(Jonathan Lee, US 2011, 89 min., Digital Projection)

Rochester Premiere! Director Jonathan Lee in Person! Co-sponsored by Nazareth College’s School of Education. Perhaps best remembered for his book Growing Up Absurd — a sociopolitical tract on “the disgrace of the Organized System” that both predicted and helped to inspire the radical changes of the 1960s — the late Paul Goodman was also a novelist, activist, anarchist, and urban theorist, as well as a proudly out gay man in 1940s America. Despite his influence and importance, Goodman remains ripe for rediscovery, a situation that director Jonathan Lee has set out to address. Combining archival footage, excerpts from Goodman’s writing, and interviews with his friends, family, and associates, Paul Goodman Changed My Life is an insightful portrait of a figure whose ideas couldn’t be more contemporary.

A discussion with director Jonathan Lee and Goodman scholars Michael Brown and Michael C. Fisher will immediately follow the screening.

Michael Brown is a doctoral student in the Department of History at the University of Rochester, where his work focuses on the role of intellectuals in American political culture after World War II. His essay “In the Flower City, Take Root” won the Dissent/JSL Films Paul Goodman Essay Contest. Michael is president of the Monroe County Young Democrats, the founder of Flower City Philosophy, and a native Rochesterian.

Michael C. Fisher wrote his honors thesis on Goodman as an undergraduate at the University of California, Davis, and is currently in his fourth year of doctoral studies in history at the University of Rochester. He wrote the introduction to the 2010 edition of New Reformation (PM Press), Goodman’s last work of social criticism, and continues to trace the intellectual and cultural aftermath of the 1960s as part of his dissertation research.