Tag Archives: Woody Guthrie

1913 Massacre — October Broadcast and November Streaming

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1913 Massacre, the documentary film I made with Ken Ross about the Italian Hall disaster, will air on WNMU-TV (Marquette, Michigan) at 9PM on Friday, October 30, as part of the Beaumier Heritage Documentary Series.

Then, for the whole month of November, everyone can stream the film from the WNMU-TV site. The film will also be available through the PBS Passport app.

The WNMU site links to this 2013 review by Bill Meyer in People’s World.

Seamless editing, engrossing interviews and a stirring well-integrated music soundtrack make the film flow like long lost friends catching up on history. Arlo makes the point early on that it was folk songs where people learned about working class history, such as this tragic event, that may have been forgotten to the world otherwise. This movie could be called a “folk movie” as it tells the story in the same dramatic and powerful manner. It joins the ranks of great progressive movies based on famous songs, that include Strange Fruit, about the song about lynchings written by Abel Meeropol and made famous by Billie Holliday, Alice’s Restaurant based on Arlo’s famous song, and Bill Moyer’s Amazing Grace, a probing study of the history of the classic hymn.

After the WNMU run, Ken and I plan to arrange online streaming through Vimeo and possibly Amazon Prime.

Two Upcoming Events In Marquette, Michigan

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On Saturday, December 5th, I’ll be at Save the Wild UP’s December Gala, where I’ve been invited to give the keynote.

Save the Wild UP is a great local grassroots organization dedicated to preserving and celebrating the nature and the culture of the Upper Peninsula. The people at Save the Wild UP (most of them are volunteers) do the work of educators, naturalists, social scientists, industry watchdogs and field guides all throughout the year, and I hear they throw a great party, too.

If you can’t make it to Steinhaus Market on the 5th, and even if you live far from Marquette or have never been to the Upper Peninsula, check out Save the Wild UP’s website, learn about the critical work they’re doing, and consider making an end-of-year, tax-deductible contribution to support their work.

I’ll post the text of my remarks here after I talk.

On Monday, December 7th, the Peter White Library in Marquette will be screening 1913 Massacre,, the feature length documentary film I made with Ken Ross about the Italian Hall disaster and the Woody Guthrie song it inspired. Part of the library’s DocuMonday series, the screening is free and open to the public. The film starts at 7PM and runs 70 minutes, and I’ll stick around afterwards to take questions, talk and say hi.

Hope to see you there.

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A Reply to Dan Blondeau

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When I sat down to reply to a comment from Dan Blondeau of Eagle Mine on my Mining Renaissance post, I found that I’d written what is, essentially, a new post. So I’m running my reply here instead of in the comments thread.

Here is Dan’s comment:

Louis and others commenting here – is there any way you would support mining anywhere? I highly doubt it. Large, long-life deposits are few and far between now. Smaller projects such as Eagle, Polymet and so on are becoming the typical scale of mining. Instead of just bashing the industry and focusing on events that happened decades ago, perhaps you could take a more positive and collaborative approach to your concerns. Thank you

Here’s my reply:

I take it that by “events that happened decades ago,” you are referring to the story told in my film 1913 Massacre. That story from what you correctly characterize as a bygone era of mining first drew me to the Upper Peninsula, and it would be dishonest or disingenuous to say that it doesn’t still color my thinking. But since completing that project I’ve tried to stay focused on what’s happening in the area now.

At the same time, the unresolved past and the present are not so easily kept apart. For example, the conversation after our screening of 1913 Massacre at the DeVos Art Museum last October went almost directly and without any prompting to the new mining up around Big Bay and across the Peninsula. I believe the film resonates with people in the UP (and in other parts of the country) not just because the immigrant experience it documents is the quintessential American experience, but also because the basic questions it raises are still very much alive today.

That aside, I am not sure why you read me as “bashing the industry” here. My post focused on sloppy and hopelessly compromised journalism. I don’t think of mining as something I would “support” or not support.  It would never occur to me to put it that way, and I’m not for or against mining per se. In some of my posts, especially those on Shefa Siegel’s work, I try to acknowledge mining’s crucial role in what Orwell calls “the metabolism of civilization”; and I’m trying to understand how bigger changes in the commodities markets and the global economic picture are driving the new mining around Lake Superior. But I also think it’s important to appreciate the real risks and the potential cost of copper and nickel mining operations in the Lake Superior watershed, and to question whether it really will create lasting prosperity for the UP or the Lake Superior region. Those are (for me) the big issues the new mining raises, and I think they are issues that any honest conversation about mining (or the development that mining brings) needs to take into account.

As I tried to suggest in my post, Kocazek just ignores them, and I wondered why she didn’t try to take them on – especially since she writes for a publication dedicated to water issues. And not just any publication: Circle of Blue, which was founded by J. Carl Ganter (who served as vice-chairman of the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on Water Security) and which has ties to – it is a “non-profit affiliate” of – the prestigious Pacific Institute.

As for taking “a more positive and collaborative approach,” I am all for it, or at least I am all for genuine collaboration. I don’t really know what a “positive…approach” would entail in this case apart from boosterism. As I say, I don’t consider myself a mining booster or a mining basher, but an observer, still (and no doubt always) an outsider, despite my many trips to the UP, exploring a place and trying my best to document what’s happening there. I’m open to having my views challenged and being shown where I am wrong or where there’s a better way to talk about or do things. (And for that reason I appreciate you taking the time to comment here.) I don’t think there can be any collaboration unless each party is willing and able to listen and – this is important – ready to yield to the other. In other words, listening goes beyond making concessions to the other in conversation: it means doing things differently in response to the other’s demands. (This is a theme I’ve been exploring in my posts on The Power of Asking, and one that I come up against over and over again when I write about mining issues.)

Am I often critical of what mining companies are doing in the UP and around Lake Superior? Sure, and I am troubled, as well, by the almost hubristic level of confidence the mining industry places in technology and engineering, even in the face of disasters like the Bingham Canyon collapse; its worrisome record on environmental and human rights issues nearly everywhere in the world mining is done; and the power and distorting influence it exerts on politicians and public debate – in the UP and elsewhere.

I still think there’s plenty of opportunity for collaboration and dialogue. If I did not, I would just call it quits; but giving up on dialogue is tantamount to giving up on people. In the area of human rights, for instance, I believe there’s still opportunity for collaboration around the Ruggie principles (despite the doubts I’ve expressed about them) and – in the Lake Superior region – around the United Nations Declaration on Indigenous Rights. Both frameworks (as well as the work done by the Lake Superior Binational Forum on Responsible Mining in the Lake Superior Basin) are decent places to start enumerating in a serious way the responsibilities and obligations that mining companies have in a region where human rights concerns and freshwater issues are intertwined.

In fact, I think genuine and ongoing collaboration on these efforts is essential, because I don’t think the mining industry can do it alone, or is the appropriate party to set the agenda here.

Would Llewyn Davis Ever “Kick Back”?

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About two-thirds of the way through the Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis, Llewyn returns to his sister Joy’s house, in Queens, to collect his Master Mates and Pilots License. He’s just been to visit his nearly catatonic father at Landfall, a sailor’s retirement home. He plans to give up folk music and ship out.

Llewyn discovers Joy in the kitchen with her son Danny, who’s eating a bowl of cereal.

“How is he?” asks Joy.

Llewyn
He’s great. Good to see what I have to look forward to.

Joy
What. Llewyn.

Llewyn
No I’m not kiddin. I’ve got it all figured out now.  Put in some hard years, yeah, but eventually ya get to kick back, get your food brought to ya, don’t even have to get up to shit.

Joy
Llewyn! Danny is sitting right here.

Joy may be appalled by Llewyn’s use of profanity in front of her six-year-old son, but she should also be thrown by his anachronistic use of “kick back.” I was, so much so that it took me a while to find my way back into the film, which up to that point had me in its spell.  I half expected Joy to ask her brother what “kick back” means, or is supposed to mean.

It’s 1961 when Llewyn walks into his sister’s kitchen in Queens. Merriam-Webster’s can find no instance of the expression “kick back” before 1972. (Even then, I’ll wager, it wasn’t in wide use.) The expression carries with it the breezy attitudes and hedonistic aspirations of 1970s California, not the earnest commitments of Gaslight folkies.

Is this just nitpicking? I’m of two minds on that question.

On the one hand, in a film of such obvious artistic merit, there ought to be someone combing through the dialogue for anachronisms and other false notes, so that audiences can stay with the picture.

The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane had even bigger problems suspending his disbelief: while he admires the “gleefully precise” ways in which production designer Jess Gonchor recreates 1961 Greenwich Village, he concludes that “something in the movie fails to grip”: Llewyn never looks “very down at the heel”; and the beauty of Bruno Delbonnel’s cinematography “hazes over the shabby desperation that…should plague the struggling artist.” Even Al Cody’s apartment, which he describes as a “dump…looks pretty neat and clean.”

Terri Thal, the ex-wife of Dave Van Ronk, the West Village folk icon whose biography inspired the Coen Brothers’ film, also notes that “the apartments are remarkably clean: No one I knew could keep soot out of apartments.” She wanted to see “roaches” and “fallen plaster.” (The American movie industry never seems willing or able to go there.) On a more serious note, Thal also finds it beyond any measure of credibility that Llewyn can sit down with a “respectable” doctor and casually discuss an illegal abortion: the only woman Dave Van Ronk impregnated, she writes, “rode a bike down several flights of stairs to get rid of his fetus.” Her situation was that desperate.

On the other hand, holding Inside Llewyn Davis to strict standards of historical authenticity will only end up limiting our experience of the film, which is as much a re-telling of Homer’s Odyssey as a hard-luck story from the early 1960s. Part of the film’s magic lies in the way it discovers one of the Western world’s most ancient and most persistent narratives in Llewyn’s lonesome wanderings. This gives the film a magical-realist grace that neo-realist grit could never provide.

llewynsubwayA cat named Ulysses guides Llewyn to an underworld and seems, at one point, to offer a real chance at redemption. But Llewyn doesn’t take it. There’s no direction home, and no chance our hero will ever have the leisure or the luxury of just kicking back.

David Bromberg, who played with Van Ronk, put it simply: you’ve got to suffer if you want to sing the blues.

Labor Day, 2013: Will Big Mining Do Better This Time Around?

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On Labor Day, I’ll be in New York City, so I won’t be able to see the television broadcast premiere of 1913 Massacre on Twin Cities Public Television. How many will tune in? How will the broadcast cut of the film look and play on TV? Above all, I wonder, what connections will the Labor Day TV audience draw between 1913 and 2013? My comments here run this holiday weekend on MinnPost.

Many people Ken and I met in mining towns around Lake Superior while filming 1913 Massacre urged us to see the positive contributions the mining companies had made to the region. Some insisted that the Woody Guthrie song that had introduced me to the story of the Italian Hall disaster and brought me to Calumet and the Upper Peninsula in the first place had gotten it all wrong. The greedy bosses, company thugs and violent social strife that Woody sang about in “1913 Massacre” did not fit the story they knew. “We all got along just fine,” they protested.

When the mines were running, the towns thrived. The big department stores downtown were open. The churches (and the bars) were packed to capacity. Everybody worked hard and the work was sometimes dangerous, but on Saturday nights, the streets were jammed and the atmosphere festive. The company put a roof over your head then sold you the house at terms you could manage. The copper bosses built libraries, sidewalks and schools, gave land grants for churches, and even furnished luxuries like bathhouses and public swimming pools. The men who ran the mines weren’t just robber barons from Boston; they were public benefactors.

But there were limits to their benevolence. The mining captains regarded the immigrant workers – Finns, Slavs, Italians — as charges placed in their paternal care. They knew what was best for these new arrivals. They discouraged organizing. Faced with strikes on the Iron Range in 1907 or on the Keweenaw in 1913, they adamantly refused to negotiate, brought in scabs to do the work and Waddell and Pinkerton men to deal (often brutally) with the strikers. Even after the tragic events of 1913, Calumet and Hecla Mining Company would not recognize the union for decades.

The Keweenaw miners were on strike again in 1968 when C & H made a calculated business decision to pull out. No more jobs, pensions cut short; the good times were over. They left the waters poisoned and the landscape littered with industrial wreckage and toxic mine tailings.

The companies driving the new mining boom around Lake Superior these days promise to do better. They are dedicated to corporate social responsibility. They practice “sustainable” mining, tout their environmental stewardship and declare their respect for human rights. They have community outreach programs and promise to make substantial, long-term investments in the economic development of the regions where they come to mine. They work closely – some would say too closely – with regulators to create environmental impact statements and plan for responsible closure of their mines. They are eager to gain social license.

For the most part, these big multinationals operate with the support of organized labor and politicians who want to create jobs — and what politician doesn’t want to do that? But the high-paying, highly-technical mining jobs are unlikely to go to local residents; and the new mining is likely to have detrimental effects on local economies, as the economist Thomas M. Power has shown in studies of Michigan and Minnesota. Mining may provide some short-term jobs, but it can also drive away creative professionals and knowledge workers, destroy entrepreneurial culture, diminish quality of life and damage long-term economic vitality.

So promises of good times and plentiful jobs need to be treated with circumspection. Polymet has repeatedly scaled back its job predictions for its huge, open-pit sulfide mining project near Hoyt Lakes, Minnesota, and the company’s own figures suggest that only 90 of the promised 360 jobs – just 25% — will go to local communities. Local is, moreover, a relative term. Mine workers today tend not to live in mining towns; they will commute an hour or more to work. And hiring will always be subject to swings in metals prices, which are now dependent on two new factors: continued Chinese growth (and urbanization) and the entry of big financial firms into metals warehousing and trading.

There are limits to big mining’s benevolence as well. The last time I flew into Marquette airport, a glossy Rio Tinto poster advertised the company’s commitment to “build, operate and close Eagle Mine responsibly.” Nobody had bothered to take the sign down after Rio Tinto had done an about-face and sold Eagle, a few months earlier, to Vancouver-based Lundin Mining for dimes on the dollar. Rio Tinto’s commitments lasted only until it was time to flip their property. Overnight, Eagle Mine had become a “non-core asset” and the surrounding community none of Rio Tinto’s responsibility.

In Wisconsin, Gogebic Taconite has drawn the line between company and community much more starkly, with help from a paramilitary firm called Bulletproof Securities. Black-masked guards, dressed in camouflage and armed with semi-automatic weapons, protect the mining company’s property from trespassers and environmental protesters. Imagine what they might do in the event of a strike.

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Bulletproof Securities patrols Gogebic Taconite’s property in northern Wisconsin.

Public Television and Public Life – A Note from the Road

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Cross-posted from my blog at 1913 Massacre:

We’ve just completed a short tour of the Upper Peninsula, taking 1913 Massacre from Houghton to Ontonagon to Marquette. After each screening of the film, we take questions and comments from the audience. All sorts of things come up in those conversations. People see themselves or their own town in the Calumet story. They make connections between the past and the present, between what happened in Calumet to what’s happening right now in the UP, in Michigan and all around the country. In Ontonagon, one audience member came away from the film thinking about garment factories in Bangladesh; in Marquette, we talked about courage, resilience and how long it takes communities to recover from social catastrophe, among other things. We learn something new with every conversation.

Though the questions, insights and topics may vary, the thing that most impresses me about all these Q&A sessions — no matter the size of the audience or the setting — is the most easily overlooked: the gathering of the audience and the shared experience of seeing the film, together, creates an opportunity for public conversation.

That’s why I’m always a little thrown when someone raises his hand in one of these public gatherings to ask whether we’ve approached PBS with our film or whether 1913 Massacre will air on public television. There are other versions of the same question. Will the film be at Sundance? Will it be on HBO? Wouldn’t it lend itself to feature film treatment? Have we approached Steven Speilberg or — name your favorite Hollywood mogul or celebrity. But the PBS question is the one we get most frequently.

The simple answer is, of course we approached PBS, Independent Lens, POV, and so on, repeatedly, for funding and grants while working on the film; and of course we are still making efforts to bring the film to wider audiences. PBS, or some part of the public broadcasting system, might offer an opportunity to do that.

That, at least, is an answer that gets us past talking about the movie business and the business prospects of our film and back to the film itself and the experience of the film we all just shared.

I realize that the PBS question and others like it show appreciation and support for the film: it’s a way of wishing us success, or a way of saying that other people, friends, family, lots of people, millions of PBS viewers should see our film. They should, with any luck they will, and it’s good to hear others hope they do.

At the same time it’s worth asking why the PBS question comes up so often, and more importantly why the question seems odd and entirely out of place at a public gathering and in a public forum. Would a PBS broadcast give our film a seal of approval it lacks? Would an Oscar? Would Steven Speilberg? Maybe, but why should any of that matter right now? We’re not approaching Speilberg: we’re approaching you. What do you say? What do others in the room have to say? Why look elsewhere? Why wait for permission? What about the approval 1913 Massacre already received, just now, right here in this room? What about the experience we all just shared? Surely we haven’t exhausted that — and surely that counts for something, for much more.

We’re here together, right now, in this room. Let’s appreciate and own it, and make the most of the opportunity we have. Let’s forget about the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and every other kind of corporate gatekeeper. Let’s not await a word from our sponsor or even admit them into the room. Let’s not diminish the present moment and our experience — a public experience, an experience of being together, in public. Let’s not look for validation or value beyond this room: we have it all, right here.

You see where this is heading. There are lessons in all this about the power people and communities have and the power we surrender, every day and for no good reason, to outside authorities, influencers and exploiters — to powerful institutions, brand names, celebrities, big money. These gatherings in small towns, in classrooms, halls and clubs, in local theaters and public libraries may look modest, but they give us a chance to exercise our habit for democracy.

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People gather in the Community Room at the Peter White Library in Marquette for a screening of 1913 Massacre.

That’s why, in the end, television broadcast can’t hold a candle to public screenings like the ones we’ve had and will continue to have. Television is not just a poor substitute for community gatherings and public life. It pulls us away from those things and from each other. Watching television is a retreat from public gathering — a withdrawal into the privacy of one’s own. In this sense, “public television” is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms.

There’s an aesthetic dimension to this as well. Our film, all film, plays best on a big screen, with a live audience. People laugh and cry together, some gasp, some cough (somebody always coughs), others sigh, shift in their seats. Applause brings everyone together at the end. (Booing and jeering would do the trick, too, but with 1913 Massacre we’ve so far been spared that experience.) These emotions, actions and reactions are an under-appreciated but essential part of the motion, or kinesis, of the cinematic experience. Films come alive — that’s the right word, alive — when people gather to see them; and when people share in public conversation what they’ve seen, they have a special chance to see each other, anew, on the other side of a new experience.

A woman in the audience in Houghton seemed to understand all this when she rose from her seat and exclaimed: “this film should be shown in every small town across the country!” If only we could make that happen.

Moses Called The First Strike

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Cross-posted from my blog at 1913 Massacre:

People from all parts of Europe made their way to Calumet at the end of the nineteenth and the start of the twentieth centuries. The copper-mining town attracted so many immigrants — Germans, Italians, Croatians, Slovenians, Cornish, Irish, Swedes, Norwegians — that it’s sometimes jokingly referred to as “the smelting pot.” Finns would eventually outnumber them all.

Many who came here from Finland to work in the mines and start a new life also brought with them, or quickly became versed in, dangerous ideas. In 1913, Finns were known as agitators, radicals, socialists. They organized in Keweenaw mining communities and in Hancock they published a newspaper called Tyomies, or The Workingman. Even their preachers espoused the social gospel, railing from the pulpit against the unfair treatment and indignities the miners endured, and advocating a more just ordering of society.

Most of the men, women and children killed at Italian Hall on Christmas Eve, 1913 were Finnish-Americans. They were not all agitators and strikers or strikers’ wives and children; in fact, we interviewed people whose families were firmly against the strike and wanted the Western Federation of Miners run out of town, but nevertheless lost children in the mayhem at the Hall. The tragedy cut across the divisions of the strike even as it deepened some of them and created new ones.

A wreath-laying ceremony in Calumet yesterday to honor the Italian Hall dead included a delegation from Finland. The ceremony was part of this year’s FinnFest, an annual celebration of Finnish-American heritage and culture. (1913 Massacre is screening twice at FinnFest.) The Turun Metsankavijat Wind Band played the Finnish and American national anthems along with other, solemn music.

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Before the wreaths were laid by David Geisler, Calumet Village President, and Pertti Torstila, Finland’s Secretary of State in the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, Reverend Robert Langseth delivered an invocation.

Langseth began quietly. He acknowledged each official on stage, then talked about the Finnish preacher who had led his parish during the strike of 1913-1914. After a pause, he thundered out the words of a sermon delivered a century ago:

MOSES called the first strike! Against the Pharoah.

Then he began to elaborate on his social gospel theme. Langseth cited the book of Micah —

What does The Lord require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy,
and to walk humbly with your God.

— and he spoke eloquently and passionately about justice and the need for reconciliation. It was beautiful. People in the crowd were visibly moved and weeping. The ceremony had invited us to mourn and honor the dead. Reverend Langseth was asking us to do even more: to respect and honor each other.

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People’s History is Alive

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Cross-posted from 1913 Massacre.
I love this tweet:

This is from the Twitter account of Voices of a People’s History.

I suspect it was posted partly in response to David Greenberg’s vituperative account of Howard Zinn’s life and work in The New Republic. Greenberg portrays Zinn as a deeply flawed, philandering charlatan, who didn’t keep pace with work in his own field, and kept “aloof from the intellectual ferment of the seminar rooms, journal offices, and conferences where radical history was being born.” As for Zinn’s best-selling A People’s History of the United States, Greenberg dismisses it as “a pretty lousy piece of work.”

Zinn has always had his detractors and defenders, and plenty of people have risen to his defense. (Clement Lime wrote one of the stronger responses to Greenberg, I think.) It’s interesting to think that our film might have a place in the conversation.

But that’s not what I like so much about this tweet. If there’s one thing we discovered about “people’s history” in the course of making our film, it’s that people’s history is alive. History lives and breathes in people; their memories, the stories they tell, the songs they sing, the photographs they cherish — all those things aren’t just artifacts or objects of study, even if historians say they are.

History is at work in everything people do — and in a place like Calumet, where past troubles were never really laid to rest, history can work in mysterious ways. People talk about the past in order to talk about the present; and if they do not want to talk about the past it will find a way to assert itself in the present. People may see in the past some faint image of ourselves and our lives, but more importantly we carry the past with us; it’s our constant companion. It comforts us and causes us pain; it can be a source of pride or shame, pleasure or remorse. It can entrap us and enrich us.

People’s history is alive not because there are historians who study it, but because, like it or not, deny it or embrace it, study it or try to forget it, it’s our story.

It’s 1913 Again in Michigan

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Crossposted from 1913massacre.com

I’ve run across a few people drawing connections between the Italian Hall disaster and the school shooting yesterday in Newtown, Connecticut (e.g., here). Maybe listening to Woody’s song helps people register Newtown’s loss, or the horror of Newtown helps us understand a little better what it must have been like for the Italian Hall parents and the Calumet community as a whole in 1913. But beyond that I don’t think there’s a very meaningful connection to be made.

It is, however, worth reflecting on what happened in Calumet in December of 1913 and what’s happening in Michigan right now. This week, the Michigan legislature — without allowing much debate or deliberation, and over the protests of thousands — handed Governor Rick Snyder a bill making Michigan a “right to work” state. They added insult to injury a couple of days later when they passed Emergency Manager Legislation that Michigan voters had rejected on November 6th. This one-two punch is supposed to remedy Michigan’s economic woes and get the state back on the road to recovery. It looks more like a last-minute power grab before the next legislature is seated, enabled by another big-money subversion of democratic process.

Indeed, a provocative piece by labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein published last week cast the “right to work” legislation in Michigan as part of a “coup.” Lichtenstein sees here “a serious defeat not only for the unions but for the very idea of social solidarity.”

this conflict is about something far bigger — the meaning of solidarity, a way of feeling and thinking about the world of work that is the basis not just of the union idea, but of a humane cooperative society.

I am not entirely persuaded by Lichtenstein’s argument: I just don’t think the “idea of social solidarity” goes down in “defeat” so easily.

It was under attack in Calumet in 1913. The Christmas party at the Hall was itself an exhibition of solidarity, six months into a brutal strike. And after the Christmas Eve tragedy, the town came together, again, to mourn. They grieved, but they didn’t give up, even after they lost their bid to unionize and the strike was over. As Joe Krainatz says in our film, “They did go on. They did survive. They raised their families. They went to work in the mines again.” And what’s most remarkable is that they rebuilt their community; their feeling of solidarity and shared humanity survived even the closing of the mines and the ruin that came in its wake.

Maybe the lesson of Calumet is that human solidarity runs deep. Money and power have never really won out over it. So far, I haven’t seen any white flags waving in Michigan.

Bringing 1913 Massacre Back to Calumet

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Cross posted from my blog at 1913massacre.com

I still haven’t managed to find out exactly what George Stoney said about bringing a documentary film back to the place where it was shot, but Deanna Kamiel was kind enough to share her notes on remarks Stoney made on the topic at the “Tribute to George Stoney” in October of 2008 at the IFC Center.

On that occasion, Stoney showed an excerpt from Uprising of ‘34, and talked about some of the responses that the film’s subjects – the people in the film – had when he showed it to them. “It is right as a filmmaker,” Kamiel reports Stoney as having said on that occasion, “that you should be able to bring your film back to your subject.”

“Right”: that word from Deanna’s notes intrigues me most. It puts the emphasis on the filmmakers’ relationship with the subject and the moral onus on the filmmaker. It’s less about truth-telling — whatever that means when talking about documentary film — than it is about respect. It seems almost to suggest that bringing a film back to the people it represents re-establishes some order (some “right relationship”) that filmmaking can too often disrupt. Films are not, in this way of thinking, a matter of “taking” someone’s picture, but instead of establishing a relationship in which you are able to bring the film back to them – giving back, not just taking. The film could be a gift, just a way of restoring the moving image to its subject.

So today we flew to the Upper Peninsula, to bring our film, 1913 Massacre, back to its subject – the town of Calumet, Michigan. We are showing the film tomorrow at the Calumet Theatre and then again on Saturday. Many of the people who appear in our film will be there. And I am wondering about how this exchange will work. I am not expecting anything like a sense of closure or resolution. I am not sure what to expect.

As we walked around the town today it felt so eerily familiar, and somehow both real and imagined, actual and remembered, a story and a place, filled with the sights and voices and the sounds that are in our film (the sign outside Bill’s Electrical squeaking as it sways, the wind coming off the lake that so often made recording sound difficult, the rumble of an old truck making its way down Fifth Street). It doesn’t feel like an exaggeration to say that, for me at least, the place now feels a little haunted by the film we shot here.

I’m ready to admit that this might just be the confusion of our first day in town, and I’m wondering how we and, more importantly, 1913 Massacre will be received in the days to come. I suppose we will find out if we got it right, or at least if some people think we got some things right.

Updates on the Calumet screenings of 1913 Massacre here and here.