Gene Friedman, who directed photography for television commercials and industrial films and made several short films about dance, including one featured in a recent Museum of Modern Art exhibition, died in his sleep at home in Wainscott on Saturday. He was 92. The cause was congestive heart failure.
Mr. Friedman’s 1964 film “Three Dances,” seen at MoMA’s tribute to the Judson Dance Theatre that opened in September 2018, addresses the question “What is dance?” A New York Times review of the exhibition began: “Three marvelous views of dancing await you at the entrance to the Museum of Modern Art exhibition ‘Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done.’ “ In the film, “bodies aren’t just moving through space: They’re also speaking to the breadth and possibility of the art form.”
In 1975 Mr. Friedman made a short documentary about Sigmund Freud’s longtime home in Vienna. The film, narrated by the late East Hampton resident Eli Wallach, features footage of the rooms in which Freud composed his major works and saw patients, until he was forced to flee the Nazis in 1938.
Mr. Friedman and his wife, Dorothy, and son, Barnaby, moved to Wainscott in 1973. Mr. Friedman designed their house based on the architectural ideas of Frank Lloyd Wright.
The Friedmans quickly became part of the community, generously opening their house to friends and colleagues for film nights, book groups, and drumming circles, and hosting volleyball games in their yard (once the soccer star Pelé showed up). They also helped to start one of the first Community Supported Agriculture farms on Eastern Long Island. That community farm, in Southampton, remains in operation today, where, instead of paying a farmer, members sow, tend, and harvest the crops themselves. Mr. Friedman was active for many years as a member of the Wainscott Citizens Advisory Committee, and was especially outspoken about limiting expansion of the East Hampton Airport.
His son remembered that Mr. Friedman “was good at anything he set his mind to. He loved to tinker with things as well as build them.” And he marveled at his father’s inquisitive nature. He “always wanted to know everything, about everyone and the world and how it worked. He was a wonderful man.” Mr. Friedman was known among friends for his generosity, wry sense of humor, and quick wit.
Eugene L. Friedman was born in Brooklyn on March 18, 1928, the son of Nathan and Sarah Friedman. He graduated from Brooklyn Technical High School in 1945 and attended City College of New York and Brooklyn College. He was drafted into the Army in 1951, serving in the Signal Corps, where he trained as a combat motion picture cameraman.
In 1967, Mr. Friedman married the former Dorothy Feldman Krooks in New York City. She survives him. Mr. Friedman’s first marriage, to Dorothy Carol Orr, ended in divorce.
Besides his wife and son, who lives in Springs, Mr. Friedman is survived by two grandchildren, Tali Rose Friedman and Ally Sawyer Friedman.
By Susan Pollack and Susan Mermelstein
