The Second Life of ‘We’re Alive’
UCLA Magazine, March 21, 2023: The Second Life of ‘We’re Alive’
“The mystery of trying to find out who had actually made We’re Alive began seven years ago, when scholar Rox Samer, aware of the film’s existence and its connection to UCLA, inquired about it at UCLA’s Archive Research and Study Center (ARSC). Samer was writing a book, Lesbian Potentiality and Feminist Media in the 1970s, that was published in 2022. Later, another email requesting the film would arrive at ARSC, this one from media scholar Beth Capper, who is working on a book about the connection of feminist documentary making to abolishment of the carceral system.
“ARSC is the on-campus home of the Film & Television Archive, where anyone can access, for free, a vast collection of 350,000-plus film and television programming. While the Archive houses the second-largest collection of moving images in the country (just behind the Library of Congress), its mission goes well beyond preservation. Every year, it assists hundreds of researchers and students in accessing the collection for scholarly pursuits ranging from books and academic papers to class assignments.
… “Back in 1974 Levitt, Gleason and Lesiak were officially visiting CIW — about 60 miles west of campus, in Chino — to teach a filmmaking workshop every Sunday for about six months. But while learning about camera angles, their incarcerated pupils seized the chance to get a message to the outside world. They wanted people to hear about their experiences in prison, and about the inequality that had led to their being incarcerated. ‘If you want to get rid of prison, you’ve got to start organizing in your own communities and change a society,’ one says pointedly in the film.
“Each week, the UCLA trio took footage back to the editing room on campus and started assembling the mostly black-and-white documentary that would become We’re Alive.”
Additional reading:
myScience, January 30, 2023: Injustice remains: 48-year-old women’s prison documentary shows how little has changed
