Essential Pittsburgh: J.T. Vale

J.T. Vale (James Thomas or, to his friends and family, Jim) was a lifelong artist, obsessive cinephile, and a fixture of Pittsburgh's South Side. He started making films as a kid. In his 20s, he found community in the emerging punk and experimental scenes thriving around Pittsburgh Filmmakers, then located at 205 Oakland Ave (now an Amazon store.) There, his idiosyncratic interests crystallized into a distinctive style of constant but subtle, fluid camera movement, which J.T. theorized as locking onto the wavelength of the subject being filmed. He was a filmmaker chasing the sublime, and in works such as "Cindy Vale," he achieves it.

In between his personal output, Vale was one of the more in-demand camerapeople in the city. Peggy Ahwesh, Tippi Comden, Robert Haller, and Natalka Voslakov (who wrote that he "knows more about film-making than most of the U.S.A.!") were just a few of his recurring collaborators.…