My Great Grandmother was a maid at the Chicago Athletic Club in the early 1900s. She would collect the cigar wrappers that were left behind and make them into beautiful art. She was also a Cubs fan, and to commemorate their 1918 World Series win, she took those wrappers, along with some other materials, and made a commemorative plate. My Mom has this plate in her dining room, and it looks as good as it was in 1918. Her name was Mathilda “Tilley” Prohaska, and she was an immigrant from the Czech Republic who came to the United States at a young age.
The reason why I start this article with her story is because I feel it really connects with that of Flora and Piroska Gellert, also known as Nita and Zita. The two sisters were a burlesque dance duo during the 1920s, traveling from Eastern Europe post-World War 1, and ending up in New Orleans, where they lived a reclusive life. They were two Jewish women who left their home country because of antisemitism. They traveled with what was on their back, and were constantly taking what was around them to make costumes. After they died, their neighbor found thousands of handmade costumes and other pieces in their house. This would lead to a five-year yard sale that resulted in their handmade work spreading all over the world.
Marci Darling, previously a burlesque dancer in the 1990s, became enchanted by the sisters’ story. They had left their priceless costumes and trinkets, but no one had really brought their story to life. In 2018, Marci’s best friend and burlesque dance partner Kim Murphy passed away. Caught up in her grief, she wrote several books, and did a TED talk about these subjects. She also felt called to tell a story on film. What better way to honor her friend than to make a film about two burlesque dancers who inspired one of Marci and Kim’s acts? So in January 2023, she started her journey as a filmmaker.
Marci is an amazing woman: a scholar, professor, author, and belly dancer (learn more). I’m so happy I met her through actor filmmaker Emily Robinson, whom I spoke with about her documentary “The Nita & Zita Project,” along with producer Dr. Sharon Gillen. Currently the film is on its festival run, with a sold out screening at the New Orleans Museum of Art, and they won Best Documentary at the Truth or Consequences Film Fiesta, Best Cinematography from the Nice International Film Fest, and won Best Editing and Excellence in Filmmaking at the Los Alamos Film and Culture festival. Announcements about their upcoming screenings will be listed here soon. In the meantime, you can follow the film here.
It’s probably too much to say in a few words, but can you share a little bit about how Nita and Zita inspired your journey, and brought you to this film?
Marci Darling (MD): In the 1990s, I was in New Orleans and I saw the picture of Piroska Gellert (who was reviewed in the Hungarian news as a young “dance phenomenon” performing her “barefoot oriental dances” around Transylvania) across the bar, and I fell in love because I love vintage costumes and old Hollywood style. I was like, ‘who is that?’ And I read the description below the picture and it said it was Zita. The next day, I stumbled into Judy’s Collage, which was junk shop with tattered costumes were hanging from the ceiling. I have a real radar for vintage costumes wherever I go in the world, so I kind of floated in there. I was just really struck by the entire story. I’m kind of an outsider artist, so I’m very drawn to kind of quirky and off the beaten path type art.
At that time, I hadn’t heard about the five-year yard sale (After Nita and Zita died, their neighbor found thousands of handmade costumes made of found objects in their house. She held a yard sale that lasted five years. The costumes and photos inspired countless artists to create their own art based on Nita & Zita.). I just saw all of these things about their lives. So I went back to Hollywood and I had a dance act with my best friend, Kim Murphy. A dancer from New Orleans who we met in Los Angeles asked if we wanted to do a Nita and Zita act. This was a perfect addition, so we put together an acrobatic contortionist act based on them. We also had an act based on Josephine Baker, and other different famous burlesque dancers.
Then overtime, I met the Radical Faeries, and they were renovating a theater out there to New Hampshire. They were telling me about the five-year yard sale. So when I moved to New Orleans, the first thing I did was get that picture of Piroska on my wall framed, which I had been carrying around with me in the back of my mind, and I ordered all the pictures I could from a collector there. After that, they were just out of the back of my mind after I left New Orleans. But I still have the picture of Piroska front and center in my living room.
When Kim died in 2018, I sunk in the swamp of grief. I had written several books on grief about the connection between art and grief. I’ve actually done a TED talk on this topic, which I explore in all my books and my film. Last January, I was like, ‘I really want to tell a visual story,’ and I was not sure what I wanted it to be. And then I woke up and was like, ‘I want to tell the story of Nita and Zita.’
Sharon, how did you come to this project?
Dr. Sharon Gillen (SG): Marci asked me to come on board last January. She told me a little bit about Nita and Zita and I was immediately drawn to the fact that they were from Eastern Europe. They were from the same area of Romania as my family, and I just felt this connection with them, not necessarily on the artistic side, but more from my ancestral family. They were from the same region, and also experienced antisemitism there. Like Nita and Zita, they were pretty much forced out of their homes, and then they traveled to the U.S.
So I was kind of was seeing it through this lens of these women who experience antisemitism in Romania, and needed to move to the U.S. because of that. So that is why I felt really drawn to the story. And I had been thinking about ways to connect more with my Judaism and to connect more to my ancestors. When Marci asked me, I knew this was the most perfect possible vehicle to do that. It has been an amazing journey telling this amazing story with these amazing Jewish women from that region. And the angle that Marci brings to it, being a belly dancer and a burlesque dancer, makes it an even richer story. There are a lot of interesting women interested in telling it.
Talk to me about the research process for developing this film.
MD: Last January, we had all of the mythologies and the stories, but no one really had any real facts. I’m a scholar and I love research, so I’m a very hard evidence person and like facts.
Immediately all of these doors slammed in my face. The collectors in New Orleans are very proprietary about themselves. Then I went to the New England Historic Genealogical Society, and a researcher helped me. I found all of their travel manifests, so I was like, ‘Oh my gosh the stories are true.’ At the time people didn’t actually know that they were sisters. There were rumors that they were not. I don’t have their birth records, so I can’t say with a hundred percent certainty that they are sisters, but in terms of my research goes, it seemed like they were. They lived with their brothers in New York, and they always named the same father.
Every story I was able to verify, I followed up on. I met one person and she referred me to someone who is the curator of rare books at the historic New Orleans collection. When I called her, she was like, ‘We have just got a few boxes of their things that we haven’t digitized yet.’ But a lot of people hadn’t digitized their stuff yet. The research was really challenging, because Nita and Zita constantly misspelled their names. They misspelled their names, and other people misspelled their names. You even saw that on flyers and documents, which you see in the film. And they changed their names all of the time, which dancers do. I changed my name all the time too, and I still change my name all the time if the fancy strikes me.
So the research was incredibly challenging. I found an expert on Shanghai and another one on the Jazz age. All of these researchers have access to different databases. You can’t just google and find all of the information. The Ogden Museum of Southern Art has different information than the professor in Shanghai, who has different information than the Jazz expert in Chicago. The professor found the ship manifest of them coming into Shanghai, and I had their flyers and their bills. I talked to the Hungarian consulate who got involved in the play, and they were like, ‘They never went to Shanghai ,they just danced in this club called the Shanghai.’ But I knew they had danced in Shanghai because of my research into their records.
I took it as far as I could. For the Southern Jewish Historical Society, I’m writing an academic article on my research, and they were like, ‘What about this and what about that?’ And I told them, “Listen, I have done my research, I have gone to the edge of the research. I cannot answer these questions for you. This is all I have. I have researchers in Hungary, and I have Jewish genealogical experts working with me. And this is just all we have been able to find.” I’m sure the answers to their questions are there somewhere, but I haven’t been able to find them. So that was my journey into the making of this film.
Can you talk about the editing process with Eva K. Morgan?
MD: Our editor is incredible. I just handed her this giant pile, and I had made what I called my murder wall. I had this whole room dedicated to Nita and Zita. Like I had paper dolls of Greta Garbo, and I used them to move around to the different places on the board. Here they started in Hungary, here’s what I have there, and then here’s the ship they traveled on to New York. I just covered the murder wall from floor to ceiling with everything that I could find. And then I just kept adding to it. I just scotch taped it all over the wall. I also I have this big alter to them in the room too. Yeah, it was a thing. [laughs] Because I had set it up in these categories of the immigration, the glittering globe trotter years, the costume mania, the recluse years, and the five-year yard sale. I already had it set up like that. So we decided to go with where the wall was taking us.
And as you know, trying to find public domain footage that you can use can be challenging. There are so many rules that are unclear. I spent days finding all of this incredible footage, only to be told it’s going to be $600 per thirty seconds. We didn’t have that budget, we had no budget at all. When I started the project last January, the plan was for it to be a free film five minutes long on my phone. I’m like, ‘I don’t want it to get out of control.’ I just wanted to tell what I know and what I could find. And then it was just really unbelievable how the doors kept opening.
Can you talk about the Nita & Zita community, specifically in NOLA, and touch on the play?
MD: Nita and Zita’s story attracts a certain type of person, this very empowered misfit type. And their story attracts mostly women. These women who are attracted to this story in the first place are really extraordinary. Lisa D’Amour who wrote the play, who wrote the play, is the Director of the Playwriting Program at Brown.. Kathy Randels, who plays Nita, is the artistic director of ArtSpot Productions. Katie Pearl who starred as Zita is a Director of Theater Arts at Wesleyan, and they all have gone on to be professors. But they all have that free spirit bohemian vibe to them, which is so great. You have this incredible group of women who are doing amazing things. Nita and Zita’s gift they give the world is that their story inspires people to make more art. Because what they did was never for someone else. It was always their thing.
The other side of it was some of those original collectors were very proprietary of the story, and they wanted it to be their view of the story. Some of the collectors would talk to us, and some wouldn’t. But I would try to talk to them. I’m a very relentless person when I want something. I do get very “squeaky wheel.” But after months of trying to get Princess, who was one of the biggest collectors, to talk to me, I just couldn’t. And the same with Paisley Babylon, who wouldn’t talk unless we paid her. With Cyndi McMurray, it took several times, and she ended up talking to us. Cyndi was Judy of Judy Collage’s daughter. So she was one of the main original collectors. She went in her house and took photographs. Lady Jane was incredibly difficult to find. She has no presence online at all. I had to track her down in the mountains of North Carolina like a detective. I’ve learned a lot about research with this topic. [laughs] Lady Jane did teach at Pratt, and she became a textile designer after she spent her years as a dancer. Something I’ve learned is that this project attracts a certain kind of misfit woman. It’s really an extraordinary group.
I love that you explore all the handmade clothing, dolls, and really everything that filled Nita and Zita’s existence. My Great Grandma, who is probably the age of Nita and Zita, was from the Czech Republic and loved making things by hand.
MD: It was so extraordinary. A lot of the people who bought the original pieces such as dresses made from 400 pieces of fabric. As you saw, all of this wild stitching. And that was just the tip of the iceberg. There were so many thousands of costumes in there. We totally lucked out because we saw all of the little burlesque dolls, which were store-bought that they had changed. Nothing was untouched by them. They never just bought anything and then used it, they changed everything. But the Hungarian-looking doll was made from scratch out of tin cans. I mean,Lady Jane went to New Orleans during the making of this film, and a friend had gotten these four handmade NIta & Zita dolls at an antique shop. These Nita Zita dolls, which have been lost to who knows where forever, appeared. They literally used their own hair as hair for the dolls.
But it was incredible because when something is handmade, there is just so much energy that goes into it. I think that’s what people really felt when they touched things. People had mixed feelings about the five-year yard sale because you can have a pair of shoes that end up in Colorado, and people are like, ‘We don’t know who these are.’ But it’s the five-year yard sale that allowed all of us to know the story of Nita and Zita. If it had been all thrown out, none of us would have known their story.
That kind of relentless creativity to me is just how they persevered in such a joyful way. A couple people talked about how their house was dark and strange.
I thought it was gorgeous!
That’s the thing, those of us who understand are like, ‘No, that’s the last word I would apply to Nita and Zita.’ They were ecstatic artists. When you see pictures of Nita and Zita, they took pictures of each other as old women as you saw in the film, and they are joyful. To me, that’s because they were non-stop creatives. Back then, they would have not known, but now we know, we know the impact of creativity on the brain, it’s literally releasing dopamine and oxytocin, and changing our neural connections. I mean, they lived through World War I, World War II and the Battle of Shanghai, all the while dealing with this constant antisemitism against their culture. Imagine thinking that the world is going to end. And yet, throughout their lives, they maintained this level of joy, kept their heads up, made their own decisions, and stayed empowered. It’s really extraordinary.
I’d love to go back to New Orleans and seek out all of these pieces.
SG: A lot of it is at the New Orleans Historic Collection. When the neighbor went into a nursing home, a lot of the things that Nita and Zita made by hand went to them. We did a lot of our research and found purses there that they had made.
What do you hope people see in your film?
SG: Coming from the Jewish perspective, it’s good that we are humanizing them, and saying that these are just people like everyone else. I think it’s good to amplify Jewish voices and tell Jewish stories. So I’m really happy that this is coming out into the world.
MD: My dream would be for it to send Nita and Zita off in true New Orleans style, the second line. And to spend the next year just having the story seen by as many people as possible. We’re not just doing film festivals, we’re doing museums, arts festivals and burlesque festivals. We want to screen the film anywhere that we think people would be interested in the story. The ultimate goal would be for people to learn about them and understand how amazing these stories can be, and get inspired to be more creative, and create more art. It doesn’t have to be about being fancy, or taking art classes. It’s just creating. Nita and Zita’s creativity was self-taught, which is one of the greatest things about them. Ultimately on the film side, I’d want it to go on the History Channel, because there is nothing out there like this. And so many people have a similar story. There are a lot of groups that are attracted to the story, from the outsider artists to the dance community, the Jewish community, the New Orleans culture community, and so on.
