Mapping Media Making Projects: a Few Good Examples
Five Media-Makers of Color Speak Out, Part II
As part of our series for the Collective Wisdom field study, we present an excerpt from a conversation between Juanita Anderson, Maria Agui Carter, Thomas Allen Harris, Maori Karmael Holmes, and Michèle Stephenson.
Read Part I, Part III , Part IV, and Part V here.
Juanita: I want to build on Maria’s comment about anthropology. If you think about the work of Europeans, l think of visual anthropologists like Jean Rouch whose ethnographic filmmaking in African societies during the 1940s and ’50s was often in direct service to colonial interests. A prime example was Les Maitres Fous, in which his narrative framing of Hauka spiritual practices in Ghana were reported to have so incensed African peoples that in some respects he is credited with giving rise to the African cinema movement, which rejected and countered the European gaze on African societies. Starting from the work of Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène, whose pioneering 1963 film Borom Saret is considered to be the first film by an African filmmaker to be made on African soil, African filmmakers, at least in the West African countries that I have visited, have always engaged communities in the making of their films. And not just as actors, but as production crew members, community advisors, production designers, and the like. So, there are international models that demonstrate people of color calling upon our communities and our families to make media.
Thomas: Yes, and Juanita, I’d like to build on your excellent point about public television. You also had innovative shows that were inviting community into the studio such as Ellis Haizlip’s Soul!, which gave voice to the burgeoning Black Arts Movement in the late ’60s and early ’70s. I worked closely with Ellis when he was at the Schomburg Center and he made it his mission to mentor the generations of cultural producers that came after him. Like Ellis, I first began my media career and my training at WNET in the late ’80s. My tenure there coincided with the movement around responding to the HIV/AIDS epidemic, particularly as it intersected with the communities of color, queers, and artists. Highlighting these communities became a focus and, because I was in public media, I was able to incorporate these voices within my shows years before commercial television would do so.
I think it’s also important to acknowledge the roles that the newsreels of the 1960s played on shaping this landscape as well. Third World Newsreel (TWN), is where I actually took my first class. Cara Mertes was also in that class. In addition to educating generations of filmmakers, TWN’s mission is to create and empower community through media as well as building and maintaining archives of and by communities of color and other disenfranchised communities. Christine Choi (co-director of Who Killed Vincent Chin) was one of the instructors. Pearl Bowser was another. Both Bowser and Michelle Materre were instrumental in making media by filmmakers of color accessible to audiences and building audience support for projects before the idea of crowdfunding became a thing. They and TWN were especially helpful in facilitating connections and collaborations between diasporic filmmakers and diasporic communities.
Maori: One of the examples that I can think of is a Scribe Video Center in Philadelphia, which has two projects that I think are good examples. One of the projects is the Precious Places Community History Project. This project is a place-based oral history program that teams neighborhood groups with experienced filmmakers and humanities consultants to make locally-authored documentaries that explore the political and cultural history of public spaces in their neighborhoods. Another [project] is called Community Visions, which is a free ten-month video production program for members of community groups, wherein participants learn to produce short documentaries about issues of importance to their constituencies. What these projects have in common is that a community organization or an agent within a neighborhood applies to this program and then gets paired with one or two filmmakers to make work about themselves. I’m still sort of learning about the term co-creation but these examples are the opposite of the traditional filmmaker going out in search of community. Instead, the community is inviting in the media maker and both parties are creating the project together. This is an important distinction.
Thomas: There is a tradition of filmmakers working in service of their communities and deeply collaborating with communities as an essential part of the creative process. I am particularly thinking about the history of black independent cinema in this country. For instance, the LA Rebellion filmmaking school with Julie Dash, Haile Gerima, Billy Woodbury, Sharon Larkin, and Charles Burnett were focused on working within their Los Angeles communities to co-create projects. Fortunately, this has recently been documented in the book L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema, edited by Allyson Field, Jan-Christopher Horak, and Jacqueline Najuma Stewart, as well as Zienabu Irene Davis’s film, Spirits of Rebellion: Black Cinema from UCLA. Both of these texts also speak of the influence of UCLA Professor Teshome Gabriel and his theory of a Third Cinema — a cinema that is revolutionary in politics as well as in form. Like the LA Rebellion filmmakers, Gabriel’s work provided me with a blueprint to claim the freedom to sidestep traditional styles of filmmaking and specific categories such as documentary or experimental.
When I look back on my media work of the last three decades, the central focus of the work has been, and continues to be, on co-creation with my various communities — whether it’s handing over super 8mm cameras to black Brazilians in Salvador da Bahia, or returning my late stepfather’s photo album to South Africa to inspire youth to engage with their history, or bringing Americans together to see our community through public sharing of our family photographs. As an artist, I claim the space to activate and invite communities on a journey to tell their stories.
Juanita: Yes, I also think that you have to look at the long history of Scribe, which Maori mentioned. Since its founding in 1982, Scribe Video Center in Philadelphia has been engaging community in media workshops so that the power rests within the communities that we’re describing — training community members in camera skills, editing skills, sound recording skills. So it’s not just some random filmmaker coming in to do this work.
This is an important model. Historically, I think we also go back to people like William Greaves and St. Clair Bourne, who were both with the original Black Journal as well as independent documentary filmmakers. We look on the West Coast and the work that the late Lonnie Ding did in San Francisco in advocating for the voices of the Asian-American community. And this is happening in the ’60s as well.
I mean, I think about the work of Henry Hampton and Blackside Inc., which in many ways codified the notion of living witnesses as integral to historical documentary storytelling. Blackside’s Eyes on the Prize also codified the concept of “production schools” that brought independent filmmakers from different backgrounds together with both scholars and community participants in the planning of the series. Before this, the public television community, far too often considered “good history” as that which was told principally through the voices of scholars, policy makers, and narrators. Acknowledging and giving voice to the people who lived this history as experts in their own right became a whole new way of approaching and changing the narrative that we have to credit Henry Hampton for. So, this is not new and we can keep going.
Michèle: Another, relatively recent example, is the Blackout For Human Rights collective, which emerged after the uprisings in Ferguson. Ryan Coogler brought together a collective of artists, activists, and filmmakers across the country to organize artistic events that included music performances, poetry reading, film screenings to highlight the plight of state-sponsored violence against black bodies in the United States. These events continue to take place annually on Black Friday and MLK Day.
Also, it’s important to talk about the ways we have co-created and collaborated among ourselves. Filmmaker St. Clair Bourne spearheaded the founding of the Black Documentary Collective. The original mission of the BDC was to support each other’s work, share information and in many cases co-create film pieces that we would later take on the black film festival circuit across the globe and grassroots screenings. The first five to six years of the BDC were truly active in terms of the creative support we gave each other. Sometimes it’s not necessarily about the task of co-creating a particular piece of work but creating community and spaces where we can simply support each other’s work, whether it is screening rough cuts or other kinds of support.
These initiatives we’re discussing and so many others are truly horizontal in terms of approach, bringing together people with varying skill sets to express resistance, and are often born out of an urgent political moment that leads to spontaneous collective action. I think that the frustration and feeling of erasure stems from not properly acknowledging the co-creation work happening in our communities for centuries in some way or another.
Thomas: I just want to re-emphasize that filmmakers engaged in these kinds of movements and co-creation processes have yet to be recognized within academic institutions or even in the field. These filmmakers of color who’ve prioritized a co-creation framework are often placed in a subgroup within mainstream media.
Case in point is William Greaves, who has foregrounded co-creation as an essential part of his practice. I remember going to a celebration for Bill a few years before his death and speaking to a white Academy Award-winning filmmaker after the event who commented how surprised she was to have never heard of him, and wondered why there had been no mention of him in grad school. Yet, this same filmmaker was adamantly resistant to the idea that racism could possibly be a cause for this erasure.
So, as we talk about recognizing the co-creation work of racialized media makers, past and present, we also have to talk about what is being legitimized, documented, and studied within the canon. We have to make sure that while we’re centralizing the histories and work being done in particular communities, we’re not marginalizing this work. It’s about rewriting and telling a more complete version of the history of this work. For me, that is really important. I observe that my students are hungry for exposure to this work. Even today, it’s still so rare that they get an opportunity to see, discuss, reflect and respond to it.
This article is part of Collective Wisdom, an Immerse series created in collaboration with Co-Creation Studio at MIT Open Documentary Lab. Immerse’s series features excerpts from MIT Open Documentary Lab’s larger field study — Collective Wisdom: Co-Creating Media within Communities, across Disciplines and with Algorithms — as well as bonus interviews and exclusive content.
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