Don Bernier, MA '94

The guts

Telling stories - or "letting interesting people tell their own stories" - has occupied Don Bernier, MA, '94, and his art for a long time now. 

Bernier is a filmmaker and editor who has finally found what he calls "the guts" to make documentary films.  As a student at the Kansas City Art Institute, he was exposed to and made primarily experimental video, much of which dealt with how humans perceive their environments and interact with nature.  Bernier's subsequent stint in UB's Media Study master's program moved him toward the documentary form.  "The core faculty all had a lot to offer," he says, "but Sara Elder was interesting because I'd never taken a documentary course."  Many of the visiting professors impressed Bernier, too: "Keith Sanborn was a huge influence.  He even acted in my thesis project, putting on a safari outfit that was two sizes too small."

Though in hindsight, Bernier feels his experimental work "was all non-fiction based," he says that even with his thesis film, he "didn't have the guts to make a straightforward verité documentary about a living, breathing person."  After completing his MA, Bernier left UB for the Bay Area and then Boston.  He thought he would teach and did, for a time.   He also continued to make his own art, installations and "time-based" artwork exhibited throughout North America.  But, he says, "I was always trying to blend the two activities.  Teaching jobs were scarce and part-time at best, and I started wanting to make my own work full time."  A move to New York City soon followed.

The Nut Lady

Bernier's first traditional documentary evolved as he and his wife, Tina, traveled the country visiting and chronicling home-made museums.  The project was meant, he recalls, "to be a quirky portrait of people without any real connection except that they're self-made curators."  In 2001, fate finally led him to a woman in Connecticut known as the "Nut Lady," curator of The Nut Museum located in the woman's Victorian-era mansion. 

The Nut Lady was, in reality, 89-year-old Elizabeth Tashjian, who'd achieved a level of notoriety with her pursuit, even making network talk-show appearances.  She gave Bernier and his wife a tour of the museum, which was, he recalls, "not like anything else I'd ever seen.  She took us table to table, talking about nuts, telling jokes and singing songs and showing her own paintings of nuts."  When Bernier asked if she'd be interested in being part of his short film, Tashjian convinced him to make her "the star of her own film.  I figured she could pull it off because she really had presence."

The resulting feature-length documentary, In a Nutshell: A Portrait of Elizabeth Tashjian, became an official selection from Slamdance to the Los Angeles Film Festival.  It won an award at the Heartland Film Festival and received a nomination for a Gotham Award from IFP - New York and Filmmaker Magazine.

Parallel career

Even as Bernier works on his own films, he's developed a "parallel career" as an editor on other people's films, including PBS filmmakers Steve Ives and David Grubin.  "I devote time to both, and as long as they're parallel, it works out," he says. 

Having made In a Nutshell, Bernier muses that "I'd like to play with [the documentary form] more.  But at least I know what it means to make a documentary now."  Other possible projects are an oral history of Bernier's French-Canadian heritage, a narrative screenplay about growing up in rural Maine with its "trashy ‘80s heavy-metal culture," or documenting the origins of the circus sideshow.

While all of those projects have potential, Bernier's dream is to be "funded to make my own films.  They would be documentary-based, but the funding would give me the freedom to make films the way I want."

Written by Grace Lazzara

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