[1968] about the insane aslyum in Massachusetts. These two films stuck with me. They represented a very different approach to filmmaking. There was something gritty and startling about their attempts to capture real life. Also, the notion that there wasn't a large film crew, just two or three individuals out exploring the world and filming it, appealed to me in some vague sense. But I didn't really act on these feelings until close to two years later.
I saw
[1958] for the first time in Paris when I was twenty-two or twenty-three, at the Cinematheque Francaise, and was dazzled by the opening shot where the camera tracks across the Mexican border. I suddenly had a kind of satori about the energy and magic of filmmaking. Later, I realized that by being a documentary filmmaker, I could satisfy my curiosity about the real world
I could indulge in that magical experience of presenting a film to that dark room full of people. It took awhile, but I got a summer job as a television cameraman at a station in Charlotte.
Page 268
I quit that job after about a year and went to Stanford's summer film institute for three weeks of intensive filmmaking. I made a couple of short Super-8 films and a 16mm film there and then, through a producer friend, got a job as an assistant cameraman for
on PBS. Basically all I did was load magazines for the cameraman. The shows weren't very exciting filmically (the Moyers series used a formula that centered on interviews and was heavily narrated), but I learned things and made a living for a year.
After that I applied to MIT's Film Section. MIT didn't have an official graduate program at the time, but Leacock was there, and so was Ed Pincus. Here were these two filmmakers, both doing unscripted, noncommercial documentaries, films that weren't intended to fit into the industry in a particular way. It appealed to me a lot. I ended up in the graduate program the following September.
Students were pretty much on their own. Leacock and Pincus were available, but the curriculum was pretty unstructured. We had access to lightweight portable 16mm rigs. They'd give us these rigs for a month at a time and say, 'Get lost. Come back when you've got a film.' That was terrific. Apparently it isn't that easy at all schools to have access to equipment for extended periods. For this kind of filmmaking you need to be able to shoot for weeks at a time in order to garner the kind of footage that can be shaped into a movie. By the end of two years I'd shot
which was my first real film.
I'd also shot footage for
(which wasn't completed until a good bit later) and for
which was finished after I officially left MIT. I was paranoid about not having access to camera equipmentnot being able to afford itonce I left MIT, so I tried to stockpile footage for as many films as I couldthinking that somehow I could always wangle access to editing tables later.
Like several of your later films,
seems, in part, a portrait of the South. Is that what you had in mind?
I had originally thought that the film might be even more a portrait of the South, or at least of Charlotte, North Carolina, with Charleen as a witty tour guide. I wasn't at all sure that the film would be an intimate portrait of Charleen herself, though I hoped this would be the case. As it turned out, Charleen enjoyed being filmed and was a natural performer, in the sense that even though it was simply her own life that she was performing, she always performed it with a certain elan that was very 'filmable.' She enjoyed revealing her life to me and the camera. As a result, much of the Southern detail simply got eclipsed by Charleen herself.
Still, as you suggest, there is a latent portrait of the South in the filmmaybe more a sketch than a portrait. I think the way interactions
Page 269
between blacks and whites are captured is interesting, with Charleen usually being the catalyst for such interaction. She repeatedly confronts whites with their own racism, and blacks with their sense of separateness from whites. She's always trying to break down the barriers between blacks and whites, but never politically. It's always done for art's sake, for poetry's sake, and out of an intense enthusiasm and love for her fellow human beings. And fortunately, it's nearly always done with a great sense of humor and verve, which prevents her passions from being self-righteously political or moralistic. She draws people out and confronts them with their own racial insecuritiesand in the South, those insecurities are rampant for both blacks and whites.
By the time you made
there was already a group of films made in the early to mid seventiesAmalie Rothschild's
[1974], Martha Coolidge's
[1973], and othersin which the filmmakers took their cameras into their domestic environments. Had you seen these films?
I saw
after I left MIT, but there were other films that were much more important as influences. Jeff Kreines and Joel DeMott had spent time at MIT, and their films were definitely influential for me. And Pincus's later films, especially
[1977] and
[1976], which was a five-year portrait of his marriage.
