The NYTimes reported on April 3 that Chloe Aaron died of cancer Feb 29. The Times obituary understandably focused on her major contributions in building PBS from a collection of stations into a national network while she was senior vice president there in the late 1970s and early '80s. She developed documentary and news programs such as MacNeil Lehrer that later became The News Hour; she established major arts series and she instituted national airing times that advanced and centralized the PBS system at the national level.
Less well known is her critical advancement of the fields of American independent film and video. I worked for Chloe in the early mid-70s as her assistant director in the Public Media Program at the National Endowment for the Arts, the predecessor to the Media Arts Program. She was a visionary leader who implemented NEA director, Nancy Hanks's, mission to use media, specifically documentary film and television, to expand access to the traditional arts. But Chloe's most impressive and visionary contribution to that mission was to gradually transform the NEA's commitment to film as a mere pipeline for the other arts into a mission that included the support of documentary film as itself an art form. At the same time, she strategically and diplomatically expanded the NEA's direct support of all independent film, including experimental avant-garde, animation, and narrative filmmaking. She appointed a standing panel of independent experts that included George Stoney, Ricky Leacock, Donn Pennebaker, Fred Wiseman, Stan VanDerBeek, Shirley Clarke, and educators and scholars like Gerald O'Grady, Colin Young (formerly BFI), and Sheldon Renan. Eventually, virtually the whole of the pantheon of film and video artists scholars, pioneers, administrators, and educators in the independent cinema of the '70s in America passed through her program on panels and as grant recipients. She hired me specifically because I was working for O'Grady's legendary programs in independent film at Buffalo, and Chloe felt she needed more staff who were already connected to independent film in order to advance one of her priorities, the regional media-center movement that supported independent filmmakers throughout the country in the '80s and '90s. Her leadership and friendship were a major positive influence on my life, and also on countless other working frameworkers ever since the 1970s. I have always been proud of her accomplishments, which seemed to flow naturally from her easy, light-spirited, far-sighted and effective leadership. She never took the limelight, and she had fun--but she performed miracles all her life. I wish her family well. Ron Green 356 W 7th Ave Columbus OH 43201 614.421.2131 J. Ronald Green Professor Emeritus of Film Studies Department of History of Art The Ohio State University
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