Up is Down by Millie Goldsholl

It’s exciting when you’re introduced to the work of a filmmaker that you’ve never heard about, such as last weekend when I stumbled upon Millie Goldsholl’s powerful and beautiful 1969 short Up is Down. Now the question I find myself asking is why hadn’t I heard of her before.

She wrote, designed and directed the film by herself. Millie, with her husband Morton, ran Goldsholl Associates, a commercial/graphic design and animation studio in Chicago. Her husband’s name is actually quite familiar to me as he was a well-known mid-century graphic designer, but I had no idea that both he and his wife were also filmmakers.

The only information I could dig up online about their animation practice was in a couple of blog posts that Michael Sporn had on his blog recently–a 1975 article from Millimeter Magazine and a few more details from a 1976 article from the same magazine.

Morton and Millie made numerous short films during the Sixties. One of Mort’s live-action efforts, about the history of paper, is also available for viewing online. From the info on this website, we can deduce that Morton and Millie most likely attended the School of Design in Chicago, which was run by Hungarian-born Bauhaus instructor László Moholy-Nagy. Together, the Goldsholls were making film experiments as early as 1942. They appear to have been a fascinating couple and I hope to learn more about them in the future.