Ditzah Pisk Feldman

Ditzah Pisk Feldman is a former Berkeley radical and one of the core film editors of 24fps, the guerrilla filmmaking collective that records political disorder and preserves images the authorities might prefer to erase. Her modestly presented home conceals both a working film archive and a history of direct action. When she shows Prairie footage made by the collective, its images bring Frenesi Gates into view as both Prairie’s mother and a participant behind the camera; later, the destruction of Ditzah’s archive demonstrates how vulnerable that record remains.

Identity and Background

Ditzah is divorced, financially solvent, and lives in a Spanish-style house at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac near Ventura Boulevard. Pepper trees and jacarandas shade the garden, and a vintage Thunderbird sits in the garage. She lives about half an hour by public transportation from work; her daughters spend the summer holidays with their father. The domestic setting makes her appear, to Prairie, like an ordinary bourgeois woman, though Prairie cannot know whether this is simply another disguise.

DL has known Ditzah since their Berkeley years. Then Ditzah and her sister, Zipi Pisk, wore camouflage clothes and enormous Afro-Jewish hairstyles, spray-painted calls to smash the state on public buildings, and kept plastic explosives in containers in their refrigerator. Their contrast with Ditzah’s later appearance is striking, but the text leaves open how much of the change is a change in her convictions and how much is merely a change in presentation.

24fps and the Work of Editing

Ditzah’s house contains a rear editing studio, where a moviola, loose 16-millimeter film, reels, and metal cans of footage hold the surviving archive of 24fps, the former guerrilla film collective. Ditzah and Zipi are described as exceptionally talented editors. Their working methods are distinct: Zipi cuts film with her fingernails and tape, while Ditzah prefers her teeth and staples. At the moviola, both are so precisely attuned to the material that they are rarely out of rhythm by more than a frame.

Their editing room is an improvised, busy environment. They chain-smoke, keep several televisions tuned to different channels, and play rock and roll on the radio, favoring psychedelic music. The astrologer Mirage makes daily horoscopes for them after learning that they are both Geminis; the sisters also learn to work at unusual hours and to stop when the moon is new. These routines accompany exacting technical labor rather than displacing it: the footage is cut, joined, and organized amid competing streams of sound and images.

Ditzah and Zipi belong to the collective’s stable core, despite the frequent turnover around them. The larger group includes impatient apprentices, old-film enthusiasts, idealists, and people suspected of being political infiltrators or provocateurs. The sisters grew up in New York and, in their own view, never really left it except geographically. Their recurring comparisons of California with New York give the group’s shared life a comic friction: they fault the West Coast for what it lacks of the human warmth and neighborliness they remember from the city, while their comrades dispute that idealized account.

The Collective’s Political Record

Ditzah, Zipi, and Frenesi Gates took over what remained of the Berkeley-based Kollettivo Cinematografico Nichilista “Morte ai Porci” and carried some of its equipment and members into 24fps. The earlier collective’s inheritance included cameras, lights, a moviola, a hydraulic camera mount, and a refrigerator full of film. Its manifesto treated the camera as a weapon and images as instruments of judgment. That rhetoric proved too extreme for some members, including Mirage, but the collective’s practical commitment to filming remained clear.

The group traveled in an inconspicuous convoy of ordinary sedans, vans, an Econoline equipment truck, and a battered Sting Ray used as a fast support car. Using CB radios to keep in contact, its members sought out unrest, filmed it, and hurried their documentary evidence to safety. Ditzah’s work therefore belongs to a practice that combines witnessing with preservation: the group does not merely record events but tries to keep the images beyond immediate reach of those they show.

The collective especially valued close-ups. Its members believed that a face could register what power tried to conceal, and that viewers confronted with the faces and voices of people being bought, sold, or made to repeat evasive official formulas might find those formulas harder to accept. Ditzah’s editing helps shape this political record into a form capable of being watched, replayed, and carried elsewhere.

Footage, Frenesi, and Brock Vond

While Prairie visits Ditzah with DL, footage from the archive gives Prairie a way to approach a mother she has not yet been able to see directly. As she watches, Prairie realizes that Frenesi was often the person behind the camera. The moving image allows Prairie to imagine sharing her mother’s viewpoint: the trembling frame can register fatigue, fear, or nausea, while the camera’s movement records Frenesi’s choice to approach and continue filming. Ditzah’s archive thus becomes more than evidence of past political activity; it is a mediated encounter between Prairie and Frenesi.

One film also captures Brock Vond crossing a courthouse lobby. Ditzah and Prairie recognize him, and Ditzah rewinds the footage. The recording comes from the collective’s pursuit of Vond as he moved a grand jury hearing among locations in Oregon, changing the time and place at short notice. The filmmakers followed him from courthouse to motel, fairground exhibition hall, college and high-school auditoriums, and even a drive-in arena. Frenesi, initially filming allegorical courthouse murals, noticed Vond in the camera’s viewfinder and began tracking him in close-up.

Ditzah explains that the footage had been transferred to videotapes and that copies were distributed in different places to disperse the archive and make it safer; she herself retained the original film. When the group watches the images projected on a sheet in a dark motel room, the preserved footage turns Vond’s elusive movements into a record that can be examined by others. The sequence also joins Ditzah’s archival work to Prairie’s discovery: the film identifies a political figure in her mother’s past while making Frenesi’s own act of seeing part of the evidence.

Surveillance and the Destruction of the Archive

Ditzah’s concern for the archive proves well-founded. During a sweep of her home, DL detects a rudimentary listening device in the rear studio after scanning the house with a radio. Ditzah notes how crude the device is for 1984; DL suspects that the ease of finding it may mean it was planted to be discovered, or that more sophisticated bugs have exhausted the available supply. The hidden microphone makes the house’s apparent privacy uncertain, especially in the room where the group’s records are kept.

When DL and Takeshi return to the neighborhood, they find a roadblock and a large operation underway. DL slips into the cordoned area and sees a barred Youth Authority bus carrying noisy juvenile inmates, smoke, and flames near Ditzah’s garage. The metal film cans are empty, while film reels, loose footage, and typed papers burn in black piles; workers sweep any surviving fragments back into the fire. Ditzah’s home and archive have been raided and the records destroyed. The contrast with the collective’s earlier dispersal of duplicate tapes is stark: copies had been sent out to protect the footage, but the original archive that remained with Ditzah was exposed to physical destruction. Her story gives the 24fps project both a human custodian and a material vulnerability, while the footage she helped preserve continues to connect political history with Prairie’s search for Frenesi.