Introduction to Full Motion Video

1. Biography of full motion video

Herx was born in Chicago on June 29, 1933, and graduated from Loyola University Chicago, where he earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in history. In contrast to the National Legion of Decency's model of "the purification of the cinema" in which films deemed to be offensive to Roman Catholics were listed so that they could be avoided, Herx began his film reviewing effort on 1962 together with Rev.

Ronald Holloway, when they created the Chicago Center for Film Study as a way to look at films from a perspective that engaged cinema. Herx worked for the Catholic News Service's Media Review Office, which is a successor to the National Legion of Decency and then the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures, and would become the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops' Office for Film and Broadcasting after Herx retired. He began working for the Media Review Office in 1964, reviewing more than 10,000 films during his career, and retired as the organization's chief critic in 1999, watching many of the movies together with his family at their home.

In addition to a capsule review, Herx gave films a rating of A for films that were deemed morally unobjectionable that ranged from A-I (for general audiences) through A-IV (for adults, but with reservations), with films deemed morally offensive being given a rating of "O". The Full Monty, the 1997 film about unemployed men who turn to a striptease act to make money, earned an A-IV rating that reflected its positive message of overcoming obstacles. In reviewing a number of films in the mid-1990s, Herx gave Clueless a rating of "O" despite the film's PG-13 rating from the Motion Picture Association of America, while the film Priest was given an A-IV rating, despite controversy about the movie's dealings with the homosexuality of a young priest and his crisis of faith.

Herx was proud of the fact that he would watch each movie in its entirety regardless of content and was deeply bothered when he was told that reviewers Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel had walked out on a film. Herx's son noted that "he felt his job was to sit there and watch it and give an honest review" no matter how bad it was. His Our Sunday Visitor's Family Guide to Movies and Videos provided an overview of films based on their content and their conformance to Roman Catholic teachings.

Herx died on August 15, 2012, at the age of 79 in his Ramsey, New Jersey, home of complications of liver cancer.

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2. Nancy Kates of full motion video

Nancy Kates is an independent filmmaker based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

She directed Regarding Susan Sontag, a feature documentary about the late essayist, novelist, director and activist. Through archival footage, interviews, still photographs and images from popular culture, the film reflects the boldness of Sontags work and the cultural importance of her thought, and received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Foundation for Jewish Culture and the Sundance Documentary Film Program. Kates is best known for her film Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin, a full-length documentary she made with co-producer Bennett Singer about Bayard Rustin, the gay civil rights leader.

The film premiered on the PBS series POV and at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival, and received numerous awards, including the 2004 GLAAD Media Award and audience awards at the major American gay and lesbian film festivals. It also received the award for best feature film at New Yorks New Festival and a number of jury prizes. "In the struggle for African-American dignity, Rustin was perhaps the most critical figure that many people have never heard of," says a review in TIME Magazine, "but neither mainstream society nor even the civil rights leadership could cope with his honesty.

" Hailed as "marvelous" by The Wall Street Journal, "packed with information" by The New York Times, and "beautifully crafted" by The Boston Globe, the Village Voice commends the film for "vividly bringing back to life a man who deeply and brilliantly influenced the course of the civil rights and peace movements." In 1995, Kates' master's thesis for Stanford University's film program, Their Own Vietnam, won a Student Academy Award in documentary. The film tells the stories of five American women who served in the Vietnam War, including a couple who met while serving.

It presents a complex picture of their identities as women, using archival footage, home movies and snapshots. The film screened at the Sundance Film Festival, South by Southwest Film Festival, the Boston International Festival of Womens Cinema, and the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival among others, aired on public television, and received an award of merit from the International Documentary Association / David Wolper Awards.

The Journal of American History praised the film, saying that the "complex melding of images from the Vietnam conflict culled from newsreel footage, snapshots, and military recruiting films with the jarringly honest recollections of five female veterans makes this an extremely compelling film," and LA Weekly praised it for its "transformations fraught with anger, pain, unimaginable guilt and sometimes joy - and the honesty with which they're brought to light." Her previous films include Castro Cowboy, a short film about the late Marlboro model Christen Haren who died of AIDS in 1996, Joining the Tribe, Married People, and Going to Extremes. A 1984 honors graduate of Harvard University, Kates worked for several years at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government writing public policy case-studies.

She is a former producer of the PBS series Computer Chronicles, and has worked as a producer, writer, and story consultant on various documentary projects. She also speaks frequently at schools, colleges and universities.