The Film

When We Met Gertrude: The Making of When West Meets East

The making of “When West Meets East” began much like most of Gertrude’s own work; with countless hours of research. While other students this spring were out playing in the sun, some of the members of Infinite Edge Productions were tucked away in the University of Oregon Knight Library’s special collections, digging through boxes of old journals, photos and keepsakes trying to sort of the details of Warner’s life.

She was a woman very much ahead of her time as far as her cultural understanding went. She realized that conflicts could not be resolved between countries and peoples until they were able to better understand each other, and she saw art as one way to help to do this. We felt that it was very important to include some of the lantern slides that Warner photographed and purchased throughout her travels to help and bring the faces and the culture of those countries into the film as well, and while obtaining them was not always an easy task, the end result of those beautiful images and the connection we hope the audience will feel with them is very much worth our efforts.

One of the biggest challenges of this film was attempting to bring Warner to life without using only still photographs of her and the testimony of those that were not around during her lifetime. We had wonderful interviews with people who had been working with the collection and documents that Warner left the University. Celia Rosenow, who has done extensive research on the life of Warner, gave us great insight as to the details of Warner’s life. Charles Lachman was able to tell us how Warner’s collection was unique to many others at the time. Hattie Mae Nixon gave us clues to Warner’s personality with the stories that she had heard from friends of Warner, and Normany Helmer provided us with great insight about Warner’s lantern slide collection. And Bryna Goodman provided a historical background for China during the time Warner lived and traveled there.

Lucky for us, Warner’s legacy included a manuscript entitled “When West Meets East”, it was intended to serve as a guide for those in the U.S. thinking of traveling to the east and was written in letter format. We were able to bring Gertrude’s own words to life through the narration of text from this manuscript.

There were so many interesting aspects of Warner’s life, fitting all of it into an eight minute piece would have been impossible, and so our group decided early on that we would need to include a few featurettes along with the regular documentary, which was our way of enabling ourselves to elaborate on the many pieces of Warner’s life and legacy that we can only touch upon in the film.