Just before Thanksgiving, the local arts scene was dealt a blow when Nan Nunes Hackman –– who documented Memphis music and contributed much to local film making –– passed away from Covid-19 on Sunday, November 21, after her immune system was compromised by lymphoma cancer and its treatments. She was 67.
Earlier this year, Memphis magazine’s profile of her life and work was a welcome corrective to her largely unsung efforts in the Memphis arts scene. Now, many are reflecting on just how much she brought to the city and its artists.
“It sucks to lose somebody so suddenly, without being able to say goodbye,” says guitarist and songwriter Robert Allen Parker, who collaborated with Hackman on the 2013 documentary Meanwhile in Memphis: The Sound of a Revolution. “I always talked to Nan weekly. All through the pandemic we’d do a video call, up until last week, even when she went in the ICU hospital bed. And she was still very much in high spirits. This whole time, the fact that she was at Vanderbilt getting the treatment was looking positive.”
Staying positive was a particular strength of Hackman’s. As a teacher in Shelby County Schools’ Creative Learning in a Unique Environment [CLUE] program for 20 years, Hackman developed an interest in video and film, and touched many lives as she did. “There’s one young man who I taught around the year 1980, and he was making an animated Super 8 movie with cardboard cutouts and stop motion animation,” she recalled when we spoke earlier this year. “And he was really into it. You would run into these kids who got excited about it and they wanted to go ahead and do additional projects. So this kid was motivated. He took the preliminary instruction and ran with it. And that’s what you want. Also, these movies were all silent, back then. So we would put appropriate music on a cassette and play it with the film, and hope that they were sort of in sync. And that’s what he did. His movie was The Attack of the Killer Ants. He’s well into his 50s now. He went to L.A. and decided to hang around the TV world there. The last I heard, he was working on How I Met Your Mother. So he parlayed this interest that started when he was a 7th grader into a career. That’s very rewarding!”
Her positive outlook led her to push herself to do more and more video and film work on her own, though she remained steadfastly homespun about it. “I’m not a professional. I don’t want to be. I want to do the projects that I want to do,” she told me. And yet she had a knack for creating quality work, as the response to Meanwhile in Memphis attested to. Grammy-winning writer Bob Mehr called it “a sprawling, important document of the city’s modern musical underground,” and it won the Audience Award at the 2013 Indie Memphis Film Festival.
If that film revealed her skills as a producer and an editor, her years of documenting Rhodes College theater productions and performances by the New Ballet Ensemble had honed her instincts for capturing magic in the moment. And, well before camera phones were ubiquitous, she paid her dues to be able to do so. “I filmed the very first footage of Charles ‘Lil Buck’ Riley, the jooking dancer, in 2007, doing ‘The Dying Swan,’” she explained. “It was an improvisation, and the reason it exists is because I lugged a heavy camera to a school show in West Memphis in October of 2007 and filmed him, and then put it up on YouTube. Eventually it went viral, but it literally happened because I lugged a camera. That experience showed me the importance of capturing one incredible performance. It was the first time he had performed it. And it was an improvisation. As he was doing it, I was aware of the importance of capturing it. I will say, it was very satisfying to see that it yielded such great fruit.”
She continued to take on independent projects, including producing and shooting a series of music videos for Parker’s album, The River’s Invitation.
Through it all, Hackman always pointed out how important her husband, Dr. Béla Hackman, was to her work in the arts. “I couldn’t do any of this without Béla,” she explained. “He supports me financially, gives me moral support, and he keeps my computer running. And Béla is also the graphic designer for Rob’s albums. He’s self-taught and very good at it. He has some wicked Photoshop skills and has studied design principles. And he’s meticulous. So all the graphics are extremely clean and professional looking. Whereas, I have some rudimentary skills, and I am quick and dirty. You do not want me doing the final version of your graphics. I will slap something together quickly. But that makes for a good partnership, because I can get stuff done on a deadline, and he can do it correctly. We work well together.”
An obituary in The Commercial Appeal quotes Dr. Hackman as saying that a memorial service for Nan Hackman will likely be held next spring. It also quotes his summation of what motivated her to do the work she excelled at: “All this stuff was going on that was not being documented and preserved. The idea is, she’s trying to perpetuate this stuff for future generations, for posterity. That’s really what drove her.”
