How
was conceived might be of interest to you. It started out as two separate films: a portrait of Clyde, the beekeeper; and a study of my brother's last summer at home before going away to medical school. I was thinking of doing a film about the difficulty of getting through four years of medical school. I felt pretty confident that my brother would return to North Carolina and practice with my father, which he eventually did, so there would be a kind of closure to a story filmed over five or six years.
What happened was that the two separate films kept pulling toward each other like magnets, and I found I couldn't separate them. There was this interwovenness between the lives of Clyde and the other black people who worked around our house and my father and my brother, and it seemed artificial to try to pry the two stories apart. Finally I realized I had to make a film that incorporated both elements. When you're making unscripted documentaries, your preconceptions about the film you're going to make usually start out very different from the film you end up making. Then, given that I didn't have much film stock, I decided to give the film a restricted area in which to work: to let it literally be confined to my backyard, with a couple of departures to other places in the neighborhood.
The panorama of relationships between black and white people is interesting. There's the scene where your brother walks into the kitchen and kisses Lucille, the cook, in such a natural, automatic, unconscious way that I'll bet many Yankees fall out of their chairs. Then there's a scene where the new bride surveys the people and says good-bye to them before she leaves on her honeymoon: she seems totally oblivious to this black guy who, on his part, is totally involved in an almost fawningly sentimental way with her leaving. In their juxtaposition these scenes capture the surreality of the social life of the South. Also there's that scene where you visit Lucille's brother (who's had a tracheotomy) in the hospital room. His total discomfort with your presence is obvious.
Yes, he makes a gesture, a sideways move of the hand
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that's right on the border between being a wave, a perfectly innocent good-bye, and a somewhat hostile shooing me away. This man is very depressed, and a lot of the reason he's depressed is because he's oppressed. For whatever reason (I don't know the specifics of his history), his alcoholism, growing up black in the South, never having had anything of material value, starving himselfthat's what Lucille said; he's suffering from malnutritionthat gesture is very important: it's emblematic of an anger that blacks in the South want to express, but can't really because of the mutual interdependency between blacks and whites, and because of an odd sense of family. And I don't mean 'family' in a sentimental way: it's not a good situation. Lucille's brother won't get angry and say, 'Get the hell out of here,' but at the same time he's not going to smile at me. There are plenty of angry blacks in the South now, but you still find his kind of acquiescence, and it makes me feel terrible. Certainly there's the implication in that scene of the cameraman as one more white exploiter of the black class. I am victimizing the helpless, using them as fodder for my film. If I'd cut the shot before the gesture, I would have cleaned the scene up as far as implicating myself in this idea of white domination of blacks. But then it would have been dishonest. Godard's comment about every cut being political is very true.
The interactions between you and the black workers at the country club are loaded. Your talk with the guy you see at the flagpole in front of the Tara-looking country club building encapsulates a lot of Southern history, as does the moment where you film the black guys in the kitchen.
I read some hostility in those black kids. They're seventeen or eighteen years old, washing dishes for the white folks, and they're really banging those dishes around. And then the chef comes in and cocks his head, and asks me if I'm 'filming all the dirt here.' It's one of those amazing little moments. It's fascinating that the black guy who has been sent out to lower the flag walks the entire distance and begins undoing the rope before he looks up and notices the flag isn't there. For me there's a lot of meaning in the downward gaze. Somehow he's learned not to look up very often. That's very sad. And then he walks back to the side of the building, crossing paths with the country club member in the white dinner jacket who goes in the front door . . . pure serendipity. It's the magic of these kinds of films that now and then, with a little patience, you get a very complicated scene, shot very simply, that unfolds like a flower right in front of you.
Your relationship with your father seems very problematic for you. Your father and brother seem very close because your brother is going into medicine and hopes to go into practice with your
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father. Your mother is no longer alive and you seem to feel left out, maybe a little bitter.
It's complex. I myself would not describe my mood as bitterness, but I can see how other people could say that. In fact, I was not unhappy with my station outside the closest family orbital ring. Orbiting is important, and I want a connection to family, but in that film I was exploiting the humor and poignancy of being just one step removed as a result of choosing a life-style that my family couldn't quite relate to.
That opening passage where you talk about the various professions you were thinking about going into is very funny. Clearly, all the professions you list were chosen to infuriate your father's sense of what a good Southern boy ought to do. At the same time, your tone reflects your own awareness of and detachment from your earlier adolescent reaction.
It seemed to be impossible to make that film without making myself a character.
Another thing that comes across in
is a portrait of a certain sort of Southern Scottish Presbyterian life. You, your father, and your brother reveal an apparent inability, or a refusal, to really talk with each other about what's happening in your lives. There's a strange conversation with your brother at the end, when you ask him what he knows about your mother's death. It's a moment that prefigures
