The Savage Eye: White Docu-Fiction & Black Reality
Wednesday February 17th - 6:30PM
92Y-Tribeca
200 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10013
We continue our recognition of Black History Month with the presentation of Sidney Meyers' masterpiece, The Quiet One. The film is an example of the post-Flaherty genre of "docufiction" (or "docudrama", terms often swapped for one-another); and a successful counterpart to the then contemporary Neorealismo movement in Italy*. To complicate matters even more, it was nominated at the Academy Awards for both "Best Documentary Feature" (1949), as well as "Best Writing: Story and Screenplay" (1950). Credited writers included Meyers, photographer Helen Levitt, painter Janice Loeb, and James Agee. The Quiet One is in a sense a sequel to Agee, Levitt, and Loeb's In the Street, shot in Harlem a year earlier*. The Quiet One is without question the precursor of, and in some cases a direct influence on, such films as Lionel Rogosin's On the Bowery (1956)*; Francois Truffaut's The 400 Blows (1959); Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep (1977/2007); and David Gordon Green's George Washington (2000), to name just a few.
For our purposes, one of the things worth considering is how many of the films on African Americans we've shown have in fact been made by white people (including the entire crew of the The Quiet One). We should think about why that is, and what that means. In D.A. Pennebaker's One PM (1970), we see Jean-Luc Godard* asking this same question of Eldridge Cleaver, and even offering him to buy him a then brand new video camera. Cleaver was disinterested. Though Cleaver would experiment with video in Algeria, it was William Klein who would eventually direct the films. We just got through screening again David Loeb Weiss' No Vietnamese Ever Called Me Nigger, made with an entirely white crew; and our entire Black Panther Party program from this summer was produced by white people. In November at the Maysles Cinema we presented a New Deal-era short film shot in Harlem by the WPA featuring footage of "Voodoo Macbeth"--a staging of the Shakespeare tragedy set in post-colonial Haiti--which was directed by Orson Welles. The definitive documents of Fred Hampton, the Videofreex interview and Howard Alk's The Murder of Fred Hampton (1971), both made by white people.
Another thread of inquiry worth mentioning is the re-examination of the filmographies of both Sidney Meyers* (1906-1969) and Helen Levitt (1913-2009). We'll try our best.
--Goggles! - Weston Woods, 1974, 6 minutes
--The Quiet One - Sidney Meyers, 1949, 65 minutes
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 71 minutes | 16mm Projection
Curated with Cristina Cacioppo.
Prints courtesy of the New York Public Library's Reserve Film and Video Collection, now held at the Library for the Performing Arts.
*The Quiet One screened at the 1949 Venice Film Festival, and was released within months of Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves.
*We had previously screened the silent In the Street with live musical accompaniment in a program of city symphony films, "A City Unfinished."
*Both The Quiet One and On the Bowery were photographed by Richard Bagley.
*Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin dramatized the trial of Bobby Seale in their Vladimir and Rosa (1971), which we screened as "The Youth International on Trial."
*A few of Sidney Meyers' films will be screened March 10-19 at Anthology Film Archives as part of the series, "Leo Hurwitz and the New York School of Documentary Film."