On Monday evening, September 27th, the Hopkins community enjoyed a private screening in the Marjorie M. Fisher Auditorium of Gilman, of The Olmsted Legacy by first-time filmmaker, Rebecca Messner, a 2008 graduate of the Writing Seminars.
Messner has been hard at work using her skills as a Writing Seminars major on this project since April 2009, though she says she did all the filming in just a week and a half.
The documentary is about Fredrick Law Olmsted, who designed many parks and college campuses in America during the nineteenth century.
He was a pioneer in the landscaping field.
His firm designed many of the parks in the Baltimore area, including Wyman Park, next to the Hopkins Homewood campus, although his most famous and influential work was New York City’s Central Park.
The film opens with a quote from Olmsted describing his vision for city parks as a place where even the poorest person can feel the luxury of the countryside.
Before Olmsted arrived on the scene, the only spaces that resembled modern city parks were cemeteries.
In fact, 19th century city-dwellers used them to picnic for lack of alternatives.
Messner’s movie is split into five sections based on the different stages of Olmsted’s life.
One details his rough childhood — his mother died when he was very young, and he was sent away to various boarding schools.
He thus became independent and adventurous at an early age and loved exploring nature.
Olmsted was also a journalist and said of his successful landscaping career, “If I had not been a literary man, I wouldn’t have stood a chance.”
Messner also emphasized the importance of her writing experience.
“Being in an environment, academically, where you are constantly being critiqued is so important,” she said of her time in the writing program at Hopkins. “[It helped me to] not be bogged down by criticism I received along the way.”
She also believes that her creative writing concentration at Hopkins was important to her work on the documentary.
“The focus I had on fiction helped me look at Olmsted as a character — a man with quirks,” she said.
Much of the documentary focuses on Central Park, which took 15 years to design and construct.
Olmsted dealt with corruption and mismanagement in the city, and a severely limited budget which ultimately he ended up exceeding.
He wanted 17,000 trees and shrubs to give the illusion of a “seemingly unending woodland.”
Oldsted said of Central Park, “There is no place in the world that is more home to me.”
Olmsted’s firm undertook 6,000 commissions, and the movie features spectacular pictures and footage of the various parks and college campuses that he designed.
Paula Burger, dean of undergraduate education in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences praised the documentary.
“The integration of history with the contemporary was just right,” she said.
“It’s all about making it an engaging story,” Messner said of filmmaking.
The audience of the screening was composed of Hopkins faculty.
Messner’s film also has its own website, complete with photos from the varoius parks, as well as an about section.
There is also a link on the website which directs one to countless interviews which were conducted as a part of the documentary. Several of the people interviewed are experts on Olmsted, as well as official historians on the parks which he designed.
In addition to being shown at Hopkins, the film was also shown at various parks that Olmsted designed. For example, one such showing in August in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, N.Y.
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