The Quiet One

While Leyda was living in Los Angeles, his friend and comrade-in-arms Sidney Meyers in New York shot a semi-documentary feature about a boy from Harlem who flees the violence of his parental home and finds refuge at the Wiltwyck School, whose focus is on social pedagogy. The complex film experiment received two Oscar nominations at the time, although there were also critical voices, not least in view of the exclusively white team that made the film. Whether and how THE QUIET ONE is still worthy of discussion today is the theme of a conversation following the film between Henning Engelke and Kazembe Balagun, head of the Maysles Documentary Center in New York. Jay Leyda’s A BRONX MORNING will be shown once again before THE QUIET ONE—also to honor his lifelong friendship with Meyers, of which he gives an piercing account in the memorial volume “Vision is my dwelling place” (1974). There is no other text by Leyda that gives a more intense description of what was important for him and his generation – and what many of them were stigmatized for.

THE QUIET ONE is provided by the Library of Congress, A BRONX MORNING by the Austrian Film Museum.