end result captures "the death of the moment." Also included are the controversial images of his dying father. This program aptly depicts this highly creative man exposed through his work as vulnerable, obsessed, and a perfectionist. This 81-minute-long program will interest a broad audience, from those interested in fashion, people of our times, the history of the 20th century, artists and art historians, and photography in general. —Anne Barclay Morgan, Amazon.com
