To describe his place in history, filmmaker Ralph Arlyck ’62 likes to say he was “taxied into the world in the middle of the last century.” Born in 1940 into a “postwar breather” when Churchill succeeded Chamberlain, German forces entered Paris, and Gone With the Wind won eight Oscars, Arlyck considers himself fortunate to have grown up in the “American century” — a time in which the pain he witnessed appeared primarily on screens.
Now in his 80s, Arlyck continues to appreciate film as a medium for communicating life’s complexities. His latest project, I Like It Here, presents a meditation on the “absolute finality” of life and the “troubling” process of aging. Featuring family, friends, and many personal anecdotes, his story is set to air on PBS next year.
Over the floor of the Hudson Valley, Arlyck’s film opens with a drone shot of his pastoral neighborhood — a testament to his love for nature. Though he was born in Brooklyn, Arlyck shares that his family’s move to the New York countryside “set his urban-rural barometer forever.” Surrounded by “bullfrogs, six different kinds of turtles, and nights that were totally dark with older girls who wore lipstick,” he remembers, “I couldn’t believe my luck.”
At Colgate in the late 1950s, Arlyck made close friends with his classmates, particularly Mel Watkins ’62 — a member of the basketball team and “honest to God existentialist.” He reunites with Watkins in the film, and the two are shown chatting on the residential quad: “We were walking past the dorms where our parents had dropped us off 60 years ago, nervous little boys,” says Arlyck.
Another connection from Arlyck’s Colgate days also appears in the film. Like many students looking to meet women in the pre-coeducation era, he and Watkins used to travel to Skidmore. Linda Chase, a student there, became his girlfriend and is now a writer who he discovers suddenly lives only 15 minutes away from the documentarian. “She still seems to have that same calmness and directness she had in college,” he says.
After Colgate, Arlyck went to Senegal with the Peace Corps — a formative experience he revisits in the film through archival footage and photographs. “I did some English teaching, agricultural advice — things that were not that useful for the Senegalese,” he admits. “But it was two years in a completely different place, with really nice people.” Toward the end of his stay, a Senegalese friend gave Arlyck a monkey, Foday, who became the subject of his first film: a goofy short about Foday’s bond with his dog.
Arlyck’s wife, Elisabeth, in a still from his most recent documentary
In Senegal Arlyck also learned French — a skill that connected him with Elisabeth Cardonne, a future French professor at Vassar College. Just two months later, the pair married in Paris. Today they live in
the Hudson Valley (Clermont, N.Y.), where they are often visited by their two sons, grandkids, neighbors, and the friends they’ve made along the ride. “I and the people I know / or love, / just riding our personal swells of enthusiasm or discontent,” he says, as the film concludes with a sequence of the couple and their loved ones dining and dancing in their Hudson Valley home.
To date, Arlyck has produced and directed more than a dozen prize-winning, independent films, which have aired on PBS and the BBC, been shown at the White House, and screened at festivals worldwide, including Sundance, New York, London, and Rotterdam. His 2004 documentary feature Following Sean earned two Emmy nominations. His other works include Current Events (1989), which explores how people respond to the news, and An Acquired Taste (1981), a wry take on the anxieties surrounding success.