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<\/a>June 12, 2017<\/p><\/div>\n
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<\/p>\n by Josslyn Luckett<\/span><\/strong> <\/p>\n We hear a familiar sound,<\/strong><\/span> In his documentary feature And When I Die, I Won\u2019t Stay Dead<\/em> (2015), Texas-born, UCLA-trained filmmaker Billy Woodberry does for the poet Bob Kaufman precisely the kind of excavation work Alice Walker must have had in mind when she charged: \u201cA people do not throw their geniuses away. And if they are thrown away, it is our duty as artists and witnesses for the future to collect them again\u2026if necessary, bone by bone.\u201d2<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n As early as 1972, black feminist literary critic Barbara Christian attempted to run interference on the forgetting or disposal of Kaufman. In an essay for Black World<\/em>, \u201cWhatever Happened to Bob Kaufman?\u201d she alerted readers that Kaufman was \u201cstill alive\u201d and \u201cneed not be praised after his body is gone and only his poetry remains.\u201d3<\/sup> By 1996, marking the posthumous release of Kaufman\u2019s Cranial Guitar<\/em> (along with the debut of Paul Beatty\u2019s White Boy Shuffle<\/em>, whose poet protagonist bears the surname Kaufman), Greg Tate lamented: \u201cBob Kaufman been<\/em> dead (since 1986) and is unlikely to turn up on any Dead Poet Society\u2019s reading list this side of the Nuyorican Poet\u2019s Caf\u00e9. While he was here, though, he damn near invented the Beat poetry scene on the West Coast. Since he\u2019s rarely credited for this or for having even lived, you know he must have been a black man.\u201d4<\/sup> Though solitude, suicide, and death march through Kaufman\u2019s work, like the dirge of so many street funerals in his native New Orleans, Woodberry and his film now take their place in the dedicated second line of black writers and scholars, and the multitude of artists and witnesses who refuse to let Kaufman \u201cstay dead.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n And When I Die, I Won\u2019t Stay Dead<\/em> had its world premiere in the fall of 2015 at the Doclisboa Festival, where it won the RTP Award for \u201cBest Investigation Documentary.\u201d This is the second film by Woodberry to win festival prizes in Europe; the first, his narrative feature Bless Their Little Hearts<\/em> (1983), won the Berlin Film Festival\u2019s Otto Dibelius Film award at the time of its debut. With three decades between the two films, one could equally wonder, \u201cWhatever Happened to Billy Woodberry?\u201d In fact, on the winter night when the Scribe Video Center and the Philadelphia Film Society hosted Woodberry for a screening of the two features\u2014preceded by Woodberry\u2019s latest short, a poetic bow to Ousmane Semb\u00e8ne, Marseille apr\u00e8s la guerre<\/em> (Marseille After the War<\/em>, 2016)\u2014I overheard two hipster millennials wondering as much. They had come because they were eager to see \u201cthat film that was sampled\u201d (did they really say sampled?) in Thom Andersen\u2019s Los Angeles Plays Itself\u00a0<\/em>(2003).<\/span><\/p>\n Woodberry\u2019s Bless Their Little Hearts<\/em>, Charles Burnett\u2019s Killer of Sheep<\/em> (1977), and Haile Gerima\u2019s Bush Mama<\/em> (1975) dominate the final section of Andersen\u2019s video essay on the history of Los Angeles as rescued in films. Jacqueline Stewart, co-curator of the UCLA Film and Television Archive\u2019s exhibition \u201cL.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema\u201d (2011), suggests that Andersen\u2019s use of these \u201clandmark L.A. Rebellion features\u201d offers \u201clong overdue, materially grounded correctives to the distortions and mythologies presented in so many white-authored cinematic representations of the city, particularly those generated by Hollywood.\u201d5<\/sup> Stewart and her partners, Allyson Field and Jan-Christopher Horak, along with filmmakers like Andersen and earlier waves of cultural critics such as Toni Cade Bambara, Ntongela Masilela, and Clyde Taylor, insist that reel\/real black Los Angeles will never be dead as long as the early works by this group of UCLA-trained filmmakers remain available. And it is important to note that Woodberry\u2019s recent projects are just two of many new projects by \u201crebellion\u201d filmmakers: Barbara McCullough, Julie Dash, and Zeinabu irene Davis all have recently completed projects making the festival rounds in the last two years.6<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n Billy Woodberry at the Viennale in 2015.<\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/div>\n The unfolding of Billy Woodberry\u2019s career\u2014both his own new work and the recent critical revaluations of his classic work, such as the naming of Bless Their Little Hearts<\/em> to the National Film Registry in 2013\u2014makes words like \u201crebellion\u201d or \u201crevival\u201d only marginally useful. Any research into the full range of his film work, including his multiple roles as film actor, film narrator, video installation artist, and film history and production professor at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) since 1989, reveals a Woodberry who might be more properly termed an underground \u201crenaissance\u201d man than a rebel.7<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n In the words of Cornel West, Woodberry might also be thought of as \u201ca bluesman in the life of the mind, a jazzman in the world of cinematic ideas.\u201d8<\/sup>From Archie Shepp and Buddy Guy on the soundtrack of Bless Their Little Hearts<\/em> to Billie Holiday, Irene Aebi, and Steve Lacy featured in And When I Die<\/em>to, most recently, Josephine Baker and Moussu T e lei Jovents as the sonic landscape for Marseille apr\u00e8s la guerre<\/em>, jazz and blues, yes, are everywhere in Woodberry. But they are not the exclusive musical terrain: spirituals, folk music, art songs, and all manner of avant-garde music live there, too. The life of the Afro-diasporic literary mind lives in his films as well, starting with The Pocketbook<\/em>, his 1980 short film adaptation of Langston Hughes\u2019s story \u201cThank you, Ma\u2019am,\u201d and continuing throughout Kaufman\u2019s wide-ranging canon. The latest example is the contemplative collage of Marseille<\/em>, which he uses to imagine the time, space, and struggle that informed Semb\u00e8ne\u2019s first novel, Le docker noir<\/em> (Black Docker<\/em>, 1956). Toni Cade Bambara did say back in 1993 that one of the chief tasks of the \u201cBlack insurgent\u201d filmmakers from UCLA would be the recovery of \u201cour own suppressed bodies of literature, lore and history,\u201d and Woodberry has remained committed to telling this history, imagined and lived, through a subaltern lens.9<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n This article is based on my expansive conversation with Woodberry, held in the middle of his two-day trip to Philadelphia and bookended by the screenings at the Philadelphia Film Society and his masterclass, \u201cCreative Approaches to Documentary Filmmaking,\u201d at the Scribe Video Center. He seemed at times more interested in discussing the history of African American labor organizing than his two most recent films (though to be fair, the National Maritime Union archives were central to the research of both). He shared detailed reflections of his film school days, including mention of one of the underexplored figures of the UCLA group, Elyseo Taylor, the sole black professor at the film school, recruited by former Theater Arts chair Colin Young to help establish the Ethno-Communications Program. This affirmative action initiative brought in not only key \u201crebellion\u201d members but also a wider group of Asian American, Chicana\/o, and Native American students that, as Renee Tajima-Pena reminds us, \u201cchanged the color of independent filmmaking.\u201d10<\/sup> Whether discussing his time as a student at UCLA or as faculty at CalArts, it\u2019s clear that the relationships he cultivated at both institutions have had a tremendous impact on his creative practices as well as his deep affection for the Los Angeles that plays itself throughout so much of their work. I offer my own deep thanks to Hye-Jung Park and Louis Massiah at Scribe<\/a> for generously creating the context for such a rich exchange to take place.<\/span><\/p>\n Josslyn Luckett: The opportunity to see all three of your films, Bless Their Little Hearts<\/em>, And When I Die, I Won\u2019t Stay Dead<\/em>, and Marseille apr\u00e8s la guerre<\/em>, back to back last night made me think a lot about the three subjects of these films\u2014that is, along with Bob Kaufman and Ousmane Semb\u00e8ne, I include Charlie Banks, your fictional protagonist in Bless<\/em>. Talk to me about those three men, because they share a lot. But Charlie doesn\u2019t have a poem or a guitar or a camera. And that\u2019s in some ways what\u2019s most devastating.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n Billy Woodberry: Yeah. (Charlie) has\u2026he\u2019s not a writer or artist or whatever, but he has an inner life and a spiritual idea. He has his way of being in the world. He\u2019s expressive and articulate in his own way. I think he has that. Also, that actor (Nate Hardman), his talent, his artistry is what gives the illusion. It gives him meaning and the sense of this character. And her\u2014and the children\u2014his playing with her, his acting with her and with them\u2026he gives Charlie meaning.<\/span><\/p>\n Billy Woodberry conducting a master class at Scribe Video Center in Philadelphia.<\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/div>\n Luckett: I want to continue with Bless Their Little Hearts<\/em> for a bit. Can you tell me about that scene in the kitchen between husband and wife, played by Hardman and Kaycee Moore? I wondered how much you let them loose.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n Woodberry: Charles Burnett [the screenwriter] wrote a whole page of description about that confrontation, that encounter with them, but he just wrote the description. Where they are, what she knows, what he knows, what he might attempt to do to explain, and what she will perhaps\u2026how she will respond. But he didn\u2019t write the dialogue. He just wrote that. And with that, they created the dialogue, they created the scene.<\/span><\/p>\n Luckett: It\u2019s really something to watch that scene right now after having just revisited Fences through Denzel Washington\u2019s recent film adaptation [2016] of August Wilson\u2019s play. There\u2019s a lot of resonance. The play was first staged in 1983, the same year as your Bless Their Little Hearts<\/em>.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n Woodberry: With language and with action, he was thinking of similar things.<\/span><\/p>\n Luckett: Changing gears, let\u2019s talk about two of your new subjects, Bob Kaufman and Ousmane Semb\u00e8ne. They inhabit very different places, but they are surprisingly similar figures.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n Woodberry: Maybe because they were artists\u2026who when they were younger were involved in labor and organizing and politics. Had to do with ports and waterfront, with travel. And they were sort of militants involved in trade unions, communist party politics. And also, maybe because they were self-educated, partly, or they found the possibility of studying in nontraditional contexts. They didn\u2019t go to university.11<\/sup> Kaufman said he tried to go to the New School a couple of years, in 1948 or something. But it was different\u2026the National Maritime Union (NMU), apparently, they had educational programs\u2026A man named Leo Huberman who with Paul Sweezy created Monthly Review Press\u2026was a teacher in their union. Apparently, their program was so good, you have to find out for sure, Columbia Teachers College used to send people to observe them.12<\/sup> But also, you know, because sailors are at sea a lot, they have an historical tradition of reading [and] literacy. And Kaufman had the double benefit that his mother was a reader and was a trained teacher. When she could no longer teach in schools, she taught her children, so all of them read and write.<\/span><\/p>\n Luckett: Though we know from your film, and from his poetry, that Kaufman is extremely well read and was, as you just said, the son of an educator, he is at the same time consistently labeled a \u201cstreet poet.\u201d How do you explain that?<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n Woodberry: In some ways, it\u2019s true. As Jack Hirschman says, Kaufman was a man of the\/ in the world and he was a man of the street. But people think that that only means people who hang in the street \u2019cause they don\u2019t have anything else to do. It can mean other things. Maybe he\u2019s pleased with that. To master the street and the encounters and the dimensions of the thing could mean something other than being a derelict or hustler or whatever. It can mean more than that. You could read what Baudelaire says about the street and about the way one encounters life in the city and all of the possibilities of what happens in the street. Even now when they talk about the \u201cArab street,\u201d what it means is: you in the corridors of power, you may have one understanding, but the people on the ground, the people of the street have a different understanding and you should be concerned about how it will play. And that\u2019s true here. I mean we just had this recent election\u2026And then on January 21st, the day after the inauguration, and then the following weekend when they proposed the ban, they saw people take to the street. The street is a place where people manifest their protest, their agreement, approval or disapproval.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nDigging and Bluing<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n
with Billy Woodberry<\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n
\nfrom Film Quarterly Summer 2017,
\nVolume 70, Number 4<\/a><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n
\nJazz, scratching, digging, bluing, swinging jazz,<\/strong><\/span>
\nAnd we listen<\/strong><\/span>
\nAnd we feel<\/strong><\/span>
\nAnd live.<\/strong><\/span>
\n\u00a0\u2013Bob Kaufman1<\/sup><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<\/a><\/a>