by Marie-Pierre Ulloa, Stanford Humanities Center
Graham Leggat, Stanford alumnus and former executive director of the San Francisco Film Society, transformed the Bay Area film scene. Tobias Wolff, the Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor of English at Stanford, remembers him with “immense fondness and admiration” as “one of the most interesting students I had.”
Visionary executive director of the San Francisco Film Society, Graham Leggat, class of ‘87, died on August 25th at his home in San Francisco after an eighteen-month struggle with cancer. He was 51.
In recent years, Leggat collaborated frequently with various Stanford institutions to bring foreign films to campus. I had the pleasure of working with Leggat on four different occasions, first, on behalf of the Mediterranean Studies Forum and then for the Humanities Center.
Leggat became the executive director of the San Francisco Film Society in October 2005 after two decades in the non-profit arts world where he held executive positions at the American Museum of Moving Image, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York City.
“For nearly six exciting and transformative years, Graham Leggat led the San Francisco Film Society with irrepressible determination, dash and design,” wrote Pat McBaine, president of the Film Society’s board of directors. “His vision, leadership, passion, work ethic, tenacity, imagination and daring along with his colorful language and wicked Scottish sense of humor have indelibly marked our organization with a valuable legacy and left it in the best shape - artistically, organizationally and financially - in its 54-year history.”
A Quest for Enlightenment
Leggat was born in England in 1960, of Scottish parents. He came to Stanford in 1979 on a soccer scholarship. Commenting on his athletic gifts he once joked, “Dad was a professional soccer player, so I had a genetic advantage.”
On his journey of “looking for enlightenment,” he spent eight years earning his B.A. in modern English and American literature and American studies at Stanford. This extended period of study was, to paraphrase Thoreau, because he “loved a broad margin to his life” and spent three of those years studying Zen in the monastic setting of Tassajara, the San Francisco Zen Center.
During his tenure at Stanford, he was the editor of the campus literary magazine, and earned a $1,000 prize for being named outstanding undergraduate-in-the-creative-arts. Graham Leggat then went on to earn his M.A. at Syracuse University where he studied fiction writing with acclaimed author Tobias Wolff, who would later join the Stanford English Department.
Sharing a Love of Film
Leggat’s collaboration with Stanford began in 2007 when, as the Associate Director for Mediterranean Studies, I worked with him to organize a screening of the acclaimed Algerian film, Rome Rather Than You in Palo Alto. After the screening, students and community members joined in a discussion with Tariq Teguia, the film’s director. In 2008, Mediterranean Studies co-sponsored a SF Film Festival presentation of the Greek movie, Valse Sentimentale, directed by another young and daring Mediterranean filmmaker, Constantina Voulgaris.
The same year, Graham and his team facilitated a showing of the Venice Film Festival award winner, The Secret of the Grain, directed by Tunisian-French filmmaker Abdellatif Kechiche. Screened at the Cubberley Auditorium at Stanford, the event was well attended by students and sparked a lively discussion afterwards with film studies professor Pavle Levi. Students’ eyes were opened to the complexities of the Muslim migrant experience in southern Europe through the vision of a film director with a uniquely provocative storytelling style.
Our last collaboration took place in April, 2011 when renowned French film critic Jean-Michel Frodon was the 2011 Bliss Carnochan Visitor at the Stanford Humanities Center. Together, Leggat and I arranged to have Frodon participate in the SF Film Festival during his time at Stanford. Leggat invited Frodon to give the master class in film criticism for the 54th San Francisco International Film Festival (see video of the SFIFF54 Master Class: Critic’s Response and Responsibility with Jean-Michel Frodon.)
Working with Graham was pure joy. He truly cared about including Stanford, his alma mater, in the life of the festival and the film society. He firmly believed in the inspirational and transformative values of films, and in educating the students in the art of cinema. It says a lot that in 2009 he hired the highly-talented Rachel Rosen, a Stanford’s alumna who earned her M.A in Documentary Film in 1993, to be the director of programming for the film society.
Remembering a Visionary in the Arts
Remembering Graham is remembering his charismatic presence, his talent in mentoring a “crack team” of collaborators, his clean cut elegance, his gracious way of being in the world, his commitment to the civic and cultural missions of film festivals, his humorous irreverence, delivered in one-liners with his “je ne sais quoi” of an accent, his amazing talent of making you feel that you are the most important person in the room.
Remembering him is remembering fun conversations about French cinema - “a true cinephile is a cinephile of French films” he’d say, knowing how the French love to bask in those kinds of compliments!
Remembering Graham Leggat is also remembering his legacy. He boldly (and baldly) took the San Francisco Film Society where no one had taken it before. He gave film lovers in the Bay Area permission to believe that San Francisco can be both an international and local “futurist” destination. He and his team brought star power to the festival, such as bay area icons George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, Sean Penn, Robert Redford but also international artists Tilda Swinton, Walter Salles, Ewan McGregor, Werner Herzog, Mike Leigh.
Under his charismatic leadership, the Film Society extended his programming to being on a daily, year-round basis; the Society offers a magnificent autumnal season of seven festivals: Hong Kong Cinema, Taiwan Film Days, the NY/SF International Children’s Film Festival, French Cinema Now, Cinema by the Bay, the San Francisco International Animation Festival and New Italian Cinema.
Last but not least, Leggat’s legacy will shine through the San Francisco Film Society’s New People Cinema, which will open its doors on September 1st, in a remarkable, state-of-the art theater in Japantown. This new theater will enable the Film Society to make a daily impact on the cultural life of the community it serves, a realization of Leggat’s ultimate ambition.
Graham Leggat is the author of a science fiction novel, Song of a Dangerous Paradise, published in 2007 (Cambrian Press). He is also Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres de la Republique Francaise, in recognition of his outstanding contribution to cinema.
Leggat is survived by his parents Graham and Marilyn of Niagara Falls, Canada, son William and daughters Vhary and Isabelle, sister Alexandra Leggat of Toronto, partner Diana Chiawen Lee, former wife Ellen Hughes, mother of his daughters and former wife Lillian Heard, mother of his son.
In lieu of flowers, donations in Leggat’s memory may be made to the San Francisco Film Society. Condolences should be sent to inmemoryofgraham@sffs.org or c/o Jessica Anthony, SFFS, 39 Mesa Street, Suite 110, The Presidio, San Francisco, CA 94129.
A memorial service, open to the public, is planned for late September. For information visit: http://sffs.org/
