[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 11]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages 15662-15663]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                        IN HONOR OF SAUL LANDAU

                                 ______
                                 

                           HON. GEORGE MILLER

                             of california

                    in the house of representatives

                       Thursday, October 10, 2013

  Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to pay 
tribute to a dear friend who spent his life trying to educate people 
about America's role in the world in an effort to make that world a 
better place.
  Saul Landau passed away last month at the age of 77 after battling 
cancer for almost 2 years.
  Saul was not only a very close friend of mine and my wife Cynthia's. 
He was a constant mentor, educator, and agitator. He was one of the 
smartest and hardest working people I have had the pleasure of knowing, 
and he was one of the funniest.
  Saul will be remembered as an award winning documentary filmmaker, an 
author, an investigator and a columnist. Upon his death, his friends 
and colleagues and family were treated to a collection of obituaries 
across the country that paid tribute to his exhaustive body of work, 
his infectious personality, and his deep caring and passion for his 
country and the world around it.
  I am including here for my colleagues' benefit just two of those 
remarkable pieces so that others may benefit from reading about this 
one man's extraordinary life.
  To Saul's family, I extend my sincere condolences for their loss. But 
I offer to them as well a deep appreciation from the halls of Congress 
of the work and thought that Saul Landau contributed to our public 
debate.
  One of the obituaries carries this quote from Saul. ``You want to do 
what you can while you're on this earth.'' Saul should rest easy 
knowing that he did that and more.
  I will miss my friend.
  Following are obituaries that appeared in the New York Times on 
September 11, 2013 and in the Los Angeles Times on September 13, 2013.

               [From the New York Times, Sept. 11, 2013]

       Saul Landau, Maker of Films With Leftist Edge, Dies at 77

                          (By Douglas Martin)

       Saul Landau, a determinedly leftist documentary filmmaker 
     and writer whose passion for asking what he called ``the most 
     intrusive questions'' yielded penetrating cinematic profiles 
     of leaders like Fidel Castro and Salvador Allende, died on 
     Monday at his home in Alameda, Calif. He was 77.
       The cause was bladder cancer, his daughter Julia Landau 
     said.
       Mr. Landau aspired to marshal art and literature to 
     illuminate social and political problems, and his point of 
     view was almost always apparent. In the 1980s, he wrote 
     essays berating the administration of Ronald Reagan for 
     trying to depose the leftist government in Nicaragua, and 
     recently he urged the United States not to become involved in 
     Syria.
       He said he saw no difference between documentary and 
     fictional films. In both, he said, a director manipulates 
     light and sound to put across a vision. ``One has to simulate 
     reality,'' he said in 2005 in an interview with The Capital 
     Times in Madison, Wis. ``The other one says, `Here's 
     reality,' whether it is or isn't.''
       Mr. Landau emerged from the roiling New Left politics of 
     the 1960s to make more than 40 documentaries, including six 
     about Mr. Castro. One of them, ``Fidel,'' released in 1969, 
     was a rare intimate look at the Cuban leader. It shows him 
     arguing with a finger-wagging peasant woman, visiting his 
     nursery school and playing baseball and striking out.
       ``I found Fidel a sympathetic figure and a hell of a good 
     actor,'' Mr. Landau told The Washington Post in 1982.
       His most acclaimed film was ``Paul Jacobs and the Nuclear 
     Gang,'' which he directed with Jack Willis in 1980. With 
     cinematography by Haskell Wexler, the documentary, broadcast 
     on PBS, told of the cover-up of health hazards from a 1957 
     nuclear-bomb test in Utah. The film won an Emmy Award and a 
     George Polk Award.
       The title referred to Mr. Landau's friend Paul Jacobs, a 
     journalist who died of cancer--believed to have been caused 
     by radiation exposure--before the film was completed.
       Other films by Mr. Landau portray poverty in big-city 
     slums, the destruction of indigenous Mexican culture, the 
     inner workings of the C.I.A., torture in Brazil and life 
     inside a San Francisco jail. Most have a leftist political 
     edge that some saw as propagandistic, but Mr. Landau 
     characterized the films as educational.
       ``All my films try to teach people without preaching too 
     hard,'' he said. ``I try not to be too tendentious.''
       Mr. Landau released two films relating to Mr. Allende, the 
     Chilean who had become Latin America's first democratically 
     elected socialist president the year before. One was an 
     interview with Mr. Allende.
       The other film, ``Que Hacer!'' (1970)--the title is a 
     translation of the title of Lenin's book ``What Is to Be 
     Done?''--is a fictional movie, a playful spy story with music 
     concerning a C.I.A. case officer in Chile. There are two 
     casts: a Chilean one directed by Raul Ruiz and an American 
     one directed by Mr. Landau and Nina Serrano, his wife at the 
     time. Country Joe McDonald performed and produced the music. 
     The film won awards at film festivals in Cannes, Venice and 
     Mannheim, Germany.
       Orlando Letelier, Chile's ambassador to the United States, 
     invited Mr. Landau to screen it at the Chilean Embassy in 
     Washington, and they became friends. A few years later, Gen. 
     Augusto Pinochet overthrew the Allende government and 
     imprisoned Mr. Letelier.
       Mr. Landau worked with other international supporters to 
     win Mr. Letelier's release and to arrange a job for him at 
     the Institute for Policy Studies, a left-wing research 
     organization in Washington Mr. Landau had joined in 1972. In 
     1976, Pinochet agents used a car bomb to kill Mr. Letelier 
     and another institute worker. In 1980, Mr. Landau and John 
     Dinges published a book about the case, ``Assassination on 
     Embassy Row,'' documenting the Pinochet government's ties to 
     the killings.
       Mr. Landau was at least as prolific a writer as he was a 
     filmmaker. He wrote 14 books and thousands of newspaper and 
     magazine articles and reviews.
       Saul Irwin Landau was born on Jan. 15, 1936, a few blocks 
     from Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, and grew up playing 
     stickball in the streets. His father was a pharmacist who had 
     fled pogroms in Ukraine to come to New York in 1920. His 
     mother was a teacher.
       As a youth, Mr. Landau once abandoned school to hitchhike 
     across America. When he returned, his mother urged him to 
     take the test for the academically elite Stuyvesant High 
     School. He passed, and went on to perform brilliantly there.
       The summer after he graduated, he met Ms. Serrano at a camp 
     in the Catskills, where he was the fry cook and she the drama 
     teacher. Ms. Serrano, who became a published poet, encouraged 
     his interest in leftist politics and a bohemian lifestyle, 
     according to their daughter Valerie Landau.
       Ms. Serrano also accompanied Mr. Landau when he went to the 
     University of Wisconsin. When a dean found out that they were 
     living together, he threatened to expel Mr. Landau (Ms. 
     Serrano was not a student then) if they did not marry. They 
     did.
       At Wisconsin, Mr. Landau got involved in a so-called Joe 
     Must Go club, which advocated the recall of Senator Joseph 
     McCarthy of Wisconsin over his demagogic attacks on people he 
     accused of being Communists.
       After earning bachelor's and master's degrees in history at 
     Wisconsin, Mr. Landau became a researcher for C. Wright 
     Mills, the sociologist, traveling with him to Western Europe, 
     the Soviet Union and Cuba.

[[Page 15663]]

       Moving to Northern California with Ms. Serrano, he worked 
     toward a doctorate at Stanford but did not complete the 
     studies. In San Francisco, they gravitated to the Beat poets 
     and the emerging New Left movement. Mr. Landau joined 
     Students for a Democratic Society and helped organize the 
     leftist magazines Ramparts and Mother Jones.
       He also joined the San Francisco Mime Troupe, for which he 
     wrote, with R.G. Davis, a parody of a minstrel show, ``A 
     Minstrel Show, or Civil Rights in a Cracker Barrel.'' 
     Performers in the show, which satirized racial perceptions, 
     appeared in blackface. The show traveled to New York and 
     elsewhere.
       ``Through the entire evening there is really nothing to 
     laugh at, no matter how funny it is,'' Richard F. Shepard 
     wrote in The New York Times. ``There is the ominous theme of 
     what hypocrisy and oppression breed.''
       In 1966 Mr. Landau got a job as a reporter at KQED-TV, San 
     Francisco's public television station, and a year later went 
     to Cuba to make a news documentary. Mr. Castro liked it, and 
     invited Mr. Landau to return to do an in-depth documentary 
     about him. Mr. Landau's marriage to Ms. Serrano ended in 
     divorce. Besides his daughters Valerie and Julia, he is 
     survived by a son, Greg, and two other daughters, Carmen and 
     Marie; his second wife, Rebecca Switzer; a sister, Beryl 
     Landau; seven grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.
       ``You want to do what you can while you're on this earth,'' 
     Mr. Landau said in 2006. ``Otherwise the alternative is to go 
     shopping.''
       This article has been revised to reflect the following 
     correction:


                     Correction: September 17, 2013

       An obituary on Thursday about the documentary filmmaker 
     Saul Landau omitted a survivor. Besides his wife, children, 
     grandchildren and great-grandchildren, Mr. Landau is survived 
     by a sister, Beryl Landau.
       This article has been revised to reflect the following 
     correction:


                     Correction: September 19, 2013

       An obituary on Sept. 12 about the documentary filmmaker 
     Saul Landau omitted a writing credit for the San Francisco 
     Mime Troupe production ``A Minstrel Show, or Civil Rights in 
     a Cracker Barrel.'' It was written by Mr. Landau and R. G. 
     Davis, not solely by Mr. Landau.
                                  ____


              [From the Los Angeles Times, Sept. 13, 2013]

    Saul Landau Dies at 77; Leftist Writer and Documentary Filmmaker


  Saul Landau was best known for documentaries, including `Fidel' and 
   `Paul Jacobs and the Nuclear Gang,' which won a George Polk Award

                           (By Daniel Miller)

       Saul Landau, a leftist writer and filmmaker best known for 
     the documentaries ``Fidel'' and ``Paul Jacobs and the Nuclear 
     Gang,'' died Monday at his home in Alameda, Calif. He was 77 
     and had bladder cancer.
       His death was confirmed by John Cavanagh, director of the 
     Institute for Policy Studies, a Washington, D.C.-based think 
     tank where Landau had been a fellow since 1972.
       In a prolific career that spanned nearly 50 years, Landau 
     wrote 14 books, directed or produced 10 film or television 
     documentaries, and worked as an investigative journalist. His 
     1979 political documentary ``Paul Jacobs and the Nuclear 
     Gang,'' about the coverup of health hazards associated with 
     atomic bomb testing in Nevada in the 1950s, won the George 
     Polk Award for best documentary in 1979. The filmmaker and 
     his partners--who included Oscar-winning cinematographer 
     Haskell Wexler--also won an Emmy Award for best documentary.
       Cavanagh, who collaborated with Landau on film projects, 
     said his documentaries were meant to be educational, ``but 
     with the very explicit intent to mobilize people to work for 
     social justice.''
       In 1968, nine years after the Cuban Revolution, Landau was 
     invited by Castro for a tour of Cuba and an in-depth 
     interview. The filmmaker turned footage from his time with 
     the Cuban strongman into the PBS documentary ``Fidel,'' with 
     premieres set for New York and Los Angeles in 1970.
       But New York's Fifth Avenue Cinema was bombed before 
     ``Fidel'' could be screened, and an office building in Los 
     Angeles that housed leftist groups and was slated to show the 
     picture was burned down before it could be shown there.
       The filmmaker's daughter Julia Landau said her father was 
     affected by the bombings, which she attributed to an anti-
     Castro Cuban faction.
       ``Throughout his life he felt threatened by zealots like 
     this,'' she said. ``He was really on the hit list for a 
     while.''
       Landau made five other films about Cuba. The most recent, 
     ``Will the Real Terrorist Please Stand Up?'' was released in 
     2010. Julia Landau collaborated on the project, which focused 
     on anti-Castro militants. Several of the filmmaker's five 
     children worked with him on various movies over the years.
       ``It really brought us close together,'' Julia Landau said.
       Besides his children Julia, Greg, Valerie, Carmen and 
     Marie, Landau is survived by his wife, Rebecca Switzer, as 
     well as seven grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.
       Born in New York to Leon Landau and Sadie Frishkov on Jan. 
     15, 1936, Saul Landau grew up in the Bronx and went on to 
     attend the University of Wisconsin.
       He studied U.S. history there, obtaining an undergraduate 
     degree in 1957 and a master's one year later.
       ``I came out of Madison with a passion for social justice 
     and the idea that you only get one shot at participating in 
     the history of the world and that you have to make the most 
     of it,'' Landau told Madison's Capital Times in 2006, the 
     year he donated his papers to his alma mater.
       He moved to San Francisco in 1961. Around that time, Landau 
     began traveling to Cuba, a place he'd visit frequently over 
     the years.
       ``He described it in his later years as a marriage he 
     couldn't break free from,'' Julia Landau said. ``He was 
     incredibly supportive of the ideals of the Cuban Revolution, 
     and he was also critical of the Cuban government for its 
     censorship.''
       Landau also had a deep connection with Chile, making films 
     in the early 1970s about the democratic election of President 
     Salvador Allende. Landau became friends with Chilean 
     ambassador Orlando Letelier, who was imprisoned after Augusto 
     Pinochet overthrew the Allende government.
       Landau and others worked to free Letelier, who was later 
     assassinated by agents of Pinochet's government. Also killed 
     was Ronni Karpen Moffitt, who worked alongside Landau at the 
     Institute for Policy Studies.
       With the backing of the Institute for Policy Studies, 
     Landau investigated the killings. In 1995, he published a 
     book about them--``Orlando Letelier: Testimonio y 
     Vindicacion.''
       Landau, who from 1999 to 2006 taught a variety of subjects 
     at Cal Poly Pomona, had eclectic interests: In addition to 
     filmmaking, he was a member of the San Francisco Mime Troupe 
     in the 1960s and published a volume of poetry, ``My Dad Was 
     Not Hamlet.''
       At the time of his death, Landau was working on another 
     documentary about Cuba. The project, about the fight against 
     homophobia there, will be completed by filmmaker Jon Alpert, 
     codirector of the film.
       ``I think my work holds up with relevance to today,'' 
     Landau told the Capital Times. ``The headlines in the 
     mainstream media come and go every day, and there is a 
     trivialization of what is happening. So you try to make a 
     movie of what makes people pay attention in larger context 
     that will endure.''

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