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 Maureen Gosling has been a documentary filmmaker for more
than thirty years and is best known for her twenty-year collaboration
with acclaimed independent director, Les Blank. Gosling has also been
sought after as an editor, working with such directors as Tom
Weidlinger, Shakti Butler, Jed Riffe, Amie Williams, Ashley James and
Pam Rorke Levy. Her work has often focused on themes of people and
their cultural values, music as cultural expression and the changing
gender roles of men and women. Her films have been seen in countless
film festivals around the world, on national public and cable
television, on television in Europe, Australia and Asia, and have been
distributed widely to educational institutions.
Gosling’s Blossoms of
Fire, a feature documentary filmed and edited completely on 16mm,
represents her debut as a Producer/Director. The film is a celebratory
tribute to the Isthmus Zapotec people of southern Oaxaca, Mexico. Blossoms
of Fire, an Intrépidas Productions release, has garnered rave
reviews, charming audiences from San Diego to Marseille. The film won
the coveted Coral Award for Best Documentary by a Non-Latino
Director about Latin America at the Havana International Film Festival.
The film has also been broadcast on HBO Latino.
Gosling's story of
becoming a filmmaker is included in the brand new book for junior high
school girls, You Can Be a Woman Movie Maker, published by
Cascade Pass. The book includes a 15-minute video on DVD entitled Maureen
Gosling, Documentary Filmmaker. Along with Brazos Films' producer
Chris Strachwitz, Gosling recently co-produced two DVD re-releases of
Strachwitz and Les Blank's J'ai été au Bal: I Went to the Dance,
the Roots of Cajun and Zydeco Music and Chulas Fronteras, the
Roots of Tex Mex, which include new "Bonus Footage."
Gosling edited two films
directed by Tom Weidlinger: Boys Will Be Men, a one-hour film
on the socialization of boys in the United States, broadcast on public
television; and A Dream in Hanoi, on a unique US-Vietnamese
production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in
Vietnam. In the spring of 2002, Gosling and Weidlinger screened A
Dream in Hanoi to enthusiastic audiences in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh
City, Vietnam. In the fall of 2002, she edited Fallon: Deadly Oasis,
directed by Amie Williams, on the town of Fallon, Nevada, which has
been suffering a rash of childhood leukemia cases. The film follows the
families and the community as they seek to discover the cause.
Gosling edited Bomba, Dancing the Drum, one hour, on the
Afro-Puerto Rican music and dance tradition called bomba and
the legendary Cepeda family. Bomba will air on PBS later this
year and won the Jean Rouch Prize for Best Documentary Music
Film at the Bilan du Film Ethnographique in Paris. Gosling also edited The
Way Home, a 90-minute video on eight different ethnic groups of
women telling of their experiences and thoughts on racism in the U.S. The
Way Home, part of a national program of public dialogue spearheaded
by Shakti Butler, has been an invaluable tool for educational groups
and organizations dealing with issues of race and gender.
Previously Gosling was a partner in Flower Films with prolific
independent director, Les Blank, as co-filmmaker on a dozen of the
twenty 16mm films they made together. She was editor and/or sound
recordist on such films as Routes of Rhythm, with Harry
Belafonte (on Cuban music in Cuba and New York), a three-part series
broadcast nationwide on P.B.S.; Del Mero Corazón, on the
lyrical song tradition of Texas-Mexican border music, which in 1976
ignited Gosling’s interest in Latino culture; and Burden of Dreams
(on the tribulations of German director Werner Herzog shooting his
feature Fitzcarraldo in the Peruvian Amazon). Burden of Dreams,
the team’s best known film, received a British Academy Award
for Best Documentary Feature in 1983, was broadcast nationwide on
P.B.S. and was on 12 U.S. critics’ Top Ten List of the Best Films of
1982. Gosling was nominated for Best Editing by The American
Cinema Editors for Burden of Dreams.
Gosling and Blank were
sponsored by the United States Information Agency in 1983 to tour ten
Latin American countries in two months with ten of their films, holding
seminars, screening their films and meeting local filmmakers. They were
also invited on a one-week filmmakers’ tour of Nicaragua in 1986. In
1984 Blank produced the Burden of Dreams Book in which
Gosling’s 74 photographs and 100-page journal were published along with
Les Blank’s diary, a transcript of the film and Herzog’s letters to his
investors.
Gosling’s films with Les Blank have been shown:
On Television
National and local PBS
in the United States, as well as BRAVO, the Learning Channel and The
Discovery Channel cable stations. The BBC and Channel 4 in Britain have
broadcast all of the films. Most of the films have been aired in
Belgium, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, Germany, Denmark,
Finland, France, Korea, Australia, China, the Netherlands.
In the Following Retrospectives
1995 Tribute at the San Francisco International Film Festival.
1992 Monica Theatre, Santa Monica, California; Vienna Film Festival,
Austria.
1991 Museum of Contemporary Art, La Jolla, California.
1990 Augsberg Independent Film Days, Augsberg, Germany.
1989 Museum of Contemporary Art, La Jolla, California.
1986 Cinemathèque Française, Paris.
1985 Univ. of California, Los Angeles; Field Museum of Natural History,
Chicago.
1984 Honolulu Academy of Arts; Cineteca Nacional, Mexico City.
1983 University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; University of Kansas;
Cinemateca Uruguayo, Montevideo; Cinemateca Nacional, Quito, Ecuador;
Cineteca Distrital, Bogotá, Colombia
1979 Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
In 1996 Gosling was an
Editing Instructor in the Cinema Department at San Francisco State
University, Fall Semester. She taught Editing and Filmmaking workshops
at Film Arts Foundation and the Independent Feature Project in 1998,
1992 and 1990. She served on the Board of Cine Acción, a Latino film
organization from 1996-2002. She received a BA in Social Anthropology
from the University of Michigan in 1972.
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