Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
The Freedom of Fiction
2k Plays1 year ago
"Blackness is a lie, but it’s a true lie." - RaMell Ross.
The boundaries between fiction and nonfiction have never been stable, neutral, or benign. What the work of photographer and filmmaker RaMell Ross, author and cultural historian Saidiya Hartman, and filmmaker Charles Burnett have in common is the belief that nonfiction media teaches how to see race, how to inhabit it, and how to police it. Can it also open up new ways to see differently? Featuring RaMell Ross, Saidiya Hartman, Charles Burnett, Terri Francis, and Ina Archer
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Romel Ross
00:00:00
Speaker
If you have them in front of you, I was going to ask if you could bring up the iconic... I'm talking with photographer and filmmaker Romel Ross.
The Decisive Moment in Photography
00:00:07
Speaker
We're looking at a photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson. It's called Behind the Gar St. Lazar. It sort of represents his idea of the decisive moment, which has been ubiquitous and extremely influential in photography and photographic theory.
Frozen Time and Street Photography
00:00:28
Speaker
It's an image of a man jumping over a puddle and he appears sort of frozen in time with his heel hovering just millimeters over it. This guy is jumping from a ladder that seems to have been fallen or maybe even placed to help someone traverse this extremely expansive puddle. It's about time being frozen so that you can see this intricate, perceptive moment. It looks quite perfect.
00:00:58
Speaker
For the photographer Cartier-Bresson, street photography was about capturing the ephemeral, spontaneous moments of modern life that can express a kind of poetic truth. It's a poetry that can't be captured in words, but it can be captured by a photographer who knows just where to look and exactly which hundredth of a second to snap the picture.
Limitless Possibilities of Photography
00:01:22
Speaker
The decisive moment celebrates the street photographer's freedom to be spontaneous, to look at whatever he wants, to make meaning however he wants. Like the man frozen in the image hovering millimeters above a rain puddle. We don't know what happened before or after he jumped, but we get the sense of limitless possibility. Maybe he lands in the puddle, or maybe he never lands at all.
00:01:50
Speaker
But
African Americans and Photography's Role
00:01:51
Speaker
Rommel argues that African Americans have had a very different relationship to photography. They haven't been able to wander or look freely. And historically, photography has been used to document, to classify, to decisively know and judge black people, not to set them free.
00:02:12
Speaker
To me there's nothing more dangerous than images that make a claim to a type of knowledge and so a counterpoint would be the indecisive moment which to me has the potential to do the opposite.
Power of Ambiguity in Images
00:02:25
Speaker
To put ambiguity in the mind of the viewer and I think to make images and be able to situate black ambiguity in the context of truth is a powerful thing.
00:02:40
Speaker
Race as a concept is relatively debunked, but, you know, blackness specifically in the U.S. is something that is fraught with much misunderstanding and emerges from an order and a logic of oppression and difference and reduction. And so to photograph and to use imagery and photography indecisively, to me, is to put a little bit of relief in the image, to change the power dynamics.
00:03:12
Speaker
For Ramel, photography isn't about correcting the record. It's about changing our whole relationship to it.
Judgment, Trust, and Truth in Photography
00:03:20
Speaker
When we look at an image and ask whether it's real or not, we're not seeing some kind of inherent truth. We're actually bringing our life experiences and our judgments to it, and we're asking ourselves, do I trust this? What's it want from me? And if I decide to trust it, what's the worst that could happen?
00:03:43
Speaker
More than getting us to ask, is this true? Romel wants us to think about why we're interested in one image, but not another. Why an image can frustrate or excite us. To move away from this notion that we need to know, or that we even can know exactly what we're looking at. As though it's evidence in a puzzle.
Jason Fox's Exploration of Perception
00:04:07
Speaker
I'm Jason Fox, and this is a five episode series I'm calling Trust Issues.
00:04:13
Speaker
You'll hear from artists, writers, activists, and even a broker for ISIS videos that were smuggled across the Syrian border about how we relate to each other through images. Think of it like a relationship advice column, except instead of learning to be a better lover, or a family member, or a friend, it's about how to become a better viewer by understanding how images shape the way we see people, whether we trust them, and why.
00:04:42
Speaker
This is episode one, The Freedom of Fiction. We look at the difference between so-called fiction and nonfiction and how that difference has a lot to do with who's in front of the lens and who's behind it.
Romel's Journey in Hale County
00:05:02
Speaker
Here's Ramel again. I moved to Hale County in 2009 and it was to teach in a youth program.
00:05:12
Speaker
And I also ended up cooking basketball there as well and really got integrated in the community. And I started making photos there as well with a large format camera. It's interesting, the images that I show are images that start in 2012 because it took three years for me to sort of get beyond the tropes of the South.
00:05:42
Speaker
The landscape as this sort of expanse of beauty, the moss as a standalone item. People in earnest hoses, houses and trees and chairs on porches. People in their places doing their things without reflexivity.
00:06:09
Speaker
Rommel was tired of seeing photographers depict the American South as some simple, uncomplicated space that seems to stand outside of time. Yellow is one of the first photographs he made that he felt did something different. Yellow is an image I made while I was photographing my friend Curtis and his family.
00:06:34
Speaker
While I was setting up my camera and they're talking and enjoying each other's company, I just glanced to my left and his granddaughter was over by this flower bush playing in the grass and doing some digging and she was doing it so diligently. The color relationship between the yellow and the landscape and herparets and the flowers were just incredibly striking.
00:07:07
Speaker
In the image, a young black girl in a yellow dress crouches behind a flower bush about 15 feet in front of the camera. Her back has turned, so we can't really see what she's doing. She's surrounded by this wide, freshly cut lawn. And about 100 feet behind her, dark woods fill the horizon. She had her own personal meaning and personal secret.
00:07:34
Speaker
that no one had access to aside from her. And I wondered what that was, and I thought that was a great settling point for ambiguity, that she's playing in the soil of this historic region. You know, God knows what happened here.
00:08:04
Speaker
I came to the strategy of obscuring people's faces and recumbency and often direct gazes or not as a means to, I think, enhance the intersubjectivity of the image.
Challenging Racial Depictions in Photography
00:08:22
Speaker
sort of provide a not only an imaginative space but I think also let each image be a tiny act of refusal on the part of myself and on the part of those in front of the camera to kind of give themselves over to the viewer for consumption. I know that
00:08:45
Speaker
photo history is replete with images of people of color that don't question the concept of race and what race means to the people viewing. It's more about sort of representing race proudly and humanizing people or giving folks insight into the lives and into the geography, into the homes of people. But
00:09:08
Speaker
What I'm interested in is questioning the whole project of representation as a possibility. It's more interesting for the images to refuse consumption by the viewer. In that way, they become sort of inexhaustible.
00:09:28
Speaker
It sort of reflects, one, the way that media and images and these types of production have produced ideas of blackness, but it also, I think, unconsciously shows that it's still in flux, like it's not something that's to be settled. I love this line by Godfrey Regio, which he's like, I want the viewer to complete the film.
00:10:00
Speaker
complete the film, complete the film. The film is incomplete until the viewer participates in it imaginatively. And I think given the sort of fiction of blackness, I think that there's a need for images with people of color to be completed. The narrative to be completed by
Blackness as Fiction and Impact
00:10:17
Speaker
the viewer.
00:10:30
Speaker
My artist statement for the series, South County, Alabama, I like to share because I think it's the best language formation I have for my approach. And it's that blackness is a lie, but it's a true lie. To be black is the greatest fiction of my life, yet I'm still bound to its myth. I can't help but think about the myth's childhood and its backyard of the South.
00:10:57
Speaker
how the myth of blackness aged into fact and grew into laws, how it evolved from there to become tacit, enjoying the secret order of things, how it became the dark matter of the American imagination.
00:11:49
Speaker
One of the reasons I couldn't stop thinking about how we talk about non-fiction is that a few years ago, the Florida invited me to listen through their extensive audio archive.
00:11:59
Speaker
In case you were wondering, the Foyardi's basically like a summer camp for a who's who of independent filmmakers, and it's been running since 1955. It's a week filled with screenings and then post-screening discussions, which can turn into pretty intense arguments. And they record almost all of them. Like, you want to hear Susan Sontag get yelled at by a random dude in 1974? This is your archive. A lot of the recordings aren't pristine.
00:12:27
Speaker
There's creaky floors, and when they're outdoors, it almost sounds like the seminars, just a background for an immersive concert of crickets in the summer grass. But I'm listening through it. I was struck by how a lot of the discussions people were having over the past 65 years still feel pretty unresolved today. Like the relationship between fact and fiction.
00:12:47
Speaker
We talk about facts as if they're the opposite of fiction, but the thing is the two are always connected. I mean, for any fiction to be relatable, it has to be grounded in some way in the daily realities we live. And facts have no meaning in and of themselves until they're injected in some kind of narrative. Rommel's photography is about creating a space where nonfiction images of African Americans confront the mythologies that are constantly projected onto them.
Charles Burnett's Film and Black Narratives
00:13:15
Speaker
But sometimes the reverse happens. Black filmmakers make works of fiction, and then audiences demand to treat them as fact. Like back in the summer of 1979, when Charles Burnett was invited to show his master's thesis film at the Flaherty. It's called Killer of Sheep. It's an impressionistic narrative portrait of Watts.
00:13:42
Speaker
a working class in a predominantly black neighborhood in Los Angeles. Burnett shot the movie himself on borrowed equipment and salvaged 16 millimeter film stock. And he used nonprofessional actors, which gives the film a strong sense of place. At the center of the film is the character of Stan, a slaughterhouse worker who stoically accepts the tedium of his job and the life of poverty it produces for his family.
00:14:13
Speaker
In this scene, the competing forces in Stan's life collide, just outside his front door. It starts with a sedan pulling up in front of Stan's modest home. Two men hop out of the car. They're wearing leather jackets. They seem pretty confident. They knock on Stan's door and ask him to step outside for a minute. They need a favor. Stan sits down on his front step.
00:14:43
Speaker
The two men hover like bees. Well, look, man, you know somebody to keep their mouth shut. Make some dough, man. They won't blush the murder. You know more kind of people like that than I do. Who the hell told you I'd help you do away somebody anyway? A friend of yours. Who? That don't make no difference, man. Say, look, man, we're going to do the extra killing. All we want you for is unnecessary details. Just be in the background. Don't hear it. Why don't you let me borrow your rascal?
00:15:13
Speaker
And I don't keep no gun. Suddenly Stan's wife appears just inside the screen door. She steps out onto the stoop to interrupt the scene. You know, Terry was laughing during the scene on the porch. They're just so goofy. They're just ridiculous. Like, you're really going to roll up to this man's house and ask him to help you with a murder? Come on, man.
00:15:44
Speaker
That's Terri Francis. She's a professor of cinema. And that's like one of these moments where this movie is real and not real. It's like a tall tale. Maybe they happened, maybe they didn't. Who cares? And this is the artist, Ian Archer. I feel like the first time I saw it was sometime in the
00:16:13
Speaker
early 90s. I remember that I lived in Brooklyn, friends that I was hanging out with at that time. We went to see it, but there was also somebody that I was, uh, developed a romantic interest there. So it was also kind of like a first date. Sure. Yeah. You have a first encounter with the film over and over again.
00:16:37
Speaker
It feels that way, I think, because of my sort of using the film as a test film for people to be blunt, you know, to see if they have a humane view of films and probably a humane view of black film. I guess I do have an expectation of a at least positive response despite Charles Burnett not wanting to produce necessarily positive images.
00:17:08
Speaker
The fail would be the person in my group who basically felt like it wasn't making a strong enough case for the situation of the characters and their poverty or their troubles, which to me seemed a failure to see the movie as a film, as a narrative.
00:17:33
Speaker
In 1979, Charles Burnett was invited to the Flaherty seminar just after finishing Killer of Sheep. And a warning here, the quality of the recording isn't the best because there was a lot of crickets and cicadas around, and they didn't know it was going to be on a podcast five decades later.
00:17:51
Speaker
At the time that Mr. Burnett is engaging this audience, he's a recent graduate. He's a young man who has made a movie for his thesis to get his master's at UCLA and finds himself in
00:18:13
Speaker
intense and remarkable company for something that he was submitting, you know, for a grade that he had made in his neighborhood with his neighbors, you know, made it a certain way. And they asked him, like, well, who did you imagine seeing this? He says, well, I was imagining the people who looked like the people in the film and then also others.
00:18:49
Speaker
And the guy interrupts and asks if you'd want the film shown on PBS. Burnett sort of thinking about it for a second, not quite sure what the question's about.
00:19:08
Speaker
Then the guy follows up to say that what the film is is marvelously raw, but it's going to serve a tragic purpose. Because it's going to reinforce racism for people who watch it. You know, that's one of the burdens of this movie.
00:19:34
Speaker
Mm-hmm. That need that people bring to it to explain what they, the viewer, needs to know in order to feel that they are learning something because they're seeing it as, like, the old-time after-school special, like, a lesson fill. I think any audience, like, just viewing it through that sort of justify-yourself-explain-something-to-me gaze rather than
00:20:02
Speaker
just kind of going there with Stan, like what it's like to be so tired that you can't even sleep anymore. And what it is to have these fleeting moments of sensual attention, like when he holds the teacup to his forehead,
00:20:27
Speaker
You know and that he himself is remembering when I used to be a person And just like their accents the the the style of language, you know the I think it's one point he says it's marvelously wrong
00:20:47
Speaker
which may tragically serve a negative purpose. And I just thought, like, you know, that should be the head of everybody's review. I was thinking about Burnett, about Charles Burnett. And, you know, if another filmmaker, say, like John Cassavetes, was there showing shadows, would
00:21:10
Speaker
people want to know if that was an indictment of what interracial relationships are like or if it was husbands or some other scripted film, you know, that men are
00:21:23
Speaker
are immature and douchebags in that film, they are.
Stereotypes in Black Filmmaking
00:21:28
Speaker
But I think it was really a burden on being put on him to represent a community, but not necessarily his community. I've had experiences with my work saying, oh, I'm a film video maker. And people might ask, where can I see your work?
00:21:50
Speaker
on PBS or can you get it from an educational resource and always kind of assuming that the work that I was doing was documentary based?
00:22:10
Speaker
One particular incident that always makes me laugh and stands out for me is my work that's basically a science fiction project about a lost film archive, Lincoln Film Company, a company that I made up who have created a body of black cast films that are technically advanced in the silent era.
00:22:37
Speaker
The film speculates about what has happened to these lost black films and what happens if you lose black films in the culture. And it turns out that these films have been abducted by aliens and are now the representative archive of what the planet Earth is like.
00:22:57
Speaker
So it was being shown in this gallery. The gallerist was very, very interested in the work. He, you know, heard the story of these lost films and how the piece was going to talk about the disappearance of these early Black films and then was kind of
00:23:17
Speaker
taken aback when it got to the point of saying, oh, they were abducted by aliens, and that he really felt that I shouldn't put that conclusion on the piece because it wasn't respectful of the material that I was working with, and I suppose of the audience either.
00:23:38
Speaker
man, these people make me tired. He felt like he had been tricked or that I was trying to trick somebody. Because when you take a liberty like what you've done, you're saying, this is mine. This is ours. I'm able to retell it. It's a lot of power. And I think then that means that it can't be definitively labeled
00:24:09
Speaker
And I think that's disconcerting. And I think there's a certain kind of well-meaning person that they have learned to interact with like Black materials in a certain way. Like they've learned some rules, but they are not under, like, well, those are your rules because you all don't know how to behave. I think that one of the hardest aspects of
00:24:39
Speaker
Black art is the incongruity of experience that is often navigated, expressed, engaged with, and often through humor, this incongruous humor, humor that is about things that are painful, tragic, the level of signifying that goes on.
00:25:05
Speaker
Um, I think being able to laugh with killer sheep is a sign of our intimacy with the film. And I think with each other as well, I don't, I don't know because you know, blackness on screen, like black physicality on screen has been a comedic presence wherein blackness is the butt of the joke.
00:25:31
Speaker
And so there are many moments that I can think of, you know, viewing moments where I'm in an audience and I'm just like, oh, dear, these people are laughing at all the wrong parts. This is not correct. You know, and it's really painful and uncomfortable. Maybe my test, my killer of sheep test is a way of trying to be intimate.
00:25:54
Speaker
you know, trying to gauge whether or not I can be intimate with this person. Right. Can you trust this person with your story? Do they have a humanity that can hold this film and Stan's story and, you know, Mrs. Stan's story? Why do you always want to hurt something? Who? Me? That's the way you need to eat.
00:26:25
Speaker
I mean, the animal has its teeth, and the man has its fists. That's the way I was brought up that day, I mean. Right on. I mean, when a man's got scars on his mug from dealing with son of a bitches every day for his natural life, ain't nobody going over this nigga. Just dry long soap. I mean, it's smoke here. We take an ice. You be a man if you can, Stan.
00:26:51
Speaker
You wait, you wait just one minute. You're talking about being a man, stand up. Don't you know it's more to it than just with your fists, the scars on your mugs? You talking about an animal or what? Now, do you think you're still in the bush, something damn weird? You here. You use your brain. That's what you use. Both of you nuts and ass niggas got a lot of nerve coming over here doing some shit like it. What do you mean, wait a minute? I ain't gonna wait a minute because it was a wait a minute. You wouldn't never come in first. Wait a minute. You gonna sit here and let him do this? Wait a minute. Look at Stan. What have you got? He worked all his life. What have you got? He don't even have a decent job paying me.
00:27:22
Speaker
All we trying to do is have liquor. Hey, you can't live, you're afraid of dying. Is that right? Is that right? Forget it, man. Forget it. Let's go.
00:28:42
Speaker
Her head was full of dreams. It was 1913 and anything seemed possible. She had done the one thing which seemed to offer hope. She had left home.
Reimagining Black Women in Archives
00:28:58
Speaker
That's an excerpt from Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by the cultural historian Saidiya Hartman. Efremel says that racial mythologies are projected under documentary photographs of black life. And Terry and Iona confront why viewers need something to be true, even when it's clearly a work of fiction. And Hartman reminds us how even historical archives are often based in state fictions. Her book focuses on progressive era black women who are unremembered outcasts.
00:29:27
Speaker
Women whose lives she found in the sorts of historical and state archives were usually treated as places of authoritative knowledge. She writes about women who are made to be statistics, whose lives were described as deserving pity, or acquiring intervention, or needing imprisonment. But Hartman uses that documentary material to remember them differently. I'm always writing a history of the present and
00:29:52
Speaker
The ways in which the lives of these young women and girls were criminalized has everything to do with the ways in which the lives of people are criminalized and disposable and precarious. In the present, I mean, there are those continuities. The book isn't about that, but rather about the way people try to live with that enclosure being built around them.
00:30:24
Speaker
In pouring through the archives, Hartman discovered the file of a young woman named Maddie Nelson, who boarded a ship in Virginia to escape to New York City in 1913, only to end up in the Bedford Hills Reformatory for women just a few years later. Hartman took some notes.
00:30:40
Speaker
the first set of notes may be based on memory. And partly that's about just really trying to register what has struck me to speculate about that longing that would have accompanied her on her journey to New York. When Maddie Nelson landed at Pier 26,
00:31:08
Speaker
She was dreaming with thoughts of what the future would hold. In the crush of folks on the pier, she breathed comfortably inside her own skin, enjoying the self-forgetfulness that she had imagined was possible in a free territory.
00:31:24
Speaker
And then, in those circumstances, on the steamer from Virginia to New York, in the crowded, segregated section, what did this young girl think might be possible in the grandeur and the splendor of New York City? The color line in the city was as deep and wide as the ocean. She traversed it, preferring the Negro world and breathing easily again when engulfed in the sea of black faces.
00:31:52
Speaker
when lingering in a cool tenement hallway in the company of stout, good-natured, colored women, reluctant to enter their private flats and slow to turn the latches of their doors. The ceaseless sounds of humanity spill to the air. The bedrooms open to air shafts, which were conduits for sound, passageways for the collective life of the tenement.
00:32:19
Speaker
This noise, if not a kind of music, at the very least inspired it. Basically, people were living together and you were overhearing
00:32:33
Speaker
your neighbor's lives. Duke Ellington also spoke of that music of the air shaft and how it enabled his compositional practice. And it's that sense of the close proximity really defying the notion of
00:32:53
Speaker
our privatized, bounded bourgeois homes. And that's the part of urban existence which is so wonderful. We do have access to
00:33:08
Speaker
the lives of others. Does it afford a kind of intimacy or understanding? Does it make relation possible? Does it make music and poetry possible? And everyone seemed to say, yes. So the counter historical work that I'm involved in is really wanting us to understand a kind of historical period or a set of relations differently.
00:33:35
Speaker
And a set of texts from me are the films of Oscar Michaud. Oscar Michaud is also dealing with the question about the character of black life in the city. And one of the things that's also so fascinating about Michaud's films
00:33:55
Speaker
is within his narrative cinema there were these moments these actualities right you know footage of a parade going by or footage from shows inside of a nightclub so that there is this kind of seamless blending of.
00:34:13
Speaker
quote unquote, documentary material with narrative material, but that both is essential in rendering a certain complex and nuanced representation of black life. Touch to the dance number on the club floor, which is pivotal, obligatory, and never inessential in a Michelle film. Everything terrible about the club
00:34:41
Speaker
the alcohol, the debauchery, the infidelity encouraged by the environment, the loose jaded women would be balanced by the scene, which would condemn the cabaret and at the same time, exalt it. In the cabaret scene, black virtuosity is on display. Then comes the chorus.
00:35:05
Speaker
and the dancing bodies are arranged in beautiful lines that shift and change as the flourish and excess of the dancers unfold into righteous possibility and translate the tumult and upheaval of the black belt into art. The extended musical numbers might first seem like digressions except that they establish the horizon in which everything else transpires and foreground the lovely actuality of blackness.
00:35:35
Speaker
The dance scene is crucial. The movement of bodies, the courts, as well as the ordinary folks crowding the floor, reveal other lineages of black cinema, understood broadly as a rendering of black life in motion in contrast to the arrested and fixed images that produce and document black life as a problem.
00:36:02
Speaker
The relationship between fiction and nonfiction, it's a really interesting and fraught division.
00:36:11
Speaker
I like to quote a passage from, you know, Toni Morrison where she says that for her, the distinction isn't between like fact and fiction, but between fact and truth. The case files are ripe with, you know, fictions and constructions and projections of the state, but those projections or fictions
00:36:36
Speaker
are authorized with state power. So the facts of the state are endorsed as an absolute truth. And sometimes the way of countering that truth of
00:36:52
Speaker
trying to destabilize it and to critique it or to destroy it even is by simply playing within the messiness of the fiction by dealing with the incredible contradictory character of the archive.
00:37:14
Speaker
The sociological note appended to the case file stated, the maternal home was a poor environment. The mother did not appear to feel very keenly disgraced by her daughter. Her immoral conduct has been repeated by her daughter. Probation officer did not believe her home would be a good place to send patients.
00:37:38
Speaker
I wanted the reader to experience my practice, whether of critical fabulation or speculative history, as not constructing another fiction in response to the fictions of the state, but really trying to produce a radically different
00:38:04
Speaker
vision of the conditions of existence, a radically different account of truth based upon the experience of Black folks. Trust Issues is written by me, Jason Fox, and the producer is Aliyah Pobani.
00:38:31
Speaker
Additional production on this episode by Heather Kirby, and the story editor is Brett Story. The music on this episode is by Lykins, Matano Roberts, and Paul Freeman, and excerpts from Wayward Lives were read by Kanisha Kelly. Additional support was provided by Antoa Studio and Sari Horowitz at the Flaherty. The series is co-presented by World Records and the Camden International Film Festival.
00:39:00
Speaker
It was made possible thanks to the generous support of the Foyerty as part of an ongoing initiative to make seven decades of the Foyerty Seminar archives available to researchers and creators. Special thanks to John Cessri-Goff, Mary Pelzer, Ruth Samalo, Jason Livingston, Samara Chadwick, Jess Shane, Kelly O'Brien, and Pooja Rangan. If you want to see excerpts from the works we talked about in this episode, go to the World Records website at worldrecordsjournal.org.
00:39:31
Speaker
and next time on Trust Issues. We look at transformational social movements like Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and QAnon to explore how personal truths can turn into the truth. Thanks for listening.