Not long after the fall of the Soviet Union, Rosemarie Reed produced a radio show on Mikhail Gorbachev which caught the notice of an executive at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. “He told me if I secured the rights to turn the show into a film, CPB would fund it,” recalls Reed, an adjunct lecturer in BMCC’s English and Developmental Skills departments.
Reed had spent several years in radio but never ventured into film. Undaunted, she traveled to Russia, where she enlisted the cooperation of the former Soviet leader and made “Conversations with Gorbachev,” a highly acclaimed 90-minute documentary that was aired over PBS. Over the next few years, she went on to make two more films about Russian history, moved to Berlin—and then her focus shifted.
Women of Science
“I read a biography of Lise Meitner, an Austrian physicist who lived and worked in Germany during the time of Nazi rule,” Reed says. “She and Otto Hahn discovered nuclear fission, but few people have heard of her.” With funding from the National Science Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Reed produced a documentary on Meitner for airing on PBS. She followed up with a film on Irène Joliot-Curie, who, with her husband, is credited with the discovery of artificial radioactivity.
“Like so many great women of science, Meitner and Joliot-Curie remain unsung heroes,” says Reed. “Irène’s mother, Marie Curie, is widely known as a pioneer in the study of radioactivity, but few have heard of Irene, who shared a Nobel Prize with her husband.” Lise Meitner is likewise consigned to unfair obscurity. “She was on track to receive a Nobel, but lost out when she was exiled by the Nazis. Otto Hahn took the prize for himself.”
Looking ahead, Reed hopes to bring other overlooked women of science into the foreground through her art—women such as Rachel Carson, a founder of modern environmentalism; 19th-century mathematician Ada Byron Lovelace, who collaborated with Charles Babbage on the first computer; and pharmacologist Frances Kelsey, who was responsible for banning the birth-deforming drug thalidomide from being marketed in the United States in the 1960s.
Reed is also working on a long-term project about Ravensbruck, the only German concentration camp built exclusively to house women. She recalls her first visit to the site: “A friend had taken me there, and I wondered aloud what it would be like to stand in the field as the women who’d been interned there had stood—starving, sick and freezing.” On a frigid day, she removed her coat, boots and hat and found she couldn’t bear the cold for more than a few minutes.
Women oppressing women
“Then and there I decided to make a film about the camp even if it took me 10 years,” Reed says. She travels to Ravensbruck regularly—to continue work on the film and also to conduct tours for visiting American high school and college students.
“Not many people know about Ravensbruck—that it was designed expressly for women, and that it was a training site for female concentration camp guards,” Reed says. “This was a place where women killed other women and other women’s children. It’s an aspect of the Holocaust few people know about.”
By her own admission, Reed didn’t follow a conventional path into TV and film. “I’d never even gone to film school,” she says. “But I was fortunate to have access to friends and colleagues who worked in the field who were willing to teach me what they knew. I can’t tell you how I made the transition, but somehow I did.”
At least one of her Russian history films provided a segue into projects to come. “It was about Anna Larina, the wife of Nikolai Bukharin, one of the founders of the Russian Revolution,” Reed says. “She herself figured importantly in the Revolution. During Stalin’s reign her child was taken from her and she was imprisoned for more than 20 years in a Soviet labor camp.” Since then, Reed’s work has centered around women—“primarily women who have accomplished great things or suffered at the hands of oppressors. When I do these films, I enter history. It’s a place I love to be.”
