Robert Banks’s Filmmaking Odyssey

Despite having made more than 35 films, Robert Banks still has a couple more celluloid/cinematic mountains he wants to climb. Despite all of the compelling and entrancing images he’s put on film, whether for motion pictures or still photographs, he remains haunted by the litany of needling comments from his colleagues, fans and followers for the last thirty years: Why aren’t you working in LA? Why aren’t you working in New York? When are you coming back to LA? You should be in LA, man.

Though he chose to remain in Cleveland as a cinematographer, director and film artist, Banks was able to leverage his gifts for making powerful films to establish a national and international reputation for his work.

For the Hollywood on the Cuyahoga exhibit about contributions to filmmaking from Northeast Ohioans that opened at the Cleveland History Center in September, Banks created nine videos, including interviews with documentarian Catherine Gund; film director, producer, screenwriter, and special effects makeup artist Robert Kurtzman and his wife Marcy King; retired president and CEO of the Cleveland Institute of Art, Grafton Nunes, who is also a film producer who worked with Miloš Forman and was involved in the making of the film Light of Day shot at the Euclid Tavern; independent filmmaker Tyler Davidson based in Chagrin Falls; and acclaimed costumer Harold Crawford (aka Rags), who has worked closely with famous actors and directors on myriad films, television shows and plays.

Banks created the teaser film for the exhibition and also did an extended interview with local filmmaking legends Anthony and Joseph Russo, who are best known for directing four blockbuster Marvel Cinematic Universe films: Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Captain America: Civil War, Avengers: Infinity War, and Avengers: Endgame. They will be featured in their own Welcome to Collinwood room at the end of the exhibition, as will Banks’ interview with Bill Garvey, president of the Greater Cleveland Film Commission, about its contributions to the region.

“I chatted with Robert and really liked his knowledge of film,” says Dennis Barrie, vice president of experience design for the Western Reserve Historical Society, who curated the exhibit which runs through October 2026. “The thing that convinced me was his extensive knowledge of film history, and he loves some of the obscure, and I love some of the obscure, as well, so we kind of bonded on some of the obscure, bad movies!”

Barrie added that their goal was to enable visitors to experience the fact that there’s been a great film history in this region, and most people don’t know that filmmaking has been going on in Northeast Ohio for decades.

In September, Banks’ 1992 film, X: The Baby Cinema, a 16mm short film that chronicled the commercial appropriation of the image of Malcolm X, was shown at the Malcolm X: Multidimensional centennial celebration at the Anthology Film Archives in New York.

In 2026, a collectively run screening space in Brooklyn, NY, plans to hold a Robert Banks film retrospective.

“The films of Robert Banks represent a vital, if underappreciated contribution to the tradition of experimental and handcrafted cinema,” says Will Hair, independent film programmer in New York. “His commitment to exploring art, abstraction, and, most of all, celluloid through tactile aesthetics and with a true DIY approach has been unwavering for thirty plus years now. I’m currently working on a long overdue retrospective of Robert’s work, which should materialize sometime early next year in New York City.”

Banks’ interest in films started when he was six years old. While he was growing up in the Hough neighborhood, his father was always running the digest version of films on his Keystone Regular 8mm projectors at home. Banks proudly maintains all of his father’s Regular and Super 8mm projectors and his collection of those condensed films that were shown on TV by filmmakers such as Bert Gordon, Roger Corman, Terence Fisher, and Nathan Juran. All were filmmakers who inspired him later when he started making his ownfilms.

“They were considered to be B movie hacks, but in fact, you’d be surprised how many filmmakers today owe so much to those men,” Banks says. “Those are the films that my dad would show me, so I would watch The Amazing Colossal Man, Earth Versus the Spider, Beginning of the End, these are all classic B monster movies. Jack Arnold was another one, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Revenge of the Creature. And all the Godzilla movies by Ishirō Honda.”

Banks also loved watching the classic horror movies Superhost, the Ghoul, and Big Chuck and Lil’ John featured on their late-night programs. If he wasn’t watching movies, he was immersing himself in Marvel comic books, downloading to memory all of those colorful action fantasy images and pondering the whole magic of the filmmaking process.

“When it came to watching movies as a kid, it had to be either cartoons, horror or science fiction,” Banks recalls. “I didn’t get into the other underground and experimental stuff until later, when I was more mature, but back then part of my dream was I wanted to make movies like these.”Some of Banks’ earliest exposure to the creative excitement film could generate for the filmmaker happened when he was a student at Cleveland School of the Arts. There, one of his teachers whom he considers his first true film mentor, Keith A. Richards, turned him on to the work of Norman McClaren, Scottish-Canadian animator, director and filmmaker who was known for painting, scratching and etching on films.

He then attended the Cleveland Institute of Art for a year before dropping out because the cost of tuition was beyond his means. Unhappy with the lack of employment opportunities, Banks decided it was time to see more of the world, so he joined the US Air Force. When his father died after a protracted illness, he received a humanitarian discharge in February 1988 so that he could return to Cleveland to take care of his mother.

He remembers how he also “double indulged on his cinema knowledge and film history,” immersing himself in as many famous or infamous films from the past that he could get his hands on to watch.

His timing was perfect as he was now able to take advantage of growing opportunities to dive into his favorite types of horror, sci-fi and underground films at Strosaker Auditorium at Case Western Reserve University, where John Ewing had also launched a new art film venue called Cinemateque in 1985. Banks became a regular patron, and his films were later featured there in a retrospective.

Reveling in inspiration overload, Banks decided it was time to quit dabbling in filmmaking and just do it.

“I was about to turn 21, and I figured let me try this one more time, because I had made a few filmmaking attempts then,” he says. “I’m going to try again, except this time I’m going to go all the way, and it’s either going to’ happen or not happen.”

By the late ’80s, early ’90s, he ventured into films that he wanted to make, drawing on all of his studying, training and inspirations. In 1992, applying everything he had learned about McClaren’s scratching and etching on film techniques, Banks completed his short 16mm film about how slain Civil Rights leader Malcolm X’s image was being commercially merchandized: X: The Baby Cinema. The film premiered at Cinemateque in the fall of that year and, he believes, “really opened the door” for him.

His 1994 feature documentary film You Can’t Get a Piece of Mind explores the world of Cleveland musician and Vietnam veteran, Dan “Supie T” Theman. Currently, Banks is in the process of restoring the film so he can screen it again.

Banks also added a few more images and elements to X and began submitting it to film festivals, including the Cleveland International Film Festival and a brand-new event, the New York Underground Film Festival. It did so well that it appeared on the compilation video “The Best Of The NY Underground Film & Video Festival Year One,” and Banks started receiving calls from the festival’s two founders.

“The one guy was Andrew Gurland and the other was Todd Phillips,” he says with a laugh. “Todd used to call my house all the time, and we never thought he was going to be what he is now. But they both said, ‘Robert, you can give us anything from now on. We will show it.’ So, every year I would make a film and give it to them and they would show it.”

That led to having his films shown in many other underground festivals sprouting up, helping his work become recognized worldwide: Sundance, Chicago, Berlin, Milan, Boston, Ann Arbor, Los Angeles and Lausanne, Switzerland. In 2000, Banks even received a retrospective of his films in London when he was the honored guest filmmaker at the BBC British Short Film Festival.

“It wasn’t until the mid-2000s that things started tapering off because all of a sudden there were film festivals everywhere, and everyone was a filmmaker,” he sighs. “Then digital technology and everything was video, and that was when the film labs were all dying out, so it got to the point where I wanted to keep doing the little films but realized I should work towards something bigger.”

In 2018, that something bigger turned out to be his first feature length work Paper Shadows, a surrealist experimental film about the shared creative angst of an elderly Black man and his young white female art student on a small college campus.

In terms of his approach to filmmaking and photography, Banks explains: “I incorporate every aspect of traditional drawing, painting, photo, and those little details, whether it’s a prop or something in the background or just a tree in the landscape. When I do a film shoot it’s like a photo shoot or a drawing, except it moves. When I do a photo shoot, it tells a story. It has a narrative, a progression, there’s a sequence, it’s rhythmic, it’s thematic, like a movie!”

The primary reason Banks remained in Cleveland rather than relocate to a moviemaking haven like LA or New York was he wanted to take care of his mother. Last year, before she died in April, his mother told him “you’re free to go do your own thing now. You won’t have to worry about me.”

Banks has taught film at Cuyahoga Community College, the Cleveland Institute of Art, Cleveland State University, and New Bridge Cleveland Center for Arts and Technology. However, his days in the classroom are over, he confirms, at least until he’s 75 and “retired.” He has also trained, interned and mentored a couple generations of film artists: he estimates more than two dozen are actively working in the industry in Hollywood. But dreams for his career are far from over.

“My goal was to get three features under my belt before I hit 40, but that didn’t happen,” says Banks who just turned 59. “So the plan is now I have to decide how far I can stretch this because I’ll be 60 next year, and I’m thinking maybe I can do another feature before I hit 60.”

By doing a more commercial film, he hopes to make himself eligible for the Directors Guild of America to obtain a union card and some health benefits.

He has multiple potential film projects percolating with other film artists, including a horror film anthology with his pal David Greathouse, producer and special effects expert known for Hacksaw Ridge, The Night Manager and Two Night Stand; he’s talking with Charles Band whose Full Moon Features has a Cleveland office; and another colleague, Teresa Nichta, has been pitching producers in LA this fall to land a film deal for which he would serve as cinematographer.

Whether any or all of these projects get the green light, Banks plans to decide early in 2026 whether he should stay in Cleveland or head for LA or another city in the US to shoot a film. Anyplace where he won’t face the distractions of his hometown, like his beloved Lake Erie with all the visual wonders of its waters, beaches, birds and sunsets, or all of the arts and cultural attractions of University Circle.

Through his career, he has remained so committed to shooting on real film that he once purchased a load of 16mm stock from Tom Jarmusch, brother of Jim Jarmusch (Stranger Than Paradise and Down by Law, among many others). The two had been talking about doing a collaboration, and they met one evening so Banks could unload the film from the trunk of Jarmusch’s car in the parking lot of Dodd Camera at East 30th and Carnegie.

“Tom’s a character. He’s known in the NYC indie film scene for his gritty, underground style. He’s somewhat known here, and Cinemateque ran some of his work, but not like his brother,” Banks concludes with his trademark chuckle. “We’re all a motley crew here when it comes to the big industry film world.”