Catharine R. Stimpson
Former Director of Fellows of MacArthur Foundation and University Professor and Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Science, New York University
Consider the Jezebel of the Hebrew Bible, a rotten bitch of a queen if ever there was one. She serves Baal rather than the Lord and so corrupts her husband King Ahab that he does, too. She is conniving, greedy, perfidious, and murderous. Her fate is richly deserved---to be devoured by dogs at the wall of the city.
Now consider the Jezebel of contemporary independent film, a daring production company if ever there was one. Its founders and owners, Greta Schiller and Andrea Weiss, saucily took the name of the most evil of women and flipped its meaning. Jezebel is no longer the symbol of female evil but of a wild and iconoclastic female creativity.
Schiller and Weiss founded Jezebel in 1984. Before I met them personally, I knew their great documentary about gay history, Before Stonewall. It was Schiller’s first major feature-length release. Weiss won an Emmy for her work as its research director. I then encountered Weiss when she was a graduate student at Rutgers University and I served on her dissertation committee. Her pathway to a Ph.D. became a path-breaking book, Violets and Vampires: Lesbians in Film (1992). Then, in the mid-1990s, both partners brought their lights and cameras, wit and ambition, salt and savoir-faire, to my office to shoot me as a talking head for Paris Was A Woman, their joyous, innovative film about women in the Bohemias of Paris in the first part of the 20th-century. I found them both women of conscience, capable of working enormously hard and being lively and original company. I still do.
Schiller and Weiss have built an amazing record. Sometimes, they work together---for example, on their triology about women jazz musicians. Sometimes, they work independently---for example, Schiller’s documentary about Cecil Williams, a gay white member of the African National Congress, The Man Who Drove With Mandela, or Weiss’s Escape to Life: The Erika and Klaus Mann Story. Despite their awards and prizes, the extent of their accomplishments is insufficiently appreciated, certainly in the U.S. In part, this is because of their subject matter. They take on minority experience, that beyond the walls of the conventions of the majority, be it that of lesbians and gays, blacks, Jews, and women. In part, this lack of adequate appreciation is because of the style of their documentaries. They have zealously unearthed previously lost material, but their subjects, given their marginality, may not have left rich records. As a result, Jezebel has explored a hybrid style, which brings together archival words and images, video animation, voice-overs, and re-enactments. Jezebel is imaginative, but never sacrifices credibility and plausibility.
Like many non-profits in the arts, Jezebel exists on the proverbial shoestring. Its materials weave together grants, royalties, teaching jobs, an artist in residency here, an appearance there. Schiller and Weiss are also connoisseurs of thrift and personal sacrifice, although they have too much humor and vibrancy to indulge in self-pity and martyrdom. They live on the edge because that is where the vehicle of their imagination, creativity, and sense of purpose drives them.
 I often think of Jezebel when I think of the paradoxical attitudes of the United States towards the arts. Some people pay handsomely for art and find social status in doing so, while others display a spasmodic indifference. Still others disdain the arts and use the more experimental artists among us as target practice, treating them as if they were the Jezebels of old. Yet artists like Schiller and Weiss keep on doing their work. When our culture is capable of seeing it clearly and whole, our culture will realize what gifts these wild and iconoclastic women have given us. Their non-profit lives are our cultural capital and profit us bountifully.