{"id":4653,"title":"An Interview with George Stoney","kind":"biblio","url":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/interview-george-stoney","version":"ce52f74a491a2c0ea8aecc66f470eb4e5614d813136d8058b51dcd62b651046d","modified":"2026-09-13T21:52:00.9243654+00:00","credits":[{"role":"Author","name":"Marita Sturken"}],"authorKeys":["Sturken, Marita"],"subjects":["Interviews"],"metadata":[{"label":"Publication","value":"Afterimage","url":null},{"label":"Publisher","value":"Visual Studies Workshop","url":null},{"label":"Date","value":"January 1984","url":null},{"label":"Place","value":"Rochester, New York","url":null},{"label":"Volume","value":"11","url":null},{"label":"Issue","value":"6","url":null},{"label":"ETC archive","value":"ETC0862","url":null},{"label":"Interviewee","value":"George Stoney","url":null}],"citations":{"page":"\u0022An Interview with George Stoney.\u0022 Video History Project, Experimental Television Center, 2026. https://www.videohistoryproject.org/interview-george-stoney.","publication":"Marita Sturken. An Interview with George Stoney. Afterimage. Visual Studies Workshop. January 1984.","risUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/citation/4653.ris"},"links":[],"sections":[{"name":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"characters":64561},{"name":"summary","source":"existing VHP generated summary","generated":true,"characters":732}],"content":{"section":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"text":"As a community and media activist, a professor of film and video, and a maker of a great many films and numerous videotapes, George Stoney is one of the most vocal and influential advocates of the use of video as a social tool, today. Born in 1916, Stoney began his career as a journalist and began working in film as a director and writer after serving as a photo intelligence officer in World War II. He joined the Southern Educational Film Service in 1946 and formed his own company, George C. Stoney Associates, in 1950. For 20 years, Stoney made some 40 sponsored social and educational documentaries, including the well-known All My Babies (1952) about midwifery. In 1968 Stoney was invited by Frank Spiller of the National Film Board of Canada to become executive producer of the Challenge for Change program, which was begun in 1966 to create films and later videotapes about the social concerns of various Canadian communities. In 1970 he returned to New York to serve for two years as the chairperson of the Undergraduate Division at New York University (NYU) where he has since taught film and video. In 1972 Stoney and Red Burns founded the Alternate Media Center in Tisch School of the Arts at NYU, and in 1976 he was one of the founding members of the National Federation of Local Cable Programmers (NFLCP), an advocacy association for public access and community programming on cable television. He is presently one of the most outspoken proponents of public access on cable. Throughout his varied career, Stoney has always remained a spokesman of social justice and the rights of individuals. He has always worked in collaboration with others and will rarely take individual credit for a work. This interview represents an edited transcript of three conversations in August and September 1983 and includes Stoney\u2019s additions and corrections. Marita Sturken: Can you explain to me how the use of video came about in the Challenge for Change program? Did it precede your arrival? George Stoney: It was simultaneous. I went up there in 1968 when the portapaks were just coming out. I had used the Ampex video rigs in 1965 and 1966 when I worked at Stanford, but they were so clumsy and full of bugs that I got terribly frustrated with them. When I got to the Film Board, a group wanted to use video and I had to approve the budget. I was so skeptical that I said, \u201COK, but only so long as you make a film about the experiment.\u201D Colin Low, the philosophical father of the Challenge for Change program, from the Film Board had conducted an initial experiment on Fogo Island in Newfoundland from which we worked out a lot of theory. But we found that in film the turnaround time was much too long, and the use of complicated film equipment caused the whole process to be dominated by a professional crew. So the idea that people could do their own recording themselves had not yet evolved. Then Bonnie Klein and Dorothy Henaut, with some help from others working in Challenge for Change, decided we should try and experiment with half inch video. The old CV Sony portable video decks were just coming into Canada at that time, and they decided to use them to see if ordinary people could use the technology on their own. An experiment was launched in Montreal with a French Canadian community group, and we made a film about it called VTR-St. Jacques. This film records, quite honestly, the experiences the people of the St. Jacques neighborhood had using video in 1969. I have used that film ever since because it makes clear many of the problems and limitations groups have been having when using video as a tool for social change: the cost of the equipment as opposed to other priorities, the time it takes, how it can distract attention from more important things. Nevertheless, the St. Jacques experiment convinced me that video could be a powerful tool if used with caution and thoughtfulness. MS: Were there problems in getting the video circulated and seen? GS: At that time very few people had video equipment. The editing and copying of tapes was very difficult, and there was no video projection. There was no 3/4 inch cassette distribution pattern such as we have now. MS: Was there cable television in Canada? GS: Oh yes, that\u2019s where I got into cable television. We were looking for ways to get the Challenge for Change material seen. I found that many Film Board distribution people had developed such fixed and out-of-date ideas they could not handle our material properly. They were convinced, for example, that theaters would not show something that had been on television, and that network television would not use anything that had been used locally. I said, \u201CLook, this is information. It\u2019s important. We are going to get it out anyway we can.\u201D Even in 1968-69 about a quarter of the people in Canada had cable. It came there very early, partly because many people lived in remote areas and needed a stronger signal but mostly because they wanted the American programming. We found that cable operators had systems with eight to 12 channels, and usually they were only using three or four of them. There were no satellites to make Home Box Office, distant signal importation, or all of that possible, so they had blank channels and many were happy to have us fill them. We began with the really small mom-and-pop operators who would help us put in little studios with portable cameras and often with high school volunteers as crews. We found some local shows already going, usually very primitive stuff, but it was there. So they would run our Challenge for Change tapes, and sometimes we did live shows as well. You see, the difference in the Challenge for Change program, at least in the beginning, was that the films and tapes were not important in themselves. It was the process and the ideas. MS: How would you define the basis for Challenge for Change? GS: As we developed it at the Film Board, it was a social contract between the people who were in charge of a government program-an agency or a social service-and the people who were the recipients of that program or service, designed to find out how they felt about what was being done and what they would like to see changed. Out of our work social theorists later tried to develop an approach and mechanism that would be applied to a vast array of social conflict situations. But in my experience it is limited to places where the people who are in power are willing to listen and respond. You see, when I go to somebody with my camera and microphone and I say, \u201CLook, give me your soul,\u201D I\u2019ve got to be able to say, \u201CLook, it\u2019s going to help you, not hurt you.\u201D If you tell me what you think, it is my obligation as the intermediary to go to the authorities, get them to look at it, and respond. If I can\u2019t persuade either party to live up to their part of the contract, it won\u2019t work. Now the advantage we had at the Film Board is that we worked through a highly respected government agency, cooperating with eight leading government departments, so we could pretty well guarantee some kind of response. People have misunderstood the Challenge for Change approach because they don\u2019t understand that a response is part of the bargain. I have not found this technique working very well in the U.S. There are not many countries in the world where one can make such a bargain, so the concept is not as transportable as people seem to think. MS: In the Challenge for Change program did you train people to use the equipment themselves? GS: Yes, we did. In some units we trained using film, but mostly it was videotape. I think one of the more successful video projects was in Drumheller, Alberta in 1969. In each case there was a community organizer who was the catalyst, and in Drumheller it was Tony Karsh, an excellent fellow who used videotape himself and trained other people to use videotape. About 1904, coal was discovered in the Drumheller area located about 80 to 90 miles northeast of Calgary. By the 1940s there were 40 some mines, and a booming economy. By 1969 only one mine was left, and it was about to close. In the moldering little mining camps around Drumheller lived a lot of old people and single mothers with lots of kids. There were also a lot of economic, social, and health problems. For example, people were moving their privies all around and the Red Deer River was getting terribly polluted. Yet the government wasn\u2019t going to give money for a sewer system to people who hadn\u2019t given any indication that they were likely to pull together to help build it. Challenge for Change was called in there by the mayor because he wanted to get people stirred up. So, Tony came and started going from house to house with the video equipment, recording oral history and getting to know people. There were groups of immigrants who had come over since 1904 from all parts of Europe. All had had the same kind of experience, but they had kept to themselves and they didn\u2019t know each other very well. Tony would make a tape of one person and show it to the next person. MS: And they were receptive to being taped? GS: Well sure, a nice young fellow comes in and wants to interview you . .. Later Tony invited them to meetings to see the tapes and discuss their problems. Tony was such a good teacher because when he came into the room with the equipment he looked like he needed help. He would act like he had six thumbs, and before long people would just take the equipment away from him and say, \u201CTony, let me show you how it works.\u201D Before long he developed really skilled crews. Anyway, he got the people to realize that they had to organize to make successful presentations to the provincial government. They had to show that they were going to be responsible in order to get to the government. And they did get somewhere. Drumheller was one of our better examples. There were others attempts to do something for one-industry towns that were losing their industries, particularly in the North. Most of the experiments were described in the Challenge for Change Newsletter, which Dorothy Henaut did a whale of a good job editing. She decided that it should not be a puff piece for the program but a critical journal which aired a lot of our problems. MS: At the point that you left the National Film Board in 1970, video must have been well integrated into the program. GS: I can recall an amusing incident. During the summer before I left, an inspector from the government in Ottawa came down to look at us. He wanted to know what all this expenditure for video equipment was. It wasn\u2019t film and this was supposed to be the Film Board. So I took him into the equipment room and showed him 44 rigs we had just bought all lined up. He said, \u201CWell, how many feet are these going to expose?\u201D I told him that it would probably be more than the Film Board\u2019s whole output, and that we could wipe them and use them again. He just had a fit, and I found many people at the Film Board who felt like he did. Unfortunately, later they got into that mode of thinking even in relation to Challenge for Change, measuring its success by how many films were shown rather than what those film showings accomplished. MS: Is the Film Board continuing to use video? GS: I haven\u2019t been to Montreal for at least two years, but I know they are using it for a drama workshop and as a way of preparing themselves to do films. I don\u2019t know that they\u2019re using video in the way we used it in Challenge for Change. Until recently, I used to visit the Film Board almost every year to see old friends and new films. People would always take me aside in the cafeteria and say, \u201CGeorge, NFB\u2019s not what it used to be in the old days.\u201D Then I would go to the Friday afternoon screenings and see beautiful new films by people I had never heard of, particularly the Women\u2019s Unit. So I wouldn\u2019t say that the Film Board in general has lost its edge. What I do regret is that what we started so bravely and successfully there, which ","offset":0,"nextOffset":12000,"totalCharacters":64561,"complete":false},"rightsUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/terms-service"}