Shustak

Shustak is a loving, yet honest eulogy, obviously made with great care by Shustak’s friend Stuart Page

Shustak, New Zealand, 2008

Director: Stuart Page

93 minutes, Exempt

Winner Best NZ Feature Documentary, Best Emerging Film-Maker, 2009 DocNZ International Film Festival

Born to Jewish immigrant parents in New York’s Bronx in 1926, Laurence Shustak trained as an apprentice toolmaker, going on to serve in the US army during the final stages of World War II and later working as an interpreter helping in war crime trials in Germany. In the mid 1950s, Shustak turned his hand to the study and practice of photography and design. He combined photography with his passion for jazz; shooting images for many jazz and blues record covers. His work soon featured in magazines and exhibitions and he began teaching and running photographic workshops for the New York School of Visual Arts and Time-Life Inc. He moved to New Zealand and established the Department of Photography at the University of Canterbury’s School of Fine Art, bringing with him cameras and ideas, zeal, and a personal vision that drew on the unfolding utopian philosophy of Buckminster Fuller together with the latest media understandings of Marshall McLuhan. At the age of 77 years, Shustak died May 13, 2003. A student and graduate of the School of Fine Arts, Stuart Page, received Creative NZ Funding for the production of this tribute to Shustak. Page punctuates his footage with Shustak’s own original prints and archival material. Page combines his own mix of unconventional ‘talking head’ interviews with animated photos and words scanning his former teacher’s career from stunning Harlem social photo essays to provocative fish eye nudes, and from stark black and white 16mm shorts to lush Polaroids.

“... A film about the Jewish American photographer Larence Shustak, a larger-than-life character who relocated to New Zealand in the seventies. Shustak is a loving, yet honest eulogy, obviously made with great care by Shustak’s friend Stuart Page. Shustak is a difficult man to like—this is largely due to some of the less than fond memories related by some of his children who only ever refer to him as “Larry”. Despite this, humanity emerges in his photographs and in the accounts of his friends and students here in New Zealand. Shustak’s devotion to photography and his rolling stone gathers no moss credo make him a irrepressible character, who was undoubtedly magnetic and influential to those who surrounded him. Page has succeeded in garnering good interviews from his subjects, as well as mixing the talking heads with candid home video footage of Shustak, and interviews with the man himself. A problem with documentaries about artists is the temporal nature of film, which means we are often not accorded enough time to spend with the works themselves. The problem extends further when attempting to cover an artist’s lifetime in a mere ninety minutes. This is not a failing of Page’s film, but rather a failing of the brevity of feature length documentaries. A retort to this is that it offers the viewer an opportunity to then seek out the artist’s work themselves, and in Shustak’s case this is something I am compelled to do. This documentary is typical of why Creative New Zealand funding is a good thing. Through their help, Page is able to make a tribute to a man many New Zealanders would otherwise never hear of. Whether documentaries chronicle our nation’s defining moments, or offer smaller portraits of artists like Shustak, the more we produce the better, because in my opinion New Zealanders are pretty good at making them.” - Costas Thrasyvoulou, Salient, 23 March 2009

read more at stuartpage.com

Screenings: Shustak screened on 4 June 2009