Pittsburgh Sound + Image presents a filmmaker unseen for 40+ years

J.T. Vale (James Thomas or, to his friends and family, Jim) was a lifelong artist, obsessive cinephile, and a fixture of Pittsburgh’s South Side. He started making films as a kid. In his 20s, he found community in the emerging punk and experimental scenes thriving around Pittsburgh Filmmakers, then located at 205 Oakland Ave (now an Amazon store.) There, his idiosyncratic interests crystallized into a distinctive style of constant but subtle, fluid camera movement, which J.T. theorized as locking onto the wavelength of the subject being filmed. He was a filmmaker chasing the sublime, and in works such as “Cindy Vale,” he achieves it.

In between his personal output, Vale was one of the more in-demand camerapeople in the city. Peggy Ahwesh, Tippi Comden, Robert Haller, and Natalka Voslakov (who wrote that he “knows more about film-making than most of the U.S.A.!”) were just a few of his recurring collaborators. A true maven of cinema povera, he had an eye for cataloging and dramatizing the oddball characters in his social orbit. And Pittsburgh. His films are so very Pittsburgh, down to a few square blocks of the South Side. Yet Jim has received little attention in the past 40 years. He passed away in 2010, and the majority of his prolific filmography is currently lost. Over the last seven years, we have scavenged Pittsburgh and beyond for any traces of his work, and we’re honored to be able to assemble a J.T. Vale primer on which we think he would approve having his name.

Doors at 7:30, show starts at 8

Advance tickets available here.

ABOUT ESSENTIAL PITTSBURGH

Pittsburgh Sound + Image seeks to redefine our region’s film history with the Essential Pittsburgh series. We acknowledge the depth of creativity which has flourished here by spotlighting vital artists and their films from the 1960s through the 2000s. This landmark series is a continuation of our efforts to celebrate a fuller picture of independent, amateur, industrial, and experimental filmmaking talent, and to better situate Pittsburgh nationally as a place of rich cinematic history.