Steven Bognar, her husband and collaborator, who shared the Oscar for the 2019 movie, confirmed the dying. Ms. Reichert had been receiving remedy for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and a type of urinary most cancers for years.
Ms. Reichert’s biggest acclaim got here as a chronicler of timeclock-punching employees and their often-painful lodging because the Rust Belt’s previous social contract — onerous work for a stab at middle-class consolation — pale away.
“What runs via all Reichert’s work is a constructive and expansive view of the tradition of odd working People, one thing uncommon in fashionable documentary historical past,” scholar Patricia Aufderheide wrote in Movie Quarterly in 2019.
Her lens moved in different instructions over the Midwestern panorama on points resembling race, labor politics and gender. Certainly one of her early movies, “Rising Up Feminine” (1971), monitoring the lives of six girls as they confronted social pressures and calls for for conformity, was added to the Nationwide Movie Registry on the Library of Congress as a traditionally vital work.
Ms. Reichert’s work merged the dispassionate-observer traditions of cinema verité and journalism-rooted methods of interviews and backstory context. Her storytelling influenced generations of unbiased filmmakers, and her dedication to Midwestern settings was adopted by different regionally centered filmmakers resembling Michael Moore.
For Ms. Reichert, her formative inventive years have been the Nineteen Sixties when she attended Antioch School in Yellow Springs (and took a hiatus in San Francisco throughout the 1967 “Summer season of Love”). In courses, she started to take an curiosity in images en path to a level in documentary arts in 1970.
“I had no concept I might be, quote unquote, a filmmaker,” she mentioned in an interview with Yellow Springs radio station WYSO. “I simply knew I liked images. I liked getting higher at it. I liked studying about taking photos. And I actually liked the radio.”
Whereas nonetheless a pupil, she discovered a spot on the station and was enthralled by the storytelling potentialities with tape, interviews and enhancing. She went on air, internet hosting “The Single Lady,” a present that challenged girls to suppose past gender roles and expectations.
“We mentioned the system’s not working and we turned, in some broad sense, revolutionaries,” she advised WYSO final yr. “Not that we needed to assault the White Home, however we actually needed to vary society.”
“American Manufacturing facility” was one thing of a sequel. In 2008, Ms. Reichert and Bognar spent weeks at a Basic Motors meeting plant in Moraine, Ohio, earlier than it closed and left greater than 2,400 autoworkers with out jobs. The ensuing movie, “The Final Truck: Closing of a GM Plant” (2009), was seen as a eulogy for the area and a wider cautionary story about America’s position in a globalized market.
Eight years after the GM manufacturing facility closed, the doorways have been reopened below the possession of Fuyao, a Chinese language firm that makes automotive glass. Ms. Reichert and Bognar gained entry once more to the plant as witness to the tense, complicated — and at instances uplifting and amusing — office rebirth.
Ohio employees complained concerning the relentless tempo of the Chinese language. Chinese language bosses groused about People as undisciplined and fat-fingered — and the way the manufacturing facility was bleeding money. There was bonding, nonetheless, over barbecue and softball.
Via all of it, Ms. Reichert builds a story round “Chairman Cao” — Cao Dewang, the billionaire Chinese language entrepreneur who reopened the manufacturing facility. In “American Manufacturing facility,” he’s at instances the epitome of the hard-charging boss.
“If a union is available in, I’m shutting down,” he tells his fellow Chinese language workers.
But Cao additionally turns into a wistful commentator on an age of dizzying adjustments.
“Now I stay in a brand new period of prosperity,” he mentioned of China’s financial juggernaut within the movie. “However I’ve a way of loss. I miss the croaking frogs and chirping bugs of my childhood.”
“American Manufacturing facility” additionally was the primary Netflix venture from Barack and Michelle Obama’s Larger Floor Productions. Washington Put up movie critic Ann Hornaday referred to as it an “beautiful documentary” that “tells a macroeconomic story via the micro-level experiences of indelible real-life characters.”
Julia Bell Reichert was born in Princeton, N.J., on June 16, 1946, and raised in close by Bordentown on the Delaware River, the second of 4 youngsters. Her father labored as a butcher, and her mom studied to turn into a nurse.
“I used to be a really awkward child,” she advised WYSO, noting she by no means felt comfy enjoying with dolls with different women.
“I liked nature. I liked science,” she added. “However I at all times needed to know how individuals labored as a result of I usually thought I used to be like a Martian. I used to be intensely inquisitive about individuals as a result of I felt so completely different from everyone else.”
Throughout a movie class at Antioch, she met her future husband Jim Klein. Ms. Reichert was creating what she referred to as a “humanist Marxist” superb. That caught Klein’s consideration. “The large factor we had collectively was this sense of social dedication and being half of a big social motion,” he as soon as mentioned.
After working collectively on “Rising Up Feminine,” they moved into labor and social themes with “Union Maids” (1976), about three girls within the Chicago labor motion throughout the Nice Despair, and “Seeing Pink” (1983), taking a look at Communist Celebration members throughout the early and mid-Twentieth century. Each have been nominated for Academy Awards. Leftist historian Howard Zinn described “Union Maids” as “the most effective movie on labor historical past I’ve ever seen.”
The movies turned a part of an necessary historic report and impressed different unbiased documentaries on labor struggles resembling “The Wobblies” (1979) and “Miles of Smiles, Years of Wrestle” (1982).
Ms. Reichert and Klein divorced in 1986. By that point, she had struck up a relationship with Bognar, whom she met at a movie screening. Their first venture had an autobiographical really feel. The function movie, “Emma and Elvis” (1992), revolves round a married documentary filmmaker and a youthful colleague.
In addition they had a private connection to a decade-long venture, “A Lion within the Home” (2006), a four-hour documentary about youngsters dealing with most cancers. Their daughter, Lela Klein, had battled lymphoma as a teen. She recovered, however Ms. Reichert was later identified with most cancers.
Along with her daughter and husband, Ms. Reichert is survived by three brothers and two grandchildren.
Throughout the top of the pandemic lockdowns, she was approached by a Yellow Springs neighbor, comic Dave Chappelle, to movie his out of doors performances with friends resembling Jon Stewart and Trevor Noah. Two movies, mixing comedy and social commentary, emerged from the 2020 summer season: “8:46” (2020) and “Untitled” (generally referred to as “Dave Chappelle: Stay in Actual Life”) in 2021.
On the 2020 Academy Awards, held simply earlier than the pandemic lockdowns hit, Ms. Reichert was accompanied by three employees who appeared in “American Manufacturing facility.” Jill Lamantia, a forklift operator, strutted in a sequin-flecked robe.
Ms. Reichert, hairless from her most cancers therapies, thanked Lamantia and the others after which maybe turned the primary Oscar winner to cite Karl Marx: “Staff of the world unite.”
“I noticed myself as an activist who has abilities to make movie,” she mentioned in 1997. “I’m nonetheless a bit uncomfortable with calling myself an artist. It denotes elitism, a sure form of individuality, as if you make artwork for artwork’s sake, for your self, to not make a distinction.”