Billy Woodberry: "The black experience, in some ways, is particular, but in that is also universal" Interview by Lus Mendona

| March 2014 | At the portuguese movie website pala de Walsh: www.apaladewalsh.com If you are talking about abandonment, loneliness and social uprooting in a child's life in The Pocketbook, in Bless Their Little Hearts you give us a very honest and tender look on the everyday life of a working class family. From a life of delinquency and orphan hood in the streets to a life unfolded from the core of the family's nest. Was this transition thought out? Were you planning this thematic evolution? Well, it sort of makes sense in a way, because even in The Pocketbook I emphasized the fact that the woman is a worker. So I was sort of committed to trying to put these people in movies. When we came up with this story, it made sense. It was a kind of continuation because of the subject and because of whatever I learnt in the process of doing the earlier short film. But it's the problems of this class of people, this kind of people that interested me. Even my professor warned me that you cant make this kind of movie now. Because it is a kind of old fashioned movie? Yes, and movies are in colour now, have this and that. It was not done to be strikingly retrograde. It was more common then you could have good black and white stock and the labs were still good. As a matter of fact, the black and white stock was cheaper than colour at that time; colour was more expensive and more difficult to deal with. Black and white was kind of simple. You keep the customs simple and you don't have a lot of problems. That was the appeal. Also, that film was easy because my friend knew the stock. He had shot a lot of it. So he was very familiar and he thought it was very rich and you could get a lot out of it. So it was easy to choose the black and white negative stock to do it.

I'm saying this because I'm thinking if you restore The Quiet One [by Sidney Meyers and Helen Levitt, to whom Billy Woodberry dedicated his movie] and do a double bill with The Pocketbook they will feel almost as two contemporary movies. One problem with The Pocketbook is that it was shot on reversal stock, so it has a high contrast ratio. And maybe the stock then was panchromatic stock, but it was recent and they shot that movie on 16mm and then they blew it up to 35mm. And it was one of the first done like that. It won a big prize in Venice. It was recognized in its time. It was special and it gave courage to Cassavetes and to the others. They knew that world. But there used to be a film industry in New York that made quite different films from what they made when they moved to Hollywood. The independent people, the people who insisted on making in New York, they have their own aesthetic, their own approach to the city. It makes sense. I always liked those films. The more radical people and the more experimental people of the thirties and forties remained in New York. Leo Hurwitz, all those people, Frontier Film people... Speaking of photographers, Paul Strand. cameramen, were an appeal. I also find in Sidney Meyers' movie the same prudence in approaching racial and social issues. In a movie like Bless Their Little Hearts the main focus seems to be on an individual conflict. The black child or the black man struggles mainly with himself than with the vicious prejudices of "white society". Do you agree with the idea that simply denouncing racial discrimination in American society would be just inverting an inscribed formula? In other words, that would end up being another form of racism? Not completely. In my own case, they make jokes about skin coloured, but the main character never attributes his situation, his condition to racism or to whites. He never declares himself or bemoans his existence as a black man, because it is obvious that he is. On a macro level, the larger level, his condition is determined by forces beyond his ability to explain, it's the larger economy that makes people redundant. That is a generalized class condition that is nearly universal in all advanced capitalist societies. All societies where you have capitalist relations of production are bond to have a 2 All those people, who started in the twenties, as

certain amount of people that are in reserve. These people have a complex kind of reality: how long will they remain in that state? What will happen if they remain too long? So is that over arching understanding of it. And it just so happens that he is a worker from a group with a certain history, but he is a worker, a universal man in that sense. That was important to assert, as opposed to simply attributing all that happens to a man to racial prejudice. That is an aspect, but people can raise these questions themselves. I was thinking of a director you talked a lot yesterday, Ousmane Sembene, mainly his movie Black Girl, and I'm thinking of another movie, Lionel Rogosin's Come Back, Africa. These are two very strong and engaged movies against racism. What's your relation with these two approaches? Those are movies that I know. The Sembene movie is also a movie against what colonialism imposed in Africa and what African man of colonialism imposes on the people and how the people have to fight through the estrangement and alienation that that imposes. And then what happens between them. The way that he asserts the cultural validity of Africa in that situation is important also. All of the French characters, imprisoned by the relations, the prejudice, but also their position in the hierarchy of things - they can't see the other person, really... So I certainly know that is valid and important. The Lionel Rogosin movie, again, is a really complicated thing, because apartheid was a specific system. He was able to make a movie clandestinely that talked about what that imposed on the people, in terms of the restrictions of the movement, of just simply to exist and to move freely in their own society. And also, what enters the life of the people among themselves, the violence, but also the beauty, the ingenuity, the humour. But it is a precious film. I include that with those New York people, Shadows and all the rest. But maybe it belongs partly to Africa, because of the collaboration of the South African people in that film.

Previously, he made On the Bowery. Yes, On the Bowery. He certainly was one of the inventors of New American Cinema. He was a theatre owner also; he projected films, foreign films. 3

Moving back to the discourse about racism, were you able to do a movie like Black Girl? Because I believe your movies are more universal. It's more an inner conflict; it's more man versus society than society versus man. Maybe. But my colleagues and friends in school a lot of them were engaged with the discourse and politics of the influence of the black power movement, which was vital and important for all of us, and also with the assertion of black beauty, intelligence and value. I was a part of that, I absorbed that and I understood that. But then what we chose to make movies about and from what position? Some of them were quite pan-Africanists and they fully engaged with discourses about Africa. We have a beautiful movie , Mr. Augusto [M. Seabra] mentioned last night: Harvest 3000 Years, by Haile Gerima. He made a beautiful movie about a woman, a welfare recipient with a child and her husband called Bush Mama. It is an important and iconic film. And preferred by many. My colleague Larry Clark and another colleague Alile Sharon Larkin made films that link to the black American situation and what was happening in Angola. The little kid writes MPLA because the father went to work with the MPLA. There are a lot of them who address this and some address more directly the problems of racism and racial prejudice. How did they react to your movies or Charles Burnett's movies? They were wise and generous enough to respect differences within the group. They can admire and respect the legitimacy and also they know that Charles Burnett speaks the truth; that he knows and even if it is different from that they know and believe ,it makes them reconsider what they know. So, no, they liked the movies, they were the first to like the movies sometimes. Even though it is not the movies they make, it's not their temperament, it's not their passion, and its not their interest. They make films about women who need to assert themselves, their preference, their identity, their voice. We cohabitated with all of these things together. That is the richness of the experience. I'm asking this because it seems that you are giving several steps forward. Perhaps the political context of that time said that you should do more radical 4

and political statements in film, but you were doing more complex and universal movies. Maybe I had a good story from a sensitive and intelligent man and we had the interest in doing the kind of film we could. The black experience, in some ways, is particular, but in that is also universal. I would argue the same about Black Girl. Even if that story were set among Vietnamese or some other place, people would have a similar experience of being alienated, not being understood and having to deal with the power residing in another place. Those are universal things. The other thing is, maybe, some writers in Afro-American traditional - I'm thinking of people like Ralph Ellison - have argued that, in fact, the aesthetic of the blues is a way to address the existential problems of life. It's similar to higher philosophical discourses , told in a very simple language, in its poetic and own musical way. It was not academic, but it was acknowledging and offering that. If people experience as such then we are lucky, right? But the influences come from a lot of different things. You are trying to understand what others have done, how others have addressed these experience and realities, and how best to reach a kind of truth about this. Brecht and all of those, other artist and thinkers... But it comes from some place. It comes from the American culture through the African-American people. You mentioned Brecht. I was thinking of the moment of Bless Their Little Hearts when the wife tells her husband to tell the truth before her and before god. When she says "before god" I believe she addressed the camera, as in a way putting us inside that discussion. From there on, I felt that the spectator was summoned and it was impossible to escape from that scene. What is the relationship you want to entail with the spectator? One interesting thing to know is that scene is three figures: the man, the woman, and the camera. The cameraman, Charles Burnett, has the camera on his shoulder. He never saw this scene before. The scene is not rehearsed. The scene is the second take complete, except you cut off the tale and the head of the shot. But he never saw that complete action before and he needs always to be in the right place to make it meaningful for you, to give you an image and a sound at that - and the feeling of that. He needs to find the correct distance to have it play up. So that's what happens. And if 5

he goes to her at a moment is because it feels right and it sounds right to be there. We took all the furniture out, we empty the kitchen and it becomes a space for her. They create and utilize the space. He creates with the frame the space that you see, the experience you see. He never saw it before, because we started "the guy grabs the woman, it stops". "You can't grab her". That's what happens when you do overt things, like you use physical force, you stop discussion, you stop exchange, and you stop everything. I have no scene, so you need to do something else. He needs to come up with other things than grabbing her. You have to sustain that all the way through. So that's what happens. And if that happens to be that she looks at the camera when she says "God", she's not even aware of that. He makes the scene. The script is a page that says "she feels that this is happening, she knows that something is wrong, she tells this, she let's him know that she knows this, he tries do deny it, he tries to argue against her, he tries to explain in a way" It's all he had, but the dialogue they carried it. When the scene starts she is peeling the apple with the knife, he goes to the stove. You have the knife, fire, you have all kind of possibilities, but they move away from it. You said that you made your movies with "little money but a lot of freedom". Can we say this is a condition for all filmmaking: less money means more freedom? No, I don't recommend it. As a matter of fact, a man once wrote that he hopes "they wont be spoiled by getting too much money". But we are talking about great movies that were made with almost no money. No, we had some money. It's necessary to have the minimum; to have the resources you need. The thing is: if you don't have money, in fact what you do is that you exploit yourself. The actual cost is greater than the amount of money you spend, because the people were not paid to act in this movie. You can't expect to do that. But you do have freedom, because nobody cares really about what you are doing. They don't invest a great deal of money and some producer is coming... That's not the condition that most people face, but if you have that condition you have to take the

opportunity that you have and you have to realize you're a free person. Your limitation is what you have. If you have the equipment, people, talent, you're fine. Also if you don't have any money and you are not in the system, I see in some cases of the American independent cinema that it is very difficult to have a career and to do a lot of movies. Morris Engel made three movies, Sidney Meyers made few movies. And they are movies that suggest - in the way people of your generation value them that they could continue. "Oh, why couldn't you continue?" But at the time the reception of the movie was restricted by the limitations and the vision of the people who control movies. There was no institutional support; there was no example even of what we have from around the world. People weren't lobbing and campaigning: "The film needs support, it is an important cultural thing". You felt that: you wanted to do more and didn't have the support? No. I had a movie fall through after this movie [Bless Their Little Hearts]. I needed to come out with another movie. I had a project. I had a good book by an AfricanAmerican writer. I had the cooperation of then fairly big agency and public television. I had the support of the big branding institution in the public television. But they couldn't find foreign partners; they couldn't find all of the money that was required to make the movie. It was not a movie that I could say "Oh, I could make it for that much", because it was a movie they were risking money, so they need to know that you have the adequate amount to deliver the movie and I have to have a crew, I have to pay the cast and I have some decision. I always insisted that I wanted to work with the people that I worked with and that I knew. A lot of colleagues faced that. But then that movie didn't happen because the agency broke. After a point, in the early nineties, I sort became depressed, didn't acknowledge it and I set it aside. Then I decided: "Ok, I don't want to pursue that, I don't want to go through that again. So, I need to find a way to work". Actually teaching in the photo program I discovered something watching my photographer friends many of whom were also writers, the most accomplished one was Allan Sekula. I found he and my other colleagues, inspiring a because they could devise the projects for themselves and they would have a concept, 7

an idea, and sometimes they had notes for their work, but they would shoot. So I decided: "I like making moving images, these toys, this Hi 8 and this small videoformat thing... I'm going start from zero, I'm going start to make things with that and I make them for myself, for my own reasons". I started doing that. Then I got a commission with Allan to make a video. I made a video project about the building of Frank Gehry Disney Concert Hall. It is for exhibition, it's a projection. So I did that and then I decided I have a film I wanted to make about a poet of the beat era, he was a radical figure in San Francisco named Bob Kaufman. I learnt that in his early life he had been a labour organizer, a sailor, he was blacklisted, he couldn't sail anymore. Then he took his political understanding and approach... and he was always interested in bebop music and surrealism. He re-emerges in 1958 as a poet. He wrote some three books in his entire life. He became a poet, a quite radical and interesting poet. This guy died some years ago, 1986. I decided I wanted to try to make a film about him, so people can discover him. I'm finishing the editing on that and that is my way of coming back. Some of my students and other people have said: "You should make another film". I think when Charles [Burnett] is back from working in Algeria, we will talk and see if there is something we want to do or we can do. We'll start to talk, but maybe I'll try another thing before. Talking about "starting again", since it was restored and released on DVD, Killer of Sheep and the whole work of Burnett conquered the attention of new cinephiles, being one of the most incredible resurrections in recent movie history. Why do you think it took so much time to be acquainted as one of the most daring works in the history of American cinema? I think because of the culture and the values and the power of the American commercial cinema. And because of the kind of film that it is... even though the leading critics acknowledge that Burnett is one of the most gifted and original creators of film in the United States. Periodically there are articles in major publications that state that. He has this McArthur Genius Grant and he has a lot of awards. People hadn't had the opportunity, because the film hadn't had a release. A whole generation of enthusiasts of cinema hadn't had the chance to know the film and when they had the chance to know the film it spoke to them. They found useful things, inspiration in it. It surprised many, many people. So that was how it happened. People had been 8

arguing it was important and good since it was made, but when you make it outside the system and against the system... not because he set down and said "Oh, I'm against the system!", but because he had something original do say. That wasn't accepted from him and when he comes from. As I said, critics, older critics, like mister Augusto [M. Seabra] and others knew the film. So when it arrived they could have a dialogue with the youngsters. People responded phenomenally. It's important you are talking about critics and scholars, because one my question regards Kent MacKenzies' The Exiles, which, for instance, was acknowledged by Charles Burnett as one of the major works of American independent cinema. You worked with Thom Andersen in the movie documentary Red Hollywood doing its voice over narration. Some give the whole credits for the resurrection o The Exiles for its appearance in Andersen's documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself, where your name is not forgotten. Now asking your opinion as a film scholar, can we say that this is one of the roles of critics, cinephiles or film historians: to repair history's missing links? It has been the case in creating Los Angeles Plays Itself. That film became known and became desired to know by people all over the world. Another man who teaches in University of Southern California, David James, has been writing a kind of counter-history to cinema. He has a book, Allegories of Cinema, and he has a book on Jonas Mekas. I think he edited Jonas Mekas' writings. He is the man who decided: "Ok, where do we look for the missing links in cinema beyond the scholarship of the last forty years?" He started to investigate the archives of the University of the Southern California of the student's films. Many other archives too. He has written a lot about cinema in Los Angeles and the avant-garde from the time of Vorkapi. He was one of the principle people discovering Kent MacKenzie's work. He and Thom simultaneously discovered it. People who love cinema responded to this revision. Maybe we are going through a necessary and strange period. There is more and more restorations, archivist people through out the world. This is the moment we are in. I don't how long it will last. I think it is necessary to last forever: the fight against time! So, I think Thom played a role because the film was shown. People discovered not only his film and thesis but they discovered another film.

Thom Andersen said in an interview: "I hope Billy Woodberrys Bless Their Little Hearts will also get some kind of DVD release at least. I think its as deserving as the others. Some people regard Bless Their Little Hearts as a greater film than Killer of Sheep. I think its certainly in the same league, lets say." Do you agree that your movies are part of this missing history of cinema? That is for others to decide. But people are generous with the film. They showed it and kept it alive. It is supposed to have a release. It is preserved and was restored. At least they can consider it and decide for themselves. In other twenty years we will know if people find anything of interest in it. Is it scheduled the re-release of your movie in DVD and in theatres? Yes, it has the same distributor [of The Exiles, Killer of Sheep and Rogosin's films]: Milestone. They are clearing the music and preparing. When they are ready they'll do the release.

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