Art Exhibition

Essential Pittsburgh: J.T. Vale 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 […]