Robert William Fenz

1969 - 2020
On August 8, 2020 the life and career of world-renowned lyrical filmmaker, intellectual and humanist, and devoted family member and friend, Robert William Fenz, was cut tragically short.

Fenz was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on March 21, 1969. His mother, Karin, grew up in Norway, and his father, Emanuel, in Italy. The youngest of five children, after Erik, Ingrid, John, and Heidi, family was central to his life. He recounted with pride their travels around the world as children.

He first met his wife, Virginia Cornish, at age six in elementary school, and, a romantic, having reunited he eloped with her on March 28 in Weston, Vermont.

Fenz was already singularly focused on photography and film as a teen. Devoted to the work, he shot exclusively analog with an emphasis on grain. Fenz is pictured holding his Bolex, Aaton, or Leica camera.

Peripatetic, Fenz left home at 16 and then moved to San Francisco as a projectionist and adventurer at 18. He went east and graduated from Bard College with a BA in 1997 where he turned away from coursework and made his kinetic film Vertical Air (1996). It was also at Bard that he met the great trumpeter and composer Wadada Leo Smith and filmmaker Peter Hutton.

Deeply sensitive Fenz was angry at the treatment of the unnamed in society. He made a five part series Meditations on Revolution (1997-2003) filmed throughout the Americas: in Cuba, Brazil, Mexico, Mississippi, and New York City. This work was enabled by a full tuition scholarship from the California Institute of the Arts where he graduated with an MFA in 2002. His films further include Passage (1993), The Sole of the Foot (2011), Books (2014), Memorizing Lou (2014), Toros (2014), Tea (2014), and the visually stunning La Nuit (2014).

As staunchly traditional as he was free, Fenz studied as a cinematographer for some of the great filmmakers of the time, including Chantal Akerman and Robert Gardner. He responded to Akerman with Crossings (2007) and to Gardner with Correspondence (2011). Duet for Trumpet and Camera (1992) was an improvisation with Smith.

Fenz received the Berlin Artist in Residence Grant from the DAAD in 2006 and, both as an artist and a friend, considered Berlin home.

Fenz's films are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Centre Pompidou, Harvard Film Archive, California Institute of the Arts, and private collection Sammlung Hoffmann and were featured in the Whitney Biennials in 2008 and 2002. He had solo retrospectives at the Centre Pompidou 2015, the 16th BAFICI Buenos Aires 2014, CA2M Centro de Arte Madrid 2013, Sammlung Hoffmann 2012, 55th BFI London 2011, Harvard Film Archive 2008, and Museum of Modern Art 1997. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2004 and his work was championed, most recently, in "Manifestations. Écrits politiques sur le cinéma et autres arts filmiques" by Nicole Brenez.

A tribute and retrospective will be held at a future date at the Harvard Film Archive.