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Bill Traylor on the Silver Screen, with filmmakers Sam Pollard and Jeffrey Wolf
17 Plays4 years ago
In April of 1853 a child was born into slavery on an Alabama cotton plantation owned by George Traylor. His first name was Bill and he would take the plantation owner’s last name for himself. A sharecropper and laborer for most of his life, in the decades since his death in 1949 Bill Traylor has became known to the world as an artist. Now, a new documentary tells Bill Traylor’s story on film for the first time. Ben Miller speaks with executive producer Sam Pollard and director Jeffrey Wolf about "Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts," distributed by Kino Lorber and available in virtual theaters via Kino Marquee.
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Transcript
Introduction to the Episode and Gallery
00:00:00
Speaker
I'm happy to announce our sponsors for this episode, Stephen S. Powers and Joshua Lowenfels.
00:00:05
Speaker
If you're interested in Bill Traylor's work and other artists like him, you might take a look at Stephen Powers and Joshua Lowenfels.
00:00:13
Speaker
These two dealers have teamed up and opened a shared gallery on the Lower East Side at 53 Stanton Street.
00:00:19
Speaker
They're joining over 50 galleries on the Lower East Side, and Powers and Lowenfels focus on outside or self-taught American folk art.
00:00:27
Speaker
and works of art in and outside the box.
00:00:30
Speaker
The gallery can be found on Stanton Street, just one block south of Houston.
00:00:35
Speaker
And to learn more, you can follow them on Instagram at Stephen S. Powers and at Ployart, P-L-O-Y-A-A-R-R-T-T.
Bill Traylor: Life and Art
00:00:55
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to Curious Objects, brought to you by the magazine Antiques.
00:00:58
Speaker
I'm Ben Miller.
00:01:00
Speaker
In April of 1853, a child was born into slavery on an Alabama cotton plantation owned by George Traylor.
00:01:07
Speaker
His first name was Bill, and he would take the plantation owner's last name for himself.
00:01:13
Speaker
Bill Traylor spent most of his 96 years of life as a sharecropper and a farmer, and
00:01:18
Speaker
Yet by the time of his death in 1949 and in the decades afterwards, Bill Traylor became known to the world not as a farmer, but as an artist.
00:01:28
Speaker
And today he ranks among the most celebrated American folk artists of the 20th century.
00:01:33
Speaker
If you've been listening to Curious Objects for a while, you might remember my interview with Kara Zimmerman about a piece by Traylor that was about to be sold at Christie's.
00:01:41
Speaker
That piece, which once belonged to Steven Spielberg, ended up fetching over $500,000.
00:01:46
Speaker
Now, a new documentary tells Bill Traylor's story in film for the first time.
00:01:53
Speaker
It's called Bill Traylor Chasing Ghosts.
00:01:56
Speaker
It's directed by Jeffrey Wolf and the executive producer is Sam Pollard.
00:02:01
Speaker
And it's my pleasure to speak with Jeffrey and Sam today.
00:02:04
Speaker
Congratulations on the film and thanks for joining me.
00:02:07
Speaker
My pleasure.
00:02:08
Speaker
Thank you.
00:02:09
Speaker
Now, I want to start in at the same place where the film starts, and that is with a quotation from Vincent van Gogh.
00:02:17
Speaker
And the quotation is this, one may have a blazing hearth in one's soul, and yet no one ever comes to sit by it.
00:02:24
Speaker
Passerby see only a wisp of the smoke from the chimney and continue on the way.
00:02:30
Speaker
Jeff, why did you choose to open the film with that text?
00:02:35
Speaker
Well, I think it kind of summarizes my feeling about these artists, including Bill Traylor and other films that I've made, that it took them a long time to be recognized.
The Importance of Traylor's Work
00:02:46
Speaker
as part of the canon of 20th century American art.
00:02:50
Speaker
And, you know, what this film tries to do is highlight his life and that he's not just sort of this myth that you see on a wall, but there's a full story of a man behind it.
00:03:05
Speaker
Sam, you've been involved with a wide array of films telling stories about black Americans, including work on a film with Spike Lee that received an Academy Award nomination.
00:03:16
Speaker
Film at Lincoln Center said you are one of cinema's most dedicated chroniclers of the black experience in America.
00:03:22
Speaker
Where did you encounter Bill Traylor and what drew you to him as a subject for a film?
00:03:29
Speaker
Well, it was really Jeff who introduced me to the trailer.
00:03:32
Speaker
I wasn't really that's made with his work.
00:03:33
Speaker
I probably had seen it, but I didn't know who he was.
00:03:36
Speaker
So when Jeff reached out to me a few years ago and told me about this documentary, he was shooting and he was looking for some other craftspersons to be involved in the film.
00:03:46
Speaker
We talked about Trailer and his connection to Trailer, and he showed me some of his early rough cuts.
00:03:52
Speaker
And, you know, as you just said, you know, because of my long history delving into the African-American historical experience, I felt like, wow, this is an important story to tell.
00:04:02
Speaker
This is a character, this is a human being whose story I'd never been told about.
00:04:06
Speaker
So, you know, that was, to me, it's a continuation of the trajectory of telling the African-American story and understanding that it's really a part of the larger American story.
00:04:18
Speaker
And this is another aspect, but be it both from a specifically historical perspective, from a musical perspective, and from this case, a visual artist perspective, these are important stories to tell and to really recognize people who have been unsung for many years.
00:04:33
Speaker
I'm curious about your very first impression.
00:04:36
Speaker
When you first sort of paid attention to one of his works for the first time, how did it strike you?
00:04:41
Speaker
Well, what I'm seeing when I look at Traylor's work is the fact that his work, and if you really look at it closely, encompasses such a breadth of American history.
00:04:52
Speaker
Here's a young man, here's a man who was born during slavery,
00:04:56
Speaker
lived through Reconstruction in the Jim Crow era, you know, and lived through the Great Migration, but spent most of his life in, you know, in Alabama, in that small section of Alabama where he grew up and worked and ended up in Montgomery, which was, as we know, a haven, you know, for those from the right and for the burgeoning civil rights movement.
00:05:18
Speaker
with the Montgomery Bush boycott that was led by a very young Dr. Martin Luther King.
00:05:23
Speaker
So looking at his work, I'm seeing that sense of history.
00:05:27
Speaker
I mean, when I see his men with the stovepipe hats, it makes me think of Lincoln.
00:05:33
Speaker
When I see the connections that you see between men and women, black men and black women,
00:05:37
Speaker
It just speaks to, you know, the life he lived, the animals and his imagery.
00:05:41
Speaker
All of it speaks to a life that he lived, which to me, if you have any understanding of our history, of American history, African American history, it speaks volumes to you.
Cultural and Personal Themes in Traylor's Art
00:05:52
Speaker
I just want to remind listeners that, as always, you can see images from the film, including Traylor's work on the web at themagazineantiques.com slash podcast.
00:06:03
Speaker
The color blue is kind of a touchstone in the film, both literally and figuratively with reference to the blues.
00:06:10
Speaker
You talked about music just a moment ago.
00:06:13
Speaker
What's the significance of blue in Traylor's life and his artwork?
00:06:20
Speaker
Jeff can speak to that.
00:06:23
Speaker
It's so multi-layered, Ben, in that as Radcliffe Bailey says, it goes back to African culture, but blue exists in so many different aspects of painting a room blue to keep ghosts away.
00:06:42
Speaker
It's
00:06:47
Speaker
Somehow, the word blues kind of went along with all that, but specifically where each thing comes from is a little hard to put together.
00:06:57
Speaker
But what's interesting, though, is that he was given paints and he chose that blue as his color, though he used other colors as well.
00:07:07
Speaker
But that's just a...
00:07:08
Speaker
like a child's, um, you know, uh, poster paint that came from a department store, you know, near where he sat and worked.
00:07:16
Speaker
So, you know, he, he, it was definitely a conscious choice, but what all the spiritual reasons for that are, I can't really, um, I can't really address, but, um,
00:07:26
Speaker
The other thing I want to say, based on the question you asked Sam, though, is that Sam just did a film called Black Art, The Absence of Light, which is about contemporary African-American artists.
00:07:37
Speaker
And interestingly, a lot of the same people who he interviewed, I also interviewed,
00:07:43
Speaker
which kind of shows what the through line of all this is.
00:07:48
Speaker
And, you know, as a follower of magazine antiques, you know, like I often look at the material in your magazine and I try to imagine how that was, you know, like what the house looked like that that was in or how that utensil was used.
00:08:03
Speaker
And, you know, so that's kind of this fascinating world that we uncovered with Bill Traylor is we would, you know,
00:08:09
Speaker
Even the poster for the movie, if you look at it carefully, it looks like an anvil that you would fix a shoe on, you know, shoe repair, which is a place where he worked for a period of time.
00:08:21
Speaker
So he's constantly taking material from that ancient, when I say ancient world, 100 years ago, and incorporating that into his drawings.
00:08:32
Speaker
So it becomes very relevant as you start looking at it closer and closer.
00:08:38
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I have to say, you know, I've been aware of Traylor's work for a little while now, and I've seen his pictures in various places.
00:08:45
Speaker
But one of the reasons I was so glad to see the film is that it really brought him to life.
00:08:51
Speaker
That's maybe a bit of a cliche, but I think, you know, his life itself is very colorful.
00:08:57
Speaker
You know, there are references in the film to, you know, women, there's drinking.
00:09:03
Speaker
I think the word carousing is even mentioned once or twice.
00:09:08
Speaker
So, you know, maybe it's a bit of a trope that artists are eccentric people, but tell me a little about that colorful side of him.
00:09:17
Speaker
Well, you know...
00:09:19
Speaker
I didn't want to sugarcoat anything and I didn't want to be trite and I didn't want to, um, you know, go get into cliche, but I tried to paint a port.
00:09:27
Speaker
First of all, you know, there's only about eight photographs of trailer that even exist and no audio recordings and the records, you know, because of being black and poor and indigent, he didn't have many opportunities.
00:09:40
Speaker
You know, there aren't many opportunities to really research too deeply into, into these situations.
00:09:46
Speaker
But, um,
00:09:47
Speaker
You know, he was bawdy and he was lusty.
00:09:52
Speaker
And, you know, by being able to show that, it made him a complete person, as far as I can tell.
00:09:59
Speaker
You know, everybody always wanted, back in the mythology of Bill Traylor, they wanted to talk about all his children and his wives and his carousing, which, you know, kind of led to a stereotype.
00:10:11
Speaker
And I wanted to fill in those blanks and kind of give you a fuller picture of him.
00:10:17
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, you know, another side of his life that you really show poignantly in the film is how much loss he suffered.
00:10:25
Speaker
You know, among other things, his son, Willie, was shot and killed by the police.
00:10:31
Speaker
Later in life, his leg had to be amputated.
00:10:34
Speaker
And, you know, of course, even after the Civil War, he was living among a deeply racist and violent cultured.
00:10:43
Speaker
But, you know, his work doesn't seem overtly sorrowful for the most part, aside from maybe this sort of symbolic use of the color blue.
00:10:53
Speaker
But what is it?
00:10:54
Speaker
Maybe I'll direct this one to you, Sam.
00:10:56
Speaker
What do you think Trailers Pictures can tell us about his state of mind?
Interpreting Traylor's Visual Style
00:11:01
Speaker
Hmm.
00:11:04
Speaker
That's a tricky question, man.
00:11:08
Speaker
I mean, I tend not to want to answer a question like that because I couldn't tell you a state of mind.
00:11:14
Speaker
I mean, I think what the work shows is that here was a man...
00:11:19
Speaker
who in many ways had the memories of his past, which he was expressing through his art.
00:11:28
Speaker
To say what it meant about a state of mind, I couldn't answer that question.
00:11:33
Speaker
I wouldn't even venture a guess.
00:11:34
Speaker
I just think that, you know, it's like when a creative person creates
00:11:42
Speaker
They don't, most of us don't think about what's my state of mind and why I'm creating what I create.
00:11:47
Speaker
They create from, you know, history.
00:11:50
Speaker
They create from experiences.
00:11:52
Speaker
And that's how they express themselves.
00:11:56
Speaker
I mean, that's the closest answer I can give you, quite honestly.
00:12:00
Speaker
Well, fair enough.
00:12:01
Speaker
And you're the one who's the creative here, not me.
00:12:04
Speaker
So I'll take your word on that one.
00:12:08
Speaker
Well, I was just saying, you know, I'd like to talk for a minute about Traylor's evolution as an artist.
00:12:15
Speaker
And, you know, of course, he starts working toward the end of his life.
00:12:19
Speaker
But pieces by him are instantly recognizable.
00:12:23
Speaker
Of course, he is, I guess we call him self-taught.
00:12:28
Speaker
But his ideas, his style, it doesn't come from no place, right?
00:12:36
Speaker
And I'm just hoping I can pick your brain a little.
00:12:39
Speaker
You know, based on the conversations you've had around the film, how do you think that Traylor's subjects and his techniques connect with African-American visual history or other sources that you think might have influenced that very distinctive visual style?
00:12:59
Speaker
I would have trouble answering the second part of that question.
00:13:01
Speaker
Maybe Sam might have some insight into that.
00:13:04
Speaker
But the first part is an artist who I interviewed for the James Castle film named Terry Winter told me once that all painting starts in the middle.
00:13:15
Speaker
And what he meant was that he often, he even used Jackson Pollock as an example, that Jackson Pollock would often take an empty canvas and put a figurative drawing on that canvas just to have something there to start with because an empty canvas is so intimidating in some way.
00:13:34
Speaker
And so what Traylor did is he found the, you know, using only found materials, he already had
00:13:41
Speaker
You know, something to work with.
00:13:42
Speaker
He had, there was a tear in the corner or there was a ripped off piece in the middle or there was a spot, you know, or a staple or something that kind of gave him a beginning.
00:13:53
Speaker
And I think that he used those beginnings often, if not always, to just get himself started.
00:13:59
Speaker
Yeah.
00:14:02
Speaker
So there's that.
00:14:04
Speaker
And then there's also this feeling of knowing how... I think he may... I know that he was somewhat of a surveyor back on the farm and had a little bit of experience in that.
00:14:15
Speaker
So when you look at the drawings, you can see geometric lines underneath a lot of the figures where he would... Like you would use an articulated figure today if you were doing a body type...
00:14:27
Speaker
he was making geometric rectangles and things in order to have a starting point and work off of that.
00:14:34
Speaker
So, you know, he was incorporating everything that he knew and he was inventing, I think he was inventing those things as he went along as well.
00:14:42
Speaker
It's kind of a visual language that he puts together that I think what's so interesting now, I mean, this is, these are things that we kind of came up with when the film was done and thinking about it, but
00:14:56
Speaker
Those images are as vital now as they were then.
00:15:00
Speaker
And they feel modern now.
00:15:02
Speaker
And they probably have a lifetime long past us, too.
00:15:06
Speaker
And will feel relevant into the future.
00:15:08
Speaker
And I think, especially, you're in a...
00:15:12
Speaker
Just to talk a little bit about antiques, I mean, this is not a time where antiques are, you know, amongst the younger generation, they're not looking at antiques quite the same way we used to look at antiques.
00:15:23
Speaker
And so I think finding this way of making it relevant to today is very important.
00:15:29
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think young people certainly have a different attitude toward, you know, old objects.
00:15:38
Speaker
And one of the themes that keeps coming up in the conversations I have in this podcast is the interest in narrative and storytelling.
00:15:47
Speaker
as a driver of our relationships with these objects.
00:15:50
Speaker
And, you know, so much of Trailer's work is sort of storytelling.
00:15:53
Speaker
There are emotions, there are, you know, you can sort of, you see figures in the middle of a conversation, which you can sort of imagine the conversation that's going on there.
00:16:03
Speaker
And it creates a story around the paintings that, you know,
00:16:08
Speaker
You know, I wonder how much that has to do with his sort of explosion into the popular culture right now.
00:16:15
Speaker
Well, you make a great, great, great point.
00:16:18
Speaker
It's a narrative.
00:16:19
Speaker
I come out of narrative filmmaking.
00:16:20
Speaker
So that's the story.
00:16:23
Speaker
I love the art, but the story, you know, without the story for me, I don't know what the film would look like exactly.
00:16:30
Speaker
But yeah.
00:16:31
Speaker
But that, I think we're in a, you know, Sam and I talk about this a lot.
00:16:34
Speaker
You look at documentaries today, which are becoming more and more popular, maybe even more so in some way than narrative films, because they're new stories that haven't been told before.
00:16:45
Speaker
And narrative films seem to go back to the same thing over and over and over again.
00:16:49
Speaker
And so, you know, I think...
00:16:53
Speaker
I think that kind of storytelling will always be relevant in that way.
00:16:57
Speaker
But I love what you just said, though, about looking at making old things relevant in that way by thinking about it from the story.
00:17:08
Speaker
And we were just discussing before, Radcliffe Bailey is somebody who, you know, he's one generation away from Bill Traylor.
00:17:16
Speaker
Like, Bill Traylor could be his great-grandfather.
00:17:19
Speaker
He talks about looking into his grandfather's medicine chest, looking into his grandfather's blanket chest in the attic and seeing what's in there and trying to conjure up the stories that go along with that.
00:17:32
Speaker
And his art reflects that as well.
00:17:37
Speaker
We'll be right back with Sam Pollard and Jeffrey Wolf.
00:17:40
Speaker
Again, you can see images at themagazineantiques.com slash podcast or on my Instagram at objectiveinterest or at antiquesmag.
00:17:49
Speaker
I'd love to hear your comments and ideas for future episodes, and you can email those to me at curiousobjectspodcast at gmail.com.
00:17:57
Speaker
And if you'd like to help support Curious Objects, you can leave us a review and rating on whatever app you're using to listen right now.
00:18:04
Speaker
Thanks so much.
Gallery Focus and Art Market Recognition
00:18:06
Speaker
Today's episode is brought to you by the dealers Stephen S. Powers and Joshua Lohenfels.
00:18:11
Speaker
Longtime private dealers Stephen S. Powers and Joshua Lohenfels have teamed up and opened a shared gallery on the Lower East Side at 53 Stanton Street.
00:18:20
Speaker
Joining over 50 galleries on the Lower East Side, Powers and Lohenfels focus on outsider self-taught American folk art and works of art in and outside the box.
00:18:31
Speaker
The gallery can be found on Stanton Street, just one block south of Houston.
00:18:35
Speaker
To learn more, follow them on Instagram at Stephen S. Powers, that's Stephen with a V, and at P-L-O-Y-A-A-R-R-T-T, that's Ploy Art.
00:18:52
Speaker
To come back to Traylor's biography here, how was he discovered?
00:18:56
Speaker
There's this section in the film, it's really striking moment where we learned that at one time the Museum of Modern Art offered $2 a piece for a group of his drawings.
00:19:09
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:19:10
Speaker
And I mean, how did his work go from that stage to being featured at the Smithsonian and at Christie's and so on?
00:19:18
Speaker
Well, it's a bit of a longer history, but I can give you sort of the nuts and bolts is that Shannon, without having much luck after the Museum of Modern Art, finally put the work away in the late 40s, early 50s and didn't bring him back out until the 80s.
00:19:36
Speaker
when he read an article about Horace Pippen in the New York Times in a gallery named Terry Dittenfast did a show and at that gallery Shannon contacted them and asked them if they'd be interested in the work and that
00:19:53
Speaker
wasn't interested, but the two people who worked there were, and they ended up kind of getting in touch with Shannon, and that started the beginning of his getting known.
00:20:05
Speaker
And then Hershey Nadler got involved, the Black Folk Art Show at the Corcoran Museum in 1982 happened, and it took off from there.
00:20:13
Speaker
you know, the values have risen astronomically in that period of time.
00:20:20
Speaker
And interesting, you know, the story you told in the beginning, the Steven Spielberg owned painting was, was actually given to Alice Cooper, not Alice Cooper, Alice Walker.
00:20:30
Speaker
When, when Spielberg made the color purple, he gave it to her as a gift and she only gave it up for auction because she decided she had lived with it long enough and wanted to pass it on to somebody else.
00:20:41
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it's amazing how attitudes around the work have changed even just in the last couple of decades.
00:20:46
Speaker
And, you know, in the film, the word primitive actually comes up as having been used in conjunction with his work, which I think, you know, that's a category it's safe to say that scholars today would think of as both offensive and also just uninformed.
00:21:04
Speaker
But now you hear terms like folk art and self-taught and outsider art.
00:21:09
Speaker
Do you think those are useful and informative categories for talking about trailers art?
00:21:15
Speaker
Oh, it's very tough.
00:21:16
Speaker
I mean, outsider art has become kind of a brand rather than a description, I think.
00:21:24
Speaker
Nobody's really come up with a word other than art that truly kind of works.
00:21:31
Speaker
I think...
00:21:36
Speaker
Somebody who's unique, who does something that's different than what anybody else has ever done, like a James Castle or a Martin Ramirez or a Bill Traylor, it's just maybe it's non-mainstream is one way of talking about it.
00:21:52
Speaker
But, you know, I think it's catching up.
00:21:54
Speaker
That's the whole point is that, you know, a lot of, you know, I think that's where the word modernism comes from is that a lot of artists today aren't buying their supplies from art store, art supply stores.
00:22:06
Speaker
You know, they're using found objects and they're, you know, they're using their wits and ideas and trying to make everything feel a little bit more relevant.
00:22:17
Speaker
You know, Ben, I would say this.
00:22:20
Speaker
I think that we tend, as a society, we seem to have to want to put things into categories, to put them into silos.
00:22:27
Speaker
And I think the challenge is to understand that, you know, he created arts.
00:22:33
Speaker
All that, that's what he did.
00:22:34
Speaker
It's not considered to me, it's not primitive, not outsider, you know, it's art.
00:22:39
Speaker
And I think sometimes, you know, because we live in such a, use my term, a capitalistic society,
00:22:46
Speaker
To sell something, you have to put it, people figure they have to put it into a box to sell it.
00:22:51
Speaker
So, I mean, you always have to be careful about these categories.
00:22:55
Speaker
I mean, to me, he's as relevant as Van Gogh or as Picasso or as...
00:23:02
Speaker
Carrie James Marshall or as Radcliffe Bailey, they're artists and they're creating.
00:23:06
Speaker
Now, some of them see themselves as artists, some of them don't.
00:23:09
Speaker
I don't think Traylor would say he was an artist.
00:23:12
Speaker
You know, he was someone who was basically, you know, remembering his many experiences living such a long life, you know, and he wanted to put them down.
00:23:22
Speaker
That's what he did, you know.
00:23:24
Speaker
those of us now say it's art.
00:23:26
Speaker
You know, for him, it was a way of expression.
00:23:29
Speaker
You know, it was just a way of expressing his background, his understanding.
00:23:33
Speaker
He didn't write it down.
00:23:35
Speaker
This was his own way of basically documenting, giving us a sense of history.
00:23:40
Speaker
That's a great answer.
00:23:41
Speaker
And I also want to say, though, that, you know, I'm not an art historian by trade.
00:23:47
Speaker
And so, you know, art movies are
00:23:49
Speaker
are known to be a little academic or whatever, and often not that popular.
Narrative and Historical Context
00:23:54
Speaker
I went out of my way, you know, to try to make this an entertaining film that's about more than just, I mean, the art, Bill Traylor's the star and the art drives it, but there's so many more layers to the story that I think an audience would really relate to and find something, you know, really interesting to tack onto.
00:24:13
Speaker
Not the least being a history that we weren't taught very much of in school,
00:24:19
Speaker
And I try to dish it out in a way that doesn't taste like medicine, but just to fill in people's understanding of what these times were like and what he may or may not have seen from his purview, but he probably experienced something like that of everything I show somewhere along the way.
00:24:42
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, this idea of sort of resisting putting him into a box is something that really comes through throughout the film.
00:24:50
Speaker
I mean, one thing I really enjoyed about it is that it does resist, I think, the very strong temptation to try to impose a narrative or multiple narratives onto Traylor's life.
00:25:03
Speaker
And you really tell his story as much as you can through his own words and the words of the people around him.
00:25:10
Speaker
But maybe this is an implied question, but is there a message or a political viewpoint that you want to communicate through the film that that trailer's life symbolizes or represents to you?
00:25:26
Speaker
I'll ask that to both of you.
00:25:29
Speaker
Well, I mean, we weren't dropped here out of nowhere, you know.
00:25:33
Speaker
And I think our ancestry and history and our memories and our family stories are very important.
00:25:41
Speaker
And, you know, particularly, you know, I come from a Holocaust surviving family, so I understand that in a little different way maybe than the Black—than I'm not—
00:25:53
Speaker
I would never try to talk about understanding the black experience, but I can talk from the Holocaust experience.
00:25:59
Speaker
You know, parents who don't want to talk about things and there are certain discussions that are off limits.
00:26:05
Speaker
But, you know, I think that if there's a lesson, it's to, you know, to kind of respect those past moments and try to incorporate them into
00:26:23
Speaker
the world and also to see that the history is, um, history is giving us warnings all the time and we're not always paying attention to them.
00:26:31
Speaker
And, um,
00:26:34
Speaker
So specifically, I just want to say two other things is that Kerry James Marshall talks about something called the vacuum of images.
00:26:41
Speaker
And what that means is that a lot of the stuff wasn't saved from that time period, photographs, records.
00:26:50
Speaker
So it's very hard to kind of build a narrative about
00:26:54
Speaker
a past that the history was destroyed.
00:26:58
Speaker
So it's very important to me to kind of relive that on one hand.
00:27:02
Speaker
And then also the absence of ruin, which is if you go to Montgomery, it doesn't, the Montgomery, you can see in that film from 1941 that there's this bustling city.
00:27:15
Speaker
If you went there in 1980, 1990, it would look like a wasteland.
00:27:17
Speaker
It was completely knocked down.
00:27:22
Speaker
And so if you don't have that to point to, then you can't have that discussion about what life was like.
00:27:28
Speaker
And I think it's important.
00:27:31
Speaker
It came up with jazz clubs in New York City, for instance.
00:27:33
Speaker
All the great jazz clubs were destroyed.
00:27:36
Speaker
So it's very hard to kind of talk about that culture.
00:27:40
Speaker
Sam.
00:27:44
Speaker
What I would say, Ben, is this.
00:27:46
Speaker
I don't like the idea of messages.
00:27:49
Speaker
Was that old classic line, Jeff, if you want to send a message, go to the Western Union?
00:27:56
Speaker
I'm not about messages.
00:27:58
Speaker
Here's what I take away from what Jeff did with his film and what I try to do with my films.
00:28:04
Speaker
I try to have people understand and relive an experience on the part of history that's long ago and far, far away.
00:28:11
Speaker
And to be able to see the imagery that Jeff found and put together of Montgomery, Alabama in the 40s and 50s, to me, speaks volumes to me of the life of that time and the period of that time, how people lived both black and white.
00:28:28
Speaker
And then also to be able to tell the story of this man, you know, Bill Traylor, who was born in 1853, I think, right, Jeff?
00:28:37
Speaker
You know, and who lived through slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Great Migration, but basically lived his whole life in a small section of Alabama.
00:28:47
Speaker
To me, that's a rich, evocative history that's important for people to connect to.
00:28:52
Speaker
Now, does it mean more to me probably than other people because I'm African-American and I'm a descendant?
00:28:59
Speaker
of African Americans who came from Mississippi and Georgia, absolutely.
00:29:03
Speaker
You know, it speaks volumes to me.
00:29:05
Speaker
It's sort of like what Jeff did with this film is the kind of feeling I have when I would go down to Mississippi and visit my family and I would feel this overwhelming sort of like connection to my ancestors.
00:29:20
Speaker
my cousins, my aunts, because they were all living in that soil, that Mississippi soil that was so complicated, both from a racial perspective and from an economic perspective, and understanding why many of my uncles and my own father left Mississippi for so-called better life in the North.
00:29:38
Speaker
So this film just speaks volumes to me because it connects me to my experience as an African American.
Commemorating Traylor's Legacy
00:29:46
Speaker
You know, one of the things that we're very pleased about, you see in the film about, you know, he was buried in an unmarked grave and we were able to mark the grave, but we've also been able to get a historical marker placed on the corner where he did his work in Montgomery.
00:30:02
Speaker
And now we're working on creating a Bill Traylor study center in Montgomery with Alabama State University so that the work that we did can be continued forward too.
00:30:15
Speaker
And there's a touching scene at the end of the film where you bring us along to this ceremony in Alabama, dedicating that new headstone for trailer.
00:30:24
Speaker
And it's this evocative moment of, I mean, really pointing toward that rising star of his well-fame, but the recognition of his accomplishments, his work and his talent and his story.
00:30:43
Speaker
Quite a nice way to close the film.
00:30:45
Speaker
But I wanted to ask, you've inserted throughout the film these short, maybe you could call them intermissions.
00:30:53
Speaker
They're these wonderful short scenes of a tap dancer interspersed with flashing images of pieces by trailer.
00:31:00
Speaker
Yeah.
00:31:14
Speaker
come from?
00:31:15
Speaker
Well, in general, I have actors playing roles as narrators, as storytellers.
00:31:24
Speaker
They're playing silhouettes of trailers.
00:31:26
Speaker
In some ways, they act out as silhouettes in the drawings.
00:31:30
Speaker
They perform readings from Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes.
00:31:36
Speaker
But the tap dancer...
00:31:39
Speaker
It was a history, you know, that started as a true historical moment where I went into the Warner Brothers archives and I found all these, you know, I found Bill Robinson, I found Snake Gips, you know, performing.
00:31:53
Speaker
And I realized that I couldn't really pay for those clips to have them in the movie anymore.
00:31:59
Speaker
And so one day I was watching Savion Glover dance and I realized that I could bring a dancer in and show him the work and he could kind of, with some rehearsal together, we could come up with some poses and ideas.
00:32:15
Speaker
So Jason Samuel Smith is the dancer.
00:32:17
Speaker
We spent about five hours on a stage going through stuff.
00:32:21
Speaker
He worked his butt off.
00:32:23
Speaker
And, you know, it's like one of those mistakes that happened in documentary, not mistakes, but like,
00:32:29
Speaker
you know, great moments where you weren't anticipating something and then it becomes sort of a centerpiece and that's how that happened.
00:32:38
Speaker
And, you know, but it couldn't have been done without somebody who was willing to sort of just dance and dance and dance until we got what we wanted.
00:32:47
Speaker
And then our cinematographer, Henry Adebujogo,
00:32:52
Speaker
Out of Bonojo.
00:32:53
Speaker
Bonojo.
00:32:54
Speaker
I can never get his name right.
00:32:56
Speaker
Bonojo.
00:32:59
Speaker
Shot it from a lot of different angles and created a lot of interesting sort of ways to incorporate it.
00:33:05
Speaker
So we were very pleased with all that.
00:33:08
Speaker
This may be a sore subject, but what's it been like releasing this film during COVID?
Film Release and Availability
00:33:14
Speaker
Well, you know, COVID has been a mixed bag.
00:33:19
Speaker
I mean, it's not great for the box office, but it's been amazing for getting people to look at it.
00:33:25
Speaker
I mean, Kino Lorber's did an amazing job.
00:33:29
Speaker
We've had 50 reviews at least and interviews and Film Forum has been a great engine in getting it out there.
00:33:41
Speaker
I mean, we probably have reached over a million, like on social media, we probably have a reach of over a million people.
00:33:50
Speaker
Is that because there's...
00:33:53
Speaker
I don't know why, but COVID hasn't, other than the financial side of it, COVID hasn't really been a detriment in any way.
00:34:02
Speaker
You know, people, you know, people,
00:34:05
Speaker
I didn't want to wait any longer.
00:34:06
Speaker
I waited a period of time and I figured, will people be any more willing to go into a theater in January than they are today?
00:34:14
Speaker
I don't think so.
00:34:17
Speaker
So here we are.
00:34:18
Speaker
And it's playing at the Film Forum right now and it's playing out in Sag Harbor and it's available on Kino Marquis virtually in about 50 theaters around the country.
00:34:28
Speaker
But the way Keynote Marquis works is you can pick any theater that you want to support and watch it through their platform.
00:34:35
Speaker
It's not like it has to be playing in your town or whatever.
00:34:39
Speaker
Right, right.
00:34:40
Speaker
Okay.
00:34:40
Speaker
So listeners, if you're interested in seeing the film, it is available.
00:34:44
Speaker
You can watch it.
00:34:46
Speaker
Even if you don't want to go to the theater right now, plenty of ways to see it.
00:34:52
Speaker
Anything that we missed?
00:34:54
Speaker
Anything you want to throw in before
Traylor's Creative Process: A Transcendental Moment
00:34:56
Speaker
we close here?
00:34:56
Speaker
Well, you know, I think, you know,
00:34:59
Speaker
one of the things that I think is important that we don't really solve, but like for an artist, what's that transcend transcendental moment where all that, you know, all your history and all your ancestry and all your memories kind of come together and you're able to force that out and pour it out the way he did over a three or four year period.
00:35:19
Speaker
And, you know, I think that's,
00:35:21
Speaker
one of the, you know, you ask what an artist is.
00:35:24
Speaker
I think that's one of the beauties of somebody like a Bill Triller is that this is sort of a phenomenon, you know, I mean.
00:35:31
Speaker
It just doesn't quite happen that way.
00:35:33
Speaker
Somebody, he lived between two worlds, rural and urban.
00:35:36
Speaker
He, you know, between industrialization and the, and the boll weevil blight, he was forced to, um, to move to Montgomery, lived homeless.
00:35:46
Speaker
I mean, it's sort of a, uh, you know, story.
00:35:49
Speaker
It's, it's, uh, truth being stranger than fiction in some, in some way, you know, so, um,
00:35:57
Speaker
I think people will really, you know, people so far really get a lot out of it.
00:36:00
Speaker
I think it's worth going to see.
00:36:02
Speaker
Go check it out.
00:36:03
Speaker
All right.
00:36:04
Speaker
Well, Jeffrey Wolf and Sam Pollitt, thank you so much for your time.
00:36:06
Speaker
Thank you very much, Ben.
00:36:07
Speaker
Thanks, Ben.
00:36:08
Speaker
The film is Bill Traylor, Chasing Ghosts in theaters, both physically and virtually right now.
00:36:14
Speaker
Today's episode was edited and produced by Sammy Delati.
00:36:18
Speaker
Our music is by Trap Rabbit.
00:36:19
Speaker
And I'm Ben Miller.