
With its second new film debut in less than a year, the VizE Lab premiered Ever Open in the Department on September 30.
Directed by Jeffrey Himpele, Ever Open (25 min.) tells a story about the largely unknown emergence of anthropology at Princeton, from its formation as a program in 1965 and through its first decade as a department in the 1970s. Interweaving first-hand accounts from faculty and students, the film takes viewers inside these early years as activist faculty and students push a number of frontiers: It forms as a hot spot in the new field of symbolic analysis; Native American Professor and activist Alfonso Ortiz (Tewa) hosts the first ever convocation of Native American scholars at Princeton, where they conceptualize Native American Studies; and the department leads the campus in gender equality and diversifying faculty and students. Yet as the decade unfolds, and as the film's interlocutors vividly recall, there were a surprising series of institutional crises and external threats to the department's existence. Ever Open also reveals how the department’s fundamental commitments to ethnography, concreteness, and social relevance have been built-in since its earliest days.
In attendance at the event were faculty who participated in the film, Emeritus Professors Jim Boon and Rena Lederman as well as Erika Geertz, daughter of the late Clifford Geertz and Hilly Geertz, who also appears in the film, and Karen Blu. In addition to the faculty and former students who speak in the film, a host of department members and student lab assistants contributed to the image research and interviews on which the film is based. The film was co-produced by Himpele and department chair João Biehl and is the first product of our project “Illuminating and Revitalizing Indigenous Scholarship and Activism at Princeton (with support from the Histories Fund of the Office of the Provost) and of our ongoing collaboration with the Special Collections of Firestone Library, which is the home of the vast collection of materials left by the late Alfonso Ortiz.
A preview of the first two and a half minutes of Ever Open is now available on the VizE Lab website.
Jeffrey Himpele preceded the main event with an update about the Lab's 2023 film Shame On You!, an animated documentary about the personal distress of facing lawsuits by the billion dollar private debt collection industry. After premiering in December 2023, Shame On You! has appeared in more than a dozen film festivals in the US, Canada, and France, picking up several awards. Shame On You! is now available in its entirety at debtcollectionlab.org/shameonyou.





