Word from Ken Feil today that his mother, the great filmmaker (among other things) Naomi Feil, has passed away at age 91. Such a life and career! (This lede mirrors that of “Ed Feil’s Passing,” published here three years ago, upon the passing of Naomi’s partner and collaborator of 58 years.) The obituary her family published documents the richness of her long life.
In 2016, I was privileged to meet the Feils at the Museum of Modern Art when they attended a festival screening of their masterpiece The Inner World of Aphasia, a 1968 medical education film. I’d first seen it when Mark McElhatten projected a 16mm print at the 1999 Robert Flaherty Film Seminar (about 3am on a dewy lawn outside a Duke University dormitory). Learning it was made by Ed Feil Productions, led to me contact a scholar I knew from my University of Texas at Austin graduate school experience — Ken Feil. He confirmed that indeed Ed and Naomi were his parents. I bought a DVD from their company; watching it again confirmed my appreciation of The Inner World.
As an avant-garde film programmer, film librarian-archivist for Martin Scorsese, and teacher at SUNY Binghamton, Mark McElhatten knew of the longtime circulation of Inner World in alternate sectors. We corresponded about orphan films to advocate for National Film Registry recognition. In 2014 he wrote about Sid Davis’s educational film Age 13 (1955) and the Feils’ Aphasia, calling them “distinctly great and original American films that reward repeated viewing.” Further, he wrote, “there are many marginal films that had limited attention given their specialized topics, distribution and exhibition. These two are enduring, exciting, peculiar, formally strange and inventive films that are accessible through their emotional outreach and empathy and were of proven use in their intended field. They have also provided inspiration for countless filmmakers.”
In addition to being an accomplished work of cinema, the film still does its work, conveying how people experience the loss of speech (and how they can recover). Central to the film’s power is the empathetic performance of Naomi Feil as protagonist Marge Nelson, a nurse who overcomes the trauma of aphasia.
The work of the Indiana University Libraries Moving Image Archive has been comprehensive: acquiring the large Feil Collection, preserving dozens of films (including home movies, sponsored documentaries, outtakes, experimental work, travel films, and more), restoring The Inner World of Aphasia, and putting high-resolution copies on-line. Now streaming here: 913 audiovisual works from the collection.
This 95-second silent home movie from a 1969 visit to New York shows Ed’s imaginative way of documenting Naomi in their family films.
When the Librarian of Congress added The Inner World of Aphasia to the National Film Registry in 2015, the announcement read:
This empathic and often poetic medical-training film features a powerful performance by co-director Naomi Feil as a nurse who learns to cope with aphasia. . . . Feil, a social worker whose career has focused on communicating with language-impaired patients, produced this film and dozens more with her husband Edward Feil. In the film, the patient’s inner thoughts are heard through voice-over as she struggles in frustration to overcome her disability and to connect with her caregivers. The Council on International Non-theatrical Events (CINE) awarded “Inner World” its top honor, the Golden Eagle. More than 47 years later, the film is still being screened by media artists and independent filmmakers who appreciate its innovative artistic qualities.
At the time she made this film, Naomi was already developing original means of communicating with people diagnosed with Alzheimer’s-related dementia. She called her method Validation therapy. It has become a widely-adopted approach among elder-care professionals. One of its principles — “empathy builds trust, reduces anxiety, and restores dignity — she related to her training in acting and exposure to the Stanislavski Method.
In the 2007 documentary There Is a Bridge we see a truly remarkable illustration of Naomi Feil’s gift of empathy and its application in healing. Watch her encounter with 87-year-old Gladys Wilson, a “virtually non-verbal” elder with Alzheimer’s.
Even in the last months, after a cancer diagnosis, she continued to teach and advocate, producing monthly on-line videos for the Validation Training Institute. Such a life and career!
May her memory be a blessing.
— Dan Streible