Marion Post Wolcott, "Houses which have been condemned by the Board of Health but are still occupied," 1944 OWI, Library of Congress
Blackside, founded by the visionary documentary filmmaker Henry Hampton in 1968, was by then already highly influential and best known for their documentary production techniques as demonstrated by their first project, Eyes on the Prize (1987) on the history of the Civil Rights Movement beginning with such events as the Brown vs. the Board of Education Supreme Court Decision of 1954 argued by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund Team led by Thurgood Marshall, the lynching of Emmett Till in 1955 together with his mother's astonishing determination to bring the eyes of the world to Money, Mississippi to witness the trial that would find her son's murderers entirely innocent; as well as the successful Montgomery Alabama bus boycott spearheaded by the bold young leader Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the courageous Rosa Parks who would not give up her seat.
Eyes on the Prize (1987) was a compelling piece of work indeed, shown on PBS before I had either VHS or DVD. I can remember making a point of being home so that I could watch each installment at least twice--there was so much information I hungered to know. It was the compelling audio-visual event from a racial standpoint of the late 80s. And there was little question that the modus operandi of Blackside had made it all possible. I was, therefore, eager to accept their invitation to come to Boston so that I could learn more about them although I was well aware that I was more journalist and intellectual than artist and that whatever footage they might shoot of me would probably end up on the cutting room floor.
Eyes on the Prize, which was re-released in 2006 by PBS on the American Experience, relied heavily upon newsreel and/or television news footage. These materials were further supported by interviews with the survivors of the Civil Rights Movement, including some who still felt defensive about segregation and racial distinctions. Since it was made in 1987, already 22 years ago, many of the people in the film are no longer alive, lending to the entire project at this point in history an archival value.
By the time I went to attend the session for I'll Make Me a World, which was planning to use the same techniques to tell the story of African Americans in the Arts, it was already becoming difficult to obtain a copy of Eyes on the Prize. Nonetheless I assumed then that it was timeless. Temporarily (this is no longer true) the entire project "was out of print" because of the complexity of the various permissions and copyrights obtained in making the original documentary.
Since then, this great injustice in regard to Eyes on the Prize has been corrected via the PBS American Experience re-release. At the age of 35, I regarded the accompanying text by the journalist Juan Williams with some trepidation because of its reliance upon mainstream sources but it has become, nonetheless, indispensable providing as it does a front row seat on much that had occurred in those historic times.
The meetings I attended in Boston hosted by Blackside in the late 90s was an experience I will never forget, a mini-landmark in my life. I was 47 years old and about one year away from completely my Ph.D. in Cinema Studies at New York University. I was reunited with old friends Carrie Mae Weems, Deborah Willis, Manthia Diawara, Barbara Anne Teer, Amiri and Amina Baraka and I met stunning people I had never met before such as Saul Williams and Robin Kelley.
Both Greg Tate and Kellie Jones were there and I can remember going with them to a concert by Cassandra Wilson, and then kicking it backstage with her and several other lovelies including Cindy Birdsong.
I also met the artist Allan Rohan Crite (deceased now) and got to visit his studio at the invitation of the artist and filmmaker Camille Billops who was leading all who would go there. Crite, an African American painter who had been working steadily in Boston since his youth in the 30s, was very old, a little deaf in one ear but incredibly sweet and outgoing. His house was a large crumbling brownstone of perhaps four or five stories with every inch of wall space, and ceilings covered with images of his own making. He also had wall to wall documents, papers and books. For example, on the top floor he had a full run of National Geographic (one of my favorite publications in those days) from the beginning to the present. A true library it was.
His bathrooms were decorated, wall and ceiling, with his erotic paintings. In the staircases and other key places, his sacred art, much of it sculptural, was hung. In between there was art of every description, little things, big things, lots and lots of great stuff one might have simply slipped right into one's pocket, an insurance nightmare, in other words, from the point of view of allowing the public inside although he clearly intended it to be a museum of his work.
I was familiar with this approach to space from having lived a lifetime with my mother the artist Faith Ringgold. Artists have a great inclination to reshape the spaces they live in to reflect from ceiling to floor their own vision of things. Archive is one word for it. Museum is another word for it, and it is what visual artists do. They fill up the space almost inadvertently by means of their own pace of creation. Then if it is possible, they begin to add to the space, or acquire larger spaces and the process of transformation begins all over again. Like Picasso who bought house after house in the South of France, filled them up with new work, and then moved on to yet another house.
Like many artists are naturally inclined to do, Crite had created the museum of his imagination with his own work and with the hope, I should think, that someone would be able to maintain it after his death. Except that Camille, Carrie and I could clearly see that his present space would probably be unmaintainable after his death because of a failure of infra-structural support: money, taxes and red tape would surely intervene to determine the bottom line in this and every case of any location within the boundaries of a great city.
The first move upon his death I thought would have to be to pack it all up and get it out of that house because the house was falling down around it.
One of the things I remember best about it is that in the midst of all this stuff jammed in a corner under a back window was a bed that I can only describe as a narrow pallet, the kind of thing one imagined the slaves sleeping on only I know what they slept on because I saw one at Monticello so I know this wasn't it. But the point is that only a cot could ever be this narrow and only an artist would think to sleep on such a thing year in and year out in order to save all possible space and time for his art.
And indeed it was precisely where he was still sleeping although he was already nearly 90. Yet his own joy over this arrangement had him seeming like somebody no more than about five years old who could scarcely control his own glee at having hit upon such a satisfying situation. Now that I think of it there was nothing old about him. He was the shell of an old man inside of which was the ageless spirit of someone who had hit upon the perfect arrangment.
Allan Rohan Crite died in 2007 at 97. I wonder if he slept in that corner until the end?
Not sure what became of all that work but I like to think there may have been a museum that came into it all so we'll see. Although he graduated from Harvard apparently, he chose to spend his life in Boston and to center his work on Boston, which means he frequently gets dismissed as a regionalist with a focus on "local color," not such a good thing in the art world hierarchy.
Meanwhile, I'll Make Me a World came and went with some pretty stunning footage of African American artists, including my Mom Faith Ringgold but nothing of me, as I had aleady anticipated. But one of the things I got out of my attendance at the sessions in Boston was copies of two other masterful documentaries made by Blackside: the seven hour treatment of The Great Depression, which is stunning for its multi-racial and politcally astute inclusiveness, and also The War on Poverty.
I continue to view The Great Depression on video whenever I have time in order to acquaint myself with this history. As I am refining my materials on this period in history, I went to find out what there was about this historic series online. I was unpleasantly surprised to find that there is barely a sign that this definitive documentary was ever made.
But why would anybody ever try to lose such magnificent cinematic collaboration? Aside from the fact that the company was started by somebody black and included a lot of black staff? I am eager to have an answer to this question and it is apparently time for this documentary to be rescued the way Eyes on the Prize was (note added mid August for there is no longer a link to Blackside).
In the meanwhile, I would like to venture two possible theories, and perhaps they are both true. The first of these is to make the observation that there is a tendency in the televisual world for output to always seek the lowest common denominator. When anything really wonderful is produced-- unless the immediate popular response to it is positively overwhelming (say like John Lennon or Michael Jackson or Marilyn Monroe or some such phoenix), one can with fair certainty expect that in a very short period of time it is going to be almost impossible to find the product in the marketplace.
The other theory is more paranoid: isn't it just about what you would expect that the true history of the Depression would be the lost history in the very country in which there has been total idiocy and amnesia about how money and markets and poverty work. Speaking of which, Blackside also produced another stunning series--which I also got from them on that occasion-- America's War on Poverty (1995). It is an unusual thing indeed when documentary footage (essentially a montage of photographs, film, music, interviews and other forms of visual and audio evidence) can actually compete with print between covers in terms of communicating the basics of what everybody who cares about the planet needs to know.
As a totally print based person who is nonetheless trying to make the necessary adjustments to the new century, almost every time I would recommend book research over video or Internet research. But in this particular case of the Blackside documentaries, speaking as a lifelong generalist, I would say it is actually safe to use this material as an introduction to what every American needs to know about "The Great Depression" and "The War on Poverty" --two really critical topics for comprehending anything at all about blues people, the African American oral tradition or African American visual culture. Let's face it. You are never going to be able to read all the books you need to read to know all you need to know. So why not cram in a little more with documentary? But the trick is to not waste your time on bad documentary. And as it turns out, that is a trick indeed because there is a lot of very very bad documentary.
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