ABOUT THE PROJECT

LOGLINE
THIS COLLAPSE OF ALL THINGS revisits the life and work of Frederick A. Demmler, 1888-1918, a promising Pittsburgh-born artist killed near the end of the First World War.

SYNOPSIS
On October 31, 1918, Frederick A. Demmler, a sergeant in the 37th Infantry Division, was mortally wounded while leading his machine gun squad into battle in Belgium. He was 30 years old; a young, promising portrait artist from Pittsburgh; a third generation German-American; a would-be social revolutionary; a pacifist torn between conscientious objection and the duty to serve; and a man of few words fluent with a paintbrush. Using letters and writings by Henry James, Willa Cather, Haniel Long, Lucien Price and others who knew him—and his own words—scholars reflect on the short life of Frederick A. Demmler.

Production began in October 2022 with filming of Demmler landscapes, portraits and sketches at museums in and around Pittsburgh, where we interviewed curators and scholars. These included Carnegie Museum of Art, Westmorland Museum of American Art, Hoyt Art Center and Associated Artists of Pittsburgh. Mid-October saw filming of Demmler portraits in the Boston area: Fall River Historical Society, Phillips Exeter Academy and Nahant Historical Society. On October 31, 2022, the scene shifted to Olsene, Belgium, where we followed Demmler’s route to the spot in a farmer’s field where he was mortally wounded on October 31, 1918. In February 2023, in Calvary Episcopal Church, Pittsburgh, we filmed the performance of a powerfully moving pipe organ work composed in 1919 in memory of Fred Demmler by Harvey Gaul.

Because of segregation in the early twentieth century, the historical record regarding Demmler remains inadvertently segregated. New production during the spring of 2023 will include an interview in Harvard’s Houghton Library with Mae Whitlock Gentry, the great-niece of Edwin Augustus Harleston, the important Black artist from Charleston, SC, who was Demmler’s classmate, 1909-1913, at Boston Museum School. Mae will tell her great-uncle’s parallel story of pursuing an artistic career in the segregated South.

PROJECT TYPE Documentary Feature / Film Essay

DIRECTOR Charles Kaufmann
PRODUCER Charles Kaufmann