Alice Embree : Anne Lewis' New Website Brings Austin Movement History to Life

Filmmaker Anne Lewis' new website is called Austin Beloved Community.

'Austin Beloved Community':
Anne Lewis' new website
brings movement history to life

'This was designed as cooperative and experimental. It’s really a community organizing art project.'

By Alice Embree / The Rag Blog / November 19, 2013

Austin Beloved Community is a gift. Movement history comes alive in a digital collage of collective memory -- audio, film, photos and maps, and a rich diversity of local recollection.

This website is a gift from Anne Lewis. Lewis makes documentary film. Notably, she was associate director/assistant camera for Harlan County, U.S.A, the Academy Award-winning documentary about a coal country strike. Her most recent work is Anne Braden: Southern Patriot. In this film, Lewis documents the life of a woman praised as “eloquent and prophetic” by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in his 1963 Letter from Birmingham Jail.

Anne Lewis came to Austin in 1998 and teaches her film craft at the University of Texas at Austin. She hardly limits herself to teaching. She can often be seen behind a camera at marches or demonstrations or without a camera holding a picket sign.

As an executive board member of the Texas State Employees Union (TSEU-CWA 6186), she is at the forefront of a current struggle against the University’s plan to downsize, consolidate, and outsource jobs -- a plan that would further corporatize the academic community.

I interviewed Anne Lewis about her recently launched website -- what she calls “a journey through time and memory.” Lewis, who also is a contributor to The Rag Blog, describes the site as “a shared space between organizations, artists, and all who hold close ideas of liberation, equality, and just society.” She reaches back to the 1880s and takes you forward to the present. She even includes a Google map that pinpoints where events occurred and organizations were born.

This is not Austin from the point of view of SXSW or Formula 1 promoters. This is the history of the struggle for social justice told by participants who know that the struggle isn’t over.

Anne Lewis.

Alice Embree: You’ve been in Austin since 1998. Can you tell us what brought you here?

Anne Lewis: Jim [Branson] and I were living in Whitesburg, Kentucky (1,499 people and one grouch) and had a young son. The Texas State Employees Union wanted Jim to come to work as an organizer for the union. I had been [producing films] with Appalshop for 15 years. I could bring my work with me, and the idea of a change seemed good. We were typical Appalachian migrants -- jobs, school, city life -- and we moved as much of our family here as we could, but if we could have gone back every weekend, we would have.

You cover a lot of hidden history -- African Americans, Chicanos, women, the LGBTQ community, labor organizers. How did you get so much input?

This was designed as cooperative and experimental. It’s really a community organizing art project. The project began by picking the kind of folks you name -- their organizations -- and asking each to contribute five uprisings or victories in Austin that mattered to them. We added a number of individuals. People and organizations are on the about page. That meant that we got everything from Homer the Homeless Goose to Mooning the Klan to convict labor at the Capitol and Lady LULAC.

I deliberately put priority on African American, Chicano, Women, LGBTQ, working class organizations -- and made rules for myself like no national organizations unless the Austin chapter was strong and independent, no group on campus, no political groups, no primarily service organizations. I managed to keep myself non-judgmental on events. Anything that was a people’s uprising or victory went on the map. Also I decided not to even try to build a database. I wanted it to be subjective, quirky, open-minded, and fun.

Your work has been with film -- as director, producer, cameraperson and teacher. What prompted you to create a website?

Well I’m not much of a cameraperson but the rest hold. I hate websites -- all those little boxes and all those tabs inside of tabs. I don’t like the idea of clicking as interactivity and I don’t really enjoy choosing my own adventure. Huge qualities of factual information leave me cold and anxious. But on the other hand I knew a wonderful visual artist, Jeanne Stern, and wanted to work with Tom Hammond’s style of tonal shifts of wind for sound design.

I also wanted to bring Anne Braden’s ideas to Austin without driving myself crazy trying to market the film and make people show it. The City of Austin helped fund the Anne Braden film, and helped fund this project as well. So in many ways the start was an animation film idea with social justice events over time as folks remembered them and a tie to Anne Braden’s ideas. The rest developed from the process of arriving at content -- organizations and mapped events, still photographs, a calendar to give back.

I know people will tell you about history that was left out. Is there a way to make this an ongoing effort?

It is already. It’s strange to say this but I want to hear from people about what I left out and what needs correcting. It’s fun doing it. The movement history is still growing. All I need is date, place, event, and a paragraph or link and it can go up. The organizational map is similar. The calendar of events is current. People need to send their events to me though -- especially the strange stuff that goes on here. The stars on the organizations are still slowly lighting up. Resistencia and PODER are the only ones on right now. Then there’s a Facebook page.

What do you hope people learn from viewing Austin Beloved Community?

To trust their own experience. To remember the good stuff and share it around. To join in community. I guess none of that is learning like reading a book (which would be a very good thing to do right now) but I’m getting way too touchy-feely already and hesitate to talk about a city that so many other people know so much better.

If you only browse this site briefly, I suggest you go to Justice Animation. There is a link to a gallery of photos, including the Birth of The Rag. Then watch the short video. Turn the sound on. It begins in silence, but will soon surprise you. Some time in the future, when you are feeling hopeless about what can be done, watch it again.

[Alice Embree, a contributing editor to The Rag Blog, is a long-time Austin activist, organizer, and member of the Texas State Employees Union. A veteran of SDS and the women's liberation movement, Alice is a former staff member of the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) and of underground newspapers The Rag in Austin and RAT in New York. She now co-chairs the Friends of New Journalism. Read more articles by Alice Embree on The Rag Blog.]

• Listen to Thorne Dreyer's February 22, 2013, Rag Radio interview with documentary filmmaker Anne Lewis.

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Anne Lewis : Corporate Crime Scene in West, Texas

Putting on the makeup. Television reporter on the scene at the fertilizer plant explosion in West Texas, Thursday, April 18, 2013. Photo by Patrick Bresnan / The Rag Blog.

Getting the picture:
Corporate crime scene in West, Texas

How do we avoid the news story framework that gives us nothing but heroes and victims when tragedy strikes? How can those narratives, as seductive as they may be, possibly move us towards an honest search for the truth?

By Anne Lewis / The Rag Blog / April 30, 2013

See a gallery of photos by Patrick Bresnan, Below.

AUSTIN -- This is about the fertilizer explosion in West, Texas, on the night of April 17, 2013. It’s also about Patrick Bresnan who found himself in West on the night of the explosion and his photographs in the aftermath of the tragedy.

Governor Perry called it a crime scene; the progressive community says, yes, corporate crime. Neither the paranoid fantasy of Governor Perry who is stuck in an ideology that says that companies can do no wrong, nor the abstract politics of progressives blaming the state’s lack of regulation -- “We shouldn’t produce fertilizer anyway because it’s not good for the planet,” I overheard in a coffee shop -- seem to get at any real truth.

I ask myself the question: how one can be kind and dignified in the face of such sorrow and loss? I try to collect myself and cannot help but think about the Central Appalachian coalfields.

The dangers of coal mining both for the environment and the workers permeated my senses. I was married to an underground coal miner. I knew not to have an argument before he went to work. He might not come back. And we would patch things up, even when we shouldn’t have.

Time slowed in the hour that I expected him to come home. The most intimate relationship was distorted by the fear of injury and death. Then Rocky Peck, a young miner with a wife and daughter who wrote the song that ended my film about the Massey strike, was killed in a non-union mine three years after the strike was lost and the film was completed.

I saw raw footage of mining disasters -- family members waiting for loved ones who would not come out alive, calling to God for comfort, the exhausted children. I heard statements of attempted compassion by local mine managers who opened their offices to suffering families but protected the absent company, denying information and economic aid and never accepting guilt by apologizing.

I remember an eloquent piece by Michael Kline, a radio story with Sarah Koznoski who lost her husband in the Mannington, West Virginia, mine explosion in 1968. Seventy-eight men were buried alive. Michael asked Sarah to describe every moment of the last day with her husband.

That was all. There was no mention of Consolidation Coal Company, still the largest underground mining company in the U.S., or the corrupt United Mine Workers union that said Consolidation was a safe company after the explosion, or the lack of regulation or protection by the government. There was just Sarah’s voice describing an ordinary day with her husband. And it was enough.

Then came the rage. “They didn’t want us to know what was going on in their damn dirty filthy mines,” another of the widows would tell us five years later. Those seven widows, who refused the $10,000 death money from Consolidation Coal Company, organized a response across the coalfields. Coalminers and their communities rose up from the grassroots. They reclaimed their union for the rank and file, and they forced the new laws and regulations that have saved countless lives.

Field of first response. Triage area, West, Texas. Wednesday, April 17, 2013. Photo by Patrick Bresnan/ The Rag Blog.

We have heard none of these things from West -- none of the deep sorrow, none of the purposeful rage, no clear expression of collective purpose -- that this will never happen to other people in another community, especially not to those most loved in any community -- the firefighters and first responders. Perhaps it’s just too soon.

Patrick’s experience in West began the warm evening of the explosion. A European film director had wanted to document the last day of life of a young black man who was next on the Texas execution list. Patrick traveled to Waco to locate the man’s family and ask them to participate in the film. He was using the Internet at Starbucks when he saw a steady stream of ambulances and heard about a huge explosion in a nearby town. He drove to West.

There he found himself stalled in a traffic jam filled with ambulances, emergency responders, police, firefighters, people who had come from as far away as three hundred miles to help. A call had gone out to bring needed wheelchairs to the community center and community people waited to get through, wheelchairs in the backs of pickups.

Some tried to reach relatives in the community center but only the injured and the elderly were allowed in. Patrick described the smell of heavy chemicals and urine. 133 patients had been evacuated from the West Rest Haven Nursing Home and there was no way to help them use the bathroom.

He decided to see if he could get pictures of the fire and drove to the part of town that had been evacuated. He began to walk towards the fire but the air was hot. It was windy and so heavy with chemicals that he was forced to turn around. Patrick returned to his truck, took off his shirt, and went to sleep.

Wednesday morning was cold and rainy. By the time Patrick got back to the community center, most of the firefighters had left. Then a mass of new people descended on the town -- roaming the streets, doing their makeup and practicing their lines out loud, “Live from West, Texas -- a town that will never be the same. This small tightly-knit community,” over and over. Anderson Cooper popped up and Patrick succumbed like many others and took a photograph of himself with Cooper.

Succumbing to the celebrity presence! Photographer Bresnan takes his own picture with CNN's Anderson Cooper. Photo by Patrick Bresnan / The Rag Blog.

Patrick didn’t see reporters doing any kind of research or having serious interviews with local people. They were in West to do their makeup and read a few contrived lines to the camera. At the West Cattle Auction the media appeared to him like a group of animals. Patrick returned a week later to take a few additional pictures and attend the memorial. He told me of a Catholic priest who spoke from the heart about what had happened, but nobody mentioned the fertilizer plant.

At about that time I was on a shuttle bus at the Austin airport coming home from a weekend trip. The Latina shuttle bus driver announced, “Welcome home.” A woman on the bus said that she had no home to return to, that she lived in West. She pulled out a newspaper with before-and-after pictures and pointed to her house which was within the 1,500 foot blast perimeter. She had been at a far off hospital visiting her son who had been shot in Afghanistan when the explosion occurred.

When another woman on the bus asked if the plant was old and dilapidated, the woman said she really didn’t remember. It had always been there. She was just glad that her family had survived. She would go home to look for her missing cat. As she got off the shuttle bus, the driver gave her a big hug and handed her all of her tip money. She said, “Take it” and the woman did.

How do we avoid the news story framework that gives us nothing but heroes and victims when tragedy strikes? How can those narratives, as seductive as they may be, possibly move us towards an honest search for the truth? The patriotic frenzy, the flag waving, the church going and singing of popular songs don’t come close to the pictures of mine disasters that stay in my mind’s eye. Patrick’s pictures, as scattered and spontaneous as they may be, seem to get closer to the truth than endless newspaper images of worship and sorrow.

Media gathered at the West Auction House, West, Texas, Thursday, April 18, 2013. Photo by Patrick Bresnan / The Rag Blog.

Thirteen people worked at the fertilizer plant in West, but we have heard nothing about them. The news talks about a close-knit community with few jobs, but I’m quite sure that many more livelihoods and lives were damaged at the nursing home, apartment complex, and three damaged schools.

Why didn’t the workers at the fertilizer plant complain about the danger they experienced every day at work and the potential disaster that their work imposed on the community? Was it alienation from their own lives, a lack of power over their own safety, a misplaced loyalty or belief in the power of a supposedly benevolent boss?

The plant had 250 tons of ammonium nitrate on site last year -- that’s more than a thousand times the trigger limit for oversight. That deadly factory somehow remained invisible to those who might have intervened.

What about the farmers in this “close knit community”? Surely they were aware of the dangers of the product they purchased and the conditions of its manufacture. Then there’s the religious factory owner who, we read, purchased the plant as an economic contribution to the community. Patrick couldn’t help but compare him to the young man on death row who was the cause of his trip to Waco. That man killed one security guard in comparison to the deaths of 14 people and more than a hundred injured including a child who was playing on a nearby playground when the blast blew him four feet in the air and broke his ribs.

The factory owner hired a Dallas public relations firm to represent him as he opened the doors of his church for the mourning residents of West and spoke through an outside source of his own broken heart.

A coal mine manager once said in one of my films, “If what we are doing in eastern Kentucky is wrong, then the whole country is wrong.” One could say the same about the murderous explosion in West, Texas. There’s something very rotten in our mistaken loyalties to companies over neighbors, our dependence on paternalism for our safety, our willed ignorance, the sacrifices we make to the dollar. Ultimately we all share some part of responsibility for what happened in West, Texas.

I think about the power of transformation, knowing that it must come from rage, knowledge, and love. I believe that deep within the community of West and our own, an independent, courageous, and collective voice can emerge to shake the foundations of what must change.

[Anne Lewis, a senior lecturer at the University of Texas and a member of TSEU-CWA Local 6186 and NABET-CWA, is an independent filmmaker associated with Appalshop. She is co-director of Anne Braden: Southern Patriot, associate director of Harlan County, U.S.A, and the producer/director of Fast Food Women, To Save the Land and People, Morristown: in the air and sun, and a number of other social issue and cultural documentaries. Her website is annelewis.org. Read more articles by and about Anne Lewis at The Rag Blog.]

Some of the photos accompanying this article were also published, under the name Otis Ike, in a gallery at the Austin Chronicle.

The next morning. House in West, Texas, Thursday, April 8, 2013. Photos by Patrick Bresnan / The Rag Blog.

School in West, Texas, Thursday, April 23, 2013.

Evacuation area, Thursday, April 18, 2013.

Missing dog sign. Thursday, April 23, 2013.

Car and flag. Thursday, April 23, 2013.

Residents respond to call for wheelchairs. Wednesday, April 17, 2013.

Memorial service at Church of the Assumption, Thursday, April 18, 2013.

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INTERVIEW / Jonah Raskin : Documentary Filmmakers Doug Hecker and Christopher Oscar Dish on 'Junk Food News'

Documentary filmmakers Christopher Oscar, left, and Doug Hecker.

Doug Hecker and Christopher Oscar:
Documentary filmmakers on media,
civil liberties, and 'Project Censored'

“The corporate rules are simple: tell the news the way you're told to tell the news or ratings will decline and you'll be out of a job.” -- Doug Hecker, Co-Producer, Co-Director, Co-Writer, 'Project Censored: The Movie'

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / April 18, 2013

Filmmaker, Doug Hecker, 47, was born and raised in San Francisco, California. His pal and cinematic collaborator, Christopher Oscar, 42, hails from Montclair, New Jersey.

Six years ago, they met in the town of Sonoma, California, and ever since then -- with time off for good behavior -- they’ve worked on a documentary about the media watchdog group, Project Censored, founded by Carl Jensen in the wake of Watergate.

Hecker and Oscar are both college grads and they’re both the kinds of grads that teachers will practically die for -- which means they’re committed to critical thinking, life-long learning, and social responsibility.

When they graduated from college -- Oscar from C.W. Post University on Long Island, New York, Hecker from Sonoma State University in California -- their studies just began.

Their new 60-minute documentary, Project Censored: The Movie, Ending the Reign of Junk Food News, informs, entertains, and riles up citizen activists, too, about the loss of civil liberties in the United States today and the rise of what they regard as a police state.

The talking heads who speak in the movie -- historian Howard Zinn, all-around gadfly Noam Chomsky, poet Amiri Baraka, UCLA Professor Nora Barrows-Freeman, and more -- make far more sense than the talking heads on ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox.

“Human consciousness,” Zinn says “is hard to fathom, but every so often it breaks to the surface.” Hecker and Oscar know that the media puts humanity to sleep all day and all night, and that the media can also wake humanity from its slumber.

Mickey Huff, the current director of Project Censored, points out that there’s more information available these days thanks to the Internet, but that, paradoxically, there’s also greater misinformation. Movie producer, director, and cinematographer Haskell Wexler suggests that in our peculiar form of democracy, Americans may not want to known the truth. Hecker and Oscar hope that’s not true.

Their rousing picture about Project Censored and the state of the media in America today is also a wake-up call to viewers sickened by the steady diet of junk food news dished out by corporate media.

The interview with both Hecker and Oscar took place two days after I saw their movie.

 

Jonah Raskin: Can you say something about an exact moment when the proverbial light went on in your head?

Doug Hecker: The light went on for me when I was enrolled in communications classes. As a student in Project Censored, we constantly discussed the spin that corporate media uses when reporting the news.

Christopher Oscar: For me, it was when I was an investigative journalism major and writing a story about the fact that crime was down 30%, but crime coverage increased 70%.

In your own life have you noticed a strong urge to censor?

Hecker: I choose my words wisely, but I tend not to censor myself. I could lose some business as a realtor because of the movie. If a client chooses not to work with me because I believe the press should be free and should present news that lead to social change, I’d rather not work with that person.

As a father with children, what kinds of limits if any do you set for them about TV and the Internet?

Hecker: I prefer to discuss topics on TV and the Internet and to help create awareness and media literacy in my children. However, I do limit violence, foul language, and sexual content.

Oscar: It’s very rare that we find a program that is suitable for my children to watch. My kids don't use the Internet. They are eight and five years old. If and when we find a child-friendly program, we limit viewing.

Your documentary shows that when there's war there's censorship and when there's censorship there's war.

Hecker: Censorship leads to war. War doesn’t benefit anyone except those in power. It’s corrupt and it’s brought about by power, money, greed, religion, politics, ignorance, and stupidity.

Doug, you grew up in a small California town. Did you buy into the official story disseminated by the media?

Hecker: I did for years. I began reading newspapers in high school and believed what I read. However, once I got to college I realized that a majority of U.S. news is designed to control the population, shape public policy, and instill fear into citizens.

Oscar, what about you?

Oscar: What I witnessed was that my parents watched tons of fear. I could never understand why they were so hypnotized by it. As I grew older, I found that I enjoyed investigative news shows like 60 Minutes. It wasn't until college that I became a critic of corporate media.

Looking at the global picture, would you say censorship is better or worse in the U.S. than in say, China, Russia, or Iran?

Hecker: I would say it's not better or worse, but different. U.S. censorship is subtle -- not the dictatorship-style where the consequences are prison or death. However, the attack on journalists and the First Amendment is increasing in the U.S. Under the guise of protecting us against terrorism, we’re losing civil liberties.

Oscar: The majority of people don't even know censorship is there. Next thing you know, America will be back in another illegal war.

In the U.S. if you want to play the corporate media game I guess you have to play by the corporate rules -- or get out.

Hecker: The corporate rules are simple: tell the news the way you're told to tell the news or ratings will decline and you'll be out of a job.

Oscar: Reporters should investigate the owners of their own stations.

Where you live in California, what local stories and truths do you think are hidden from citizens now?

Hecker: GMOs, pesticides, farm animal abuse, the ever-increasing rise of health care, petroleum products, pollution, lobbyists, government corruption, etc.

Fear is a big factor in our society isn't it? Reporters are afraid and citizens are afraid. How do we overcome fear?

Hecker: Fear-based news leads to higher ratings, which leads to increased ad revenue. To change fear-based news you need to start at the grassroots with programs like Project Censored and other alternative media sources that have validated news and fact-based reporting.

Oscar: People glued to the nightly news are bombarded and besieged with violence and destruction. The message you get is that people are out to get you so you better watch out. We need a media system that shines light on the good that people are doing in the world to create a more harmonious planet.

There still are people who are courageous, such as the Australian, Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, who released on the Internet confidential U.S. documents. Did he go too far?

Hecker: We need more people like Assange, Daniel Ellsberg, Bradley Manning who realize that sacrifice may be necessary to expose human rights abuses, corruption, and environmental damage.

Oscar: Hopefully, governments will think twice about their actions now that there is a Julian Assange out there. It's surprising, though, how little attention it's really gotten. You would think more people would be upset about the failure of the news to dig for truth.

What gives you hope for a world in which your kids are grown up?

Hecker: Without hope no future is possible. We made this film to help future generations and to point out that social change is needed and that the people of the world need to put an end to complacency and become active and involved citizens both politically and socially in order to end the human and environmental atrocities that plague our world.

[Jonah Raskin, a regular contributor to The Rag Blog, is  a long-time journalist and author. Read more articles by Jonah Raskin on The Rag Blog.]

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RAG RADIO / Thorne Dreyer : Legendary Music Producer Chris Strachwitz and Filmmakers Maureen Gosling & Chris Simon

From left: Chris Simon, Chris Strachwitz, and Maureen Gosling at the studios of KOOP-FM in Austin, Texas, Friday, March 15, 2013. Photo by Bob Simmons / The Rag Blog.

Rag Radio podcast:
Arhoolie Records founder Chris Strachwitz,
filmmakers Maureen Gosling & Chris Simon

This Ain't no Mouse Music! paints a "vivid portrait of an obsessive sonic sleuth" as the film takes "a hip-shaking stroll from New Orleans to Appalachia and right into the very DNA of rock’n’roll.”

By Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog / March 21, 2013

See Bob Simmons' YouTube videos from the show, Below.

Legendary blues and roots music producer Chris Strachwitz, founder of Arhoolie Records, and filmmakers Maureen Gosling and Chris Simon, whose This Ain't no Mouse Music! about Arhoolie premiered at SXSW in Austin, were our guests on Rag Radio, Friday, March 15, 2013. Rag Radio is a syndicated radio program produced at the studios of KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin, Texas.

Listen to or download our interview with Chris Strachwitz, Maureen Gosling, and Chris Simon here:



Born to an aristocratic family in a section of Germany that is now part of Poland, Chris Strachwitz came to the United States after World War II. He developed a love for roots and blues music and in 1960 established the extremely influentual indie record label, Arhoolie.

As the producers of This Ain't no Mouse Music! put it, Strachwitz "traveled to plantations and prisons, roadhouses and whorehouses, churches and bayou juke joints, and returned with recordings that would revolutionize the sound of popular music."

Chris Strachwitz brought performers like Texas bluesmen Mance Lipscomb and Lightnin’ Hopkins, Tejano musicians Flaco Jiménez and Lydia Mendoza, Cajun greats Michael Doucet and the Savoy Family, and Zydeco king Clifton Chenier -- and many more -- into world prominence. And, in collaboration with filmmaker Les Blank, he made the classic film Chulas Fronteras about Norteño music.

Bonnie Raitt said, "It’s impossible to look at the history of blues, Cajun and Zydeco music without looking at Chris Strachwitz’ role. He’s a monumental figure.”

Maureen Gosling and Chris Simon produced and directed This Ain’t No Mouse Music! which tells the amazing story of Chris Strachwitz and Arhoolie Records. The film premiered with several screenings at this year’s SXSW Film Festival in Austin.

Jeffrey St. Clair called Mouse Music a “vivid portrait of an obsessive sonic sleuth” in which the filmmakers “take a hip-shaking stroll from New Orleans to Appalachia and right into the very DNA of rock’n’roll. In this beautifully shot film, we come face to face with the creators of indigenous music...”

“I guess I’m just a rootin’ groundhog,” Strachwitz told the Rag Radio audience. “If I can’t find musicians, I just hunt records wherever I go. I should have probably opened a detective agency.”

"I fell in love with all these different regional musics," he said, "not just with blues. New Orleans jazz was one of my first loves... and hillbilly music. There was this amazing array of extraordinarily powerful and emotional music."

Noted Musicologist Mack McCormick -- who “knew Texas, the vernacular Texas, better than any other human being” -- suggested the name “Arhoolie" for the new record company. Strachwitz' response? "Ar-what?" "Arhoolie" was a variation on a term meaning a “field holler,” sung by workers in the cotton fields. "I figured... it’s a catchy name. What the heck."

In This Ain't no Mouse Music!, Chris explains his approach to the business like this:

Most record companies, they record everything that they think is commercial. I didn’t want to record stuff I don’t like... My stuff isn’t produced. I just catch it as it is... I knew the music I liked was all over the place. Especially in Texas and Louisiana and Mississippi and god knows where... I don’t know why I like it so much. It’s just got some guts to it. It ain’t wimpy, that’s for sure. It ain’t no mouse music...

About making the film with Strachwitz, Maureen Gosling said on Rag Radio, “We had the amazing experience of hanging around with him and going on the road with him and being able to be with all these people.”

Chris Simon added, “We saw a whole other side of Chris, and the passion that he brings to his work is extraordinary. Going around, knocking on strangers' doors, saying, do you know where this person lives? It’s inspiring. And I hope that that’s one of the things that young people get out of the film. If you have a vision, just do it.”

The film, which includes narration from Bonnie Raitt, Ry Cooder, Taj Mahal, Richard Thompson, and folklorist Archie Green, features a wide range of musical performance including valuable archival footage of Lightin' Hopkins, Mance Lipscomb, Big Mama Thornton, and others.

Maureen says, "We filmed a lot of things live, like the Treme Brass Band in New Orleans, Michael and David Doucet performing together, No Speed Limit, a bluegrass band in Virginia... and Santiago Jiménez, Jr. here in Texas, as well as Flaco Jiménez, and many, many others..."

And, she added, "We filmed at the Savoy family annual boucherie -- and that’s just a perfect setting for the movie because it’s just people jamming and eating and having a good time and it’s a beautiful way to see music in the context of the culture. And not just set up on a stage..."

Maureen Gosling, who graduated from the University of Michigan with a degree in social anthropology and who lived in Austin in the '70s, has been a documentary filmmaker for more than 30 years. Her work has often focused on themes of people and their cultural values, music as cultural expression, and the changing gender roles of men and women.

Chris Simon, who is also a folklorist, has been an award-winning filmmaker for more than 25 years, producing independent documentaries through her Sageland Media. Gosling and Simon met while working with acclaimed documentary filmmaker Les Blank, with whom they collaborated on classic films such as Gap-Toothed Women and Burden of Dreams.

This Ain't No Mouse Music! on Rag Radio
Video by Bob Simmons / The Rag Blog.

Rag Radio has aired since September 2009 on KOOP 91.7-FM, an all-volunteer cooperatively-run community radio station in Austin, Texas. Hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor and long-time alternative journalist Thorne Dreyer, a pioneer of the Sixties underground press movement, Rag Radio is broadcast every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on KOOP, and is rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EDT) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA.

The show is streamed live on the web by both stations and, after broadcast, all Rag Radio shows are posted as podcasts at the Internet Archive.

Rag Radio is produced in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive Internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation. Tracey Schulz is the show's engineer and co-producer.

Rag Radio can be contacted at ragradio@koop.org.

Coming up on Rag Radio:
THIS FRIDAY, March 22: Progressive sportswriter Dave Zirin, Sports Editor at The Nation and author of Game Over: How Politics Has Turned the Sports World Upside Down.
Friday, March 29: "Bronx Butch" poet, performance artist, and memoirist Annie Rachele Lanzillotto.
Friday, April 5: Anti-violence activists John Woods and Claire Wilson James about the issue of guns in schools and on college campuses.
Friday, April 12: Sixties activists and Yippie founders Judy Gumbo Albert and Nancy Kurshan.

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RAG RADIO / Thorne Dreyer : A Conversation With Austin Chronicle Editor and SXSW Co-Founder Louis Black

Austin Chronicle editor and South by Southwest co-founder Louis Black in the studios of KOOP-FM in Austin, Texas, Friday, March 1, 2013. Photo by Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog.

Rag Radio Podcast:
Austin Chronicle editor Louis Black,
co-founder of South by Southwest

"It used to be that you had to leave Austin to establish yourself politically, as a writer, as a filmmaker, as a musician. And now the world comes to Austin." -- Louis Black

By Rag Radio / The Rag Blog / March 7, 2013

Austin Chronicle editor Louis Black -- co-founder of the massive South by Southwest Music, Interactive and Film Festivals and Conferences -- was Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio, Friday, March 1, 2013.

Rag Radio is a syndicated radio program produced at the studios of KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin, Texas.

Listen to or download our interview with Louis Black here:


Louis Black is the editor of The Austin Chronicle, Austin’s major weekly newspaper, which he co-founded with Nick Barbaro in 1981. In 1987 Black co-founded South by Southwest Music, Interactive and Film Festivals and Conferences, along with Barbaro and Roland Swenson.

SXSW Music is the largest music festival and music industry event in the world; SXSW Interactive is arguably the largest event of its kind in the world; and SXSW Film has become one of the preeminent film festivals in the country. And there's a new educational component (SXSWedu) that "supports innovations in learning for education practitioners, industry leaders and policy maker."

(This year's SXSW takes place between March 8 and March 17, 2013, at the Austin Convention Center and all over Austin, Texas.)

On Rag Radio, Louis Black talked about his personal history growing up in Teaneck, New Jersey. ("I had dyslexia, I had attention issues, all kinds of authority issues. I was a disaster as a student.") So he became a film geek. At about 12 he became best friends with Leonard Maltin -- who would grow up to be one of the nation's most honored film critics -- “and we began to go into New York City after school and all-day Saturdays to watch films -- to museum screenings, we’d go to the film societies... We saw tons of movies."

"We weren’t really auteur freaks or international film fans," he said. "We would see lots of B movies, lots of cartoons... When we were 15, Len and I met Buster Keaton under the Brooklyn Bridge where he was filming the film, Film." Film was written by the legendary Irish playwright and novelist Samuel Beckett, who was standing nearby at the time. Black and Maltin were thrilled to meet Keaton but had no idea who Beckett was.

Thanks to Maltin's connections, Black ended up studying film in graduate school at the University of Texas. "I had been watching movies all my live, I had an enormous amount of knowledge," and suddenly he was not only a star student, but he had found his calling. Black received an MFA from UT-Austin, with a concentration in film studies, in 1980. And he would soon find himself at the epicenter of Austin's big-time cultural explosion.

Louis Black was a founding board member of the Austin Film Society, and the board's first president, and, along with then Texas Monthly Editor Evan Smith, co-founded the Texas Film Hall of Fame in 2001. He executive produced the documentary Be Here to Love Me: A Film About Townes Van Zandt, by Margaret Brown, and was an associate producer on Brown’s documentary, The Order of Myths, which won a Peabody Award in 2009.

Black executive produced the DVD release of the late Eagle Pennell's The Whole Shootin' Match, a 1968 film which had long been thought lost and that Robert Redford cites as inspiration for starting the Sundance Institute.

Louis Black and Thorne Dreyer.
Photo by Tracey Schulz.

Black says that the Austin Chronicle, with a circulation close to 450,000, can no longer legitimately be called an "alternative" publication ("KOOP radio is 'alternative,'" he said), but is a weekly newspaper featuring local news reporting and extensive cultural coverage -- and with a "definite point of view." The Chronicle has played a big role in Austin's evolution as a cultural hub. "Austin’s a unique place and a very special place," Black told the Rag Radio audience, "and certainly we’ve contributed to that, and we’ve benefited enormously from that."

When they started South by Southwest, Black said, they thought they'd have a "nice regional event, a little gathering in Austin for a couple of days, with workshops and panels and hearing some music… and we’d end it with a softball game and a barbeque." Well, "it was regional for the first year or two," he added, "but then it became national and then international. And then, under Roland Swenson's leadership, we added film, we added interactive, and now we’ve added an education component. And it mirrors Austin. The event is just a multiplier for what goes on in Austin all year round. It’s really succeeded."

And has it succeeded! As the UT alumni mag Alcalde put it in its March/April 2011 issue:

From its modest beginnings as a regional music conference in 1987, South by Southwest has ballooned into a multimedia powerhouse. Its music, film, and interactive-media conferences attract tens of thousands, turning Austin into the center of the cultural universe for one week every March.

Whatever you’re doing, South by Southwest is the place to show it off. Johnny Cash launched his big comeback at South by Southwest in 1994. More recently, Norah Jones started building buzz there before she won all her Grammy Awards. Newly launched Twitter saw tweets per day more than triple at the 2007 interactive conference. And Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, which won [the 2010] best-picture Oscar, was the talk of the 2009 film festival.

At last year's music festival, Bruce Springsteen provided a memorable keynote address and electrifying showcase performances, heading a stellar cast of artists, from world-renowned to (as yet) little-known, and this year's bill includes Dave Grohl, Stevie Nicks, and Green Day. There will be more than 20,000 registered participants and many thousands more will come into Austin for the related musical events involving more than 2,000 bands performing at easily a hundred venues. The film festival will offer screenings of more than 150 films.

SXSW Interactive is "probably the biggest event of its kind in the world, and now has hundreds of speakers," Black says. More than 25,000 attended last year's Interactive gathering and a substantial increase is expected this year. "With Interactive you can just feel the energy sizzling," Black says. As The Wall Street Journal wrote, "The brainpower that assembles in Austin is overwhelming. Everywhere you look there are smart people discussing smart ideas."

And the film festival is now "one of the most highly-regarded film festivals in the world." Austin is widely-known as the "live music capital of the world," with thousands of active musicians. But it has also become a major independent film center, home to filmmakers like Richard Linklater, Robert Rodriguez, and Mike Judge.

According to Black, "There’s more creative people in Austin now. More artists and musicians and filmmakers making a living in Austin or living in Austin and having their work seen around the world. It used to be that you had to leave Austin to establish yourself politically, as a writer, as a filmmaker, as a musician. And now the world comes to Austin."

"And the special thing about the creative scene in Austin," he said, is that it's "a completely culturally-integrated community. When you go to New York, the documentary filmmakers don’t hang out with the theatrical filmmakers who don’t hang out with the animators. In Austin all those filmmakers do, and people with a lot of different political stripes do: poets hang out with filmmakers who hang out with novelists who hang out with artists."

And, host Dreyer added, "everybody hangs out with the musicians."

Rag Radio has aired since September 2009 on KOOP 91.7-FM, an all-volunteer cooperatively-run community radio station in Austin, Texas. Hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor and long-time alternative journalist Thorne Dreyer, a pioneer of the Sixties underground press movement, Rag Radio is broadcast every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CST) on KOOP, and is rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EST) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA.

The show is streamed live on the web by both stations and, after broadcast, all Rag Radio shows are posted as podcasts at the Internet Archive.

Rag Radio is produced in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation. Tracey Schulz is the show's engineer and co-producer.

Rag Radio can be contacted at ragradio@koop.org.

Coming up on Rag Radio:
THIS FRIDAY, Friday, March 8: Novelist David McCabe, author of Without Sin, based on a true story of a sex trafficking ring exploiting young, undocumented women.
Friday, March 15: Legendary producer Chris Strachwitz of Arhoolie Records, and filmmakers Maureen Gosling and Chris Simon, This Ain't No Mouse Music!
Friday, March 22: Progressive sportswriter Dave Zirin, Sports Editor at The Nation.

The Rag Blog

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RAG RADIO / Thorne Dreyer : Anne Lewis' Documentary About Anne Braden Is 'Gem of a Film'

Filmmaker Anne Lewis on Rag Radio in the studios of KOOP-FM in Austin, Texas, Friday, February 22, 2012. Photo by William Michael Hanks / The Rag Blog.

Rag Radio Podcast:
Documentary filmmaker Anne Lewis,
co-director of Anne Braden: Southern Patriot

By Rag Radio / The Rag Blog / February 27, 2013

Documentary filmmaker and University of Texas senior lecturer Anne Lewis, whose most recent work, Anne Braden: Southern Patriot, was called a "gem of a film" by folksinger and civil rights activist Joan Baez, was Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio, Friday, February 22, 2013.

On the show, Lewis discussed her impressive body of work as an independent filmmaker and, in particular, her acclaimed film about the remarkable Southern civil rights fighter Anne Braden.

She also addressed recent developments at the University of Texas at Austin, where university president Bill Powers has made radical proposals to "increase efficiency" at the the school, in part by privatizing much of the university staff. Powers' plans have drawn reaction from faculty, students, and union activists on the UT-Austin campus, and Lewis wrote about the issue in The Rag Blog.

Rag Radio is a syndicated radio program produced at the studios of KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin, Texas. This episode was produced during KOOP's Spring 2013 Membership Drive and includes fundraising pitches for the cooperatively-run all volunteer public radio station.

Listen to or download our interview with Anne Lewis, here:


Anne Lewis is an independent filmmaker, a senior lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin's School of Radio-Television-Film, and an active member of the Texas State Employees Union (TSEU-CWA Local 6186) and NABET-CWA. She has been making documentary films since 1970. Most of her filmmaking depicts working class people -- often women -- fighting for social change. She is associated with Appalshop, an arts and education center located in the heart of Appalachia.

Anne Lewis was associate director of Harlan County, U.S.A, and the producer/director of Fast Food Women, To Save the Land and People, Morristown: in the air and sun, and a number of other social issue and cultural documentaries. She was associate director/assistant camera for Harlan County, USA, the Academy Award-winning documentary, which focused on the Brookside, Kentucky, strike of 1975. After the strike, Lewis moved to the coalfields where she lived for 25 years.

Lewis was co-director with Mimi Pickering of the 2012 film, Anne Braden: Southern Patriot, a first-person documentary about the extraordinary life of the American civil rights leader. The film was first screened by the Austin Film Society on July 18, 2012.

Filmmaker Anne Lewis.

Writing at The Rag Blog, William Michael Hanks called the film "a wellspring of intellectual reason, a blueprint for action [that] includes some of the most iconic footage from the civil-rights movement ever seen." The Rag Blog's Hanks, himself a former documentary filmmaker, joined us in the interview, discussing with Lewis her unique use of first person narrative in constructing the film.

According to The Texas Observer's Susan Smith Richardson, Anne Braden, a middle-class white woman from Alabama who "rejected her racial privilege in the Jim Crow South and devoted her life to fighting racism," was considered a "traitor to her race" by many who opposed her. Braden and her husband Carl, who together published the crusading Southern Patriot newspaper, were targets of Sen. Joseph McCarthy's anti-Communist witch hunts. Braden, who was an inspirational figure among movement activists, was called "eloquent and prophetic" by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Joan Baez called Anne Braden: Southern Patriot, "a gem of a film, accented with freedom fighters who speak firsthand about carving a path through a traumatized, violent, racist South, to make way for one of the largest and most effective nonviolent movements for social change the world has ever seen."

To learn more about Anne Lewis' work, visit her website, AnneLewis.org.

Rag Radio has aired since September 2009 on KOOP 91.7-FM, an all-volunteer cooperatively-run community radio station in Austin, Texas. Hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor and long-time alternative journalist Thorne Dreyer, a pioneer of the Sixties underground press movement, Rag Radio is broadcast every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CST) on KOOP, and is rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EST) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA.

The show is streamed live on the web by both stations and, after broadcast, all Rag Radio shows are posted as podcasts at the Internet Archive.

Rag Radio is produced in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation. Tracey Schulz is the show's engineer and co-producer.

Rag Radio can be contacted at ragradio@koop.org.

Coming up on Rag Radio:
THIS FRIDAY, March 1, 2013: Louis Black, co-founder and editor of the Austin Chronicle and co-founder of the South by Southwest Music, Interactive, and Film Festival (SXSW).
Friday, March 8: Novelist David McCabe, author of Without Sin, based on a true story of a sex trafficking ring exploiting young, undocumented women.
Friday, March 15: Legendary producer Chris Strachwitz of Arhoolie Records, and filmmakers Maureen Gosling & Chris Simon, This Ain't No Mouse Music!

The Rag Blog

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INTERVIEW / Jonah Raskin : Superstar Cinematographer Tom Hurwitz

Cinematographer Tom Hurwitz embedded with troops in Afghanistan during filming for the movie Kansas to Kandahar. Photo courtesy Tom Hurwitz.
An interview with Tom Hurwitz:
Superstar of contemporary 
American cinematography

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / January 23, 2013

“I love going to the movies. Movies are one of the great anachronisms, where collective craft, design, and technology merge with individual talent, as in the building of a medieval cathedral.” -- Tom Hurwitz

I love talking shop, especially with those who work in shops, whether they’re real old-fashioned and gritty or the most up-to-date and sophisticated. Tom Hurwitz, whom I first met in 1968 on the rough-and-tumble campus of Columbia University, is my idea of the ideal filmmaker to talk with about the big glittering shop that makes images and that we all call Hollywood.

Hurwitz is a straight shooter in more ways than one, and a real craftsman -- a versatile cinematographer -- who knows the film industry from the inside out. What other living moviemaker can you name who talks about capitalism and about art in the same breath and who can practically recite all the scenes in Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane?

Hell, he’s also the son of the legendary documentary filmmaker, Leo Hurwitz (1909-1991), who was, for a time, blacklisted, and who continued to make films, despite it. His stepmother, Peggy Lawson, was a filmmaker and film editor and stars in Dialogue with a Woman Departed (1981) that Leo Hurwitz wrote and directed and that’s a tribute to her and her work.

Tom Hurwitz made his first picture -- Last Summer Won’t Happen (1968) -- with Peter Gessner when he was 20, and, while he’s taken a few detours in life, he’s followed the script that seems to have been written for him by the gods of cinema. He’s worked on -- to name just a few pictures - Creep Show 2 (1987), Wild Man Blues (1997), Ghosts of Abu Ghraib (2007), and Queen of Versailles (2012) that wasn’t nominated for an Oscar -- damn it! -- but that did win awards at Sundance and from the Directors Guild of America.

Born in 1947 and reared in New York, he’s filmed TV programs such as Down and Out in America (1986), and Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero (2002) both for PBS, as well as movies for the big screen, and has won dozens of awards including two Emmys, along with Sundance and Jerusalem Film Festival awards for best cinematography. Then, too, he’s on the faculty of New York’s School of Visual Arts and a founding member of its MFA program in the social documentary.

For years, I had close friends in Hollywood: Mark Rosenberg at Warner Brothers who produced, with his wife Paul Weinstein, The Fabulous Baker Boys (1989) and Flesh and Bone (1993); and Bert Schneider who produced Easy Rider (1969) and Five Easy Pieces (1970), as well as the award-winning documentary about Vietnam, Winning Hearts and Minds (1974). Rosenberg died in 1992 at the age of 44; Schneider died in 2012 at the age of 78.

Tom Hurwitz is one of the few individuals I know who’s still working in film, still very much alive, and still kicking up a storm of ideas and images for the screen. With the 2012 Academy Awards on the horizon, I fired off a round of questions about movies and moviemakers. Hurwitz was about to leave for India to make yet another movies, but he fired back his answers.

Tom Hurwitz, center in shades, during demonstration at Columbia University, 1968. At front right is Stew Albert, one of the founders of Yippie! Photo courtesy Tom Hurwitz.

Jonah Raskin: Too bad your film Queen of Versailles wasn’t nominated for an Oscar.

Tom Hurwitz: I shot the film and I’m very proud to have been part of it. As I see it, Queen tells a Shakespearian story about the decline of values, the dispersion of families, and the bursting of bubbles in this wretched stage of capitalism we inhabit. It tells the story by following the lives of a household that begins in unimaginable wealth.

Was it a fairly straightforward picture to make?

Making it was difficult. You wouldn't think that filming the family of a failing billionaire would be taxing. But when you see the movie, you can appreciate that maintaining the proper documentary relationship over a long time was hard. What was wonderful about shooting Queen was working with the director, Lauren Greenfield. She’s a great still photographer who also has a great sense of story. We speak the same language, and I loved the challenge of working up to her standards, making my motion pictures work with the style of her stills.

What are, from your perspective, the best five feature films of 2012?

Anna Karenina uses the device of the theatrical stage to turn a book into a movie -- always a challenge -- and to surmount the limitations of budget. It takes on a dream-like character with a miraculous effect.

Then there’s Zero Dark Thirty, a film that asks big questions. It felt more real and immediate than any other film this year, with acting, design, direction, photography, and sound all serving a unified end. When the first explosion happened in the film, I was on the floor before I knew it -- and I was in Afghanistan. It says something that the filmmaker, Kathryn Bigelow, cares enough about reality to make the explosions sound more real than in any other film that I’ve seen.

Moonrise Kingdom is an almost perfect product of Wes Anderson's imagination. It’s a fantasy that resides in the twilight land of childhood, in the lives of its marvelously understated characters, in their island world, and in the brilliant design and execution of the film. I kept thinking about it, savoring it like a wonderful meal, or perhaps like a dream.

What about documentaries?

Five Broken Cameras, made by a Palestinian Arab and an Israeli Jew, is seen through the eyes of a villager inside the occupied territories of the West Bank. The film is shot with camera after camera over a 10-year period beginning with the birth of a boy, and as the State of Israel tries to cut off the village off from its fields, and as settlers try to take the land itself.

The residents fight back nonviolently. The toll of the occupation on the lives of the Arabs and on the souls of the Israelis is made painfully clear. The film is told like an historical novel with character development, revelation, and tragedy. It’s the best combination of micro and macro documentary that I’ve ever seen.

Do you watch the Academy Awards?

I only watch them all the way through when a film I’ve photographed is up for an award. I went a couple of times and then I had to sit through them. I usually watch the beginning, get bored, and check the results in the paper or on line.

Are the Oscars mostly a publicity event for the movie industry?

I don't take the awards themselves lightly. For members of the Academy, November and December are crazy because we try to watch all the films in contention, nominate, and vote. I don't agree with many of the choices, but I care that the industry goes through the ritual of holding up its best, as cheesy as the event often is.

The chance to walk down the red carpet -- even though folks like me are shunted down the non-celebrity lane -- is worth the ticket, the limo, and the suit. For five minutes, you walk slowly through a world where shadows are banished, wrinkles and imperfections don't show, and every watching face holds a camera.

Do you actually go to a movie theater and watch a new film?

I love going to the movies. Movies are one of the great anachronisms, where collective craft, design, and technology merge with individual talent, as in the building of a medieval cathedral. Films ought to be appreciated in a social context. Watching a film alone on the screen in my living room, as I often do, isn’t the same thing.

You were part of the anti-war movement and a protester at Columbia in the 1960’s. Are there others with similar political backgrounds in the movie industry today?

I think any sensible person in the industry who is old enough to have been in the 1960's political movements is retired. I usually work with people from 10 years younger to less than half my age. Haskell Wexler, a mentor, was an activist in the 1960’s. He’s more of a die-hard than I am and 20 years older. In my age group -- Connie Field, Barbara Kopple, Deborah Schaeffer, Mark Weiss, and Deborah Dickson -- all spent time in the movement.

Does anyone in Hollywood make what might be called a “radical movie,” and if so how does that happen?

Most of what’s produced in Hollywood now is television. The movie industry, even though some great films were produced this year, is in a huge fog about where it’s going. I don't think narrative film knows how to be radical. It’s not alone. Neither does television -- as good as some of it may be, or the theater.

It's not only that radical art doesn't get distributed, it's that the radical voice is often confused and muted. That may be one of the reasons for the present flowering of documentary films. We may be in a time where reality speaks clearest of all.

What impact does Sundance have on moviemaking today?

Sundance Festival is a great place to see people I know who I would never otherwise get to spend time with. Also, I get to view tons of good, near-good, and occasional great films-- so many that my brain becomes mush. Filmmakers who go there leave inspired by the attention, companionship, and good work. Producers sell their films to distributors there, though I’d hate to have to be part of that sales race.

I have friends who say the last really good Hollywood movies were made in the 1930s. Is that perversity or blindness?

There were great films made in Hollywood in the 1930’s, but to say that they were the last great films is obtuse. Thirties films are mannered, even the best of them, with a set of conventions: visual, directorial, and acting. That the best of them succeed in spite of their rarefied air is a particular kind of grandeur. One might note that the social documentary film was invented in the 1930's in New York, as a way to blow open the closed world of 1930's Hollywood.

Tom Hurwitz shooting in India for Paul Taylor: Dancemaker. Photo courtesy Tom Hurwitz.
What films do you turn to again and again?

I watch a lot of films over and over because I teach graduate students every year and analyze the images. It's another way of appreciating films other than just being inspired by them. I have a list of what I consider perfectly photographed films.

If a director and I haven't already worked together I always try to screen The Conformist (1970), which Vittorio Storaro shot for Bernardo Bertolucci. I talk about the way the image is at once hugely expressive, yet always works at the service of the story and never just calls attention to itself arbitrarily. That is the highest calling of cinematography in narrative and in documentary. I call it the articulate image. Even if we don't want the film to look anything like The Conformist, watching it together starts the best of conversations. Sometimes I see it to make myself feel good about the possibilities of the image.

What movie made in the last, say, 10 years would you like to be able to say, “That’s my movie.”

I’d pick a documentary called War/Dance (2007) made by Sean and Andrea Fine. It’s about children in a refugee camp in Uganda and their struggle to mount a successful team for a national dance competition. The children become characters in their own amazing drama. The cinematography lifts the heart with its beauty and perfectly compliments the story and the subject.

What filmmakers have you learned from?

First and most important my father, Leo Hurwitz, who directed some of the first American political documentaries in the 1930's and one of the greatest ever made, Native Land. It was photographed by Paul Strand, the great American photographer, and narrated by Paul Robeson. I love Native Land because it’s brilliantly shot and structured. It influenced me, of course, and a generation of American documentarians here in New York who moved into television in the 1950's.

Next, there are a group of influential filmmakers who I call my "aunts and uncles": Sydney Meyers, Manny Kirchheimer, Peggy Lawson, Bill Jersey, Al and David Maysles, Ricky Leacock, Haskell Wexler, Owen Roisman, Charlotte Zwerin, Dede Allen, and Bob Young.

And then, more at a distance: Orson Welles, Nicholas Roeg, James Wong Howe, Gordy Willis, Phillip Roussalot, Peter Suschitzky, Peter Biziou, Nestor Almendros, Sven Nyquist, Terrence Malik, Bernardo Bertolucci, Chris Marker, Jean Rouche, Alain Resnais, Wong Kar Wai, Akiro Kurasawa, and I’m leaving out dozens.

You made movies as a 20-year-old. At 20 and 21 did you look into the future and see a career in the movies?

In 1968, when I looked into the future, I was scared shitless, though I had a film, Last Summer Won’t Happen, in the New York Film Festival. I had no more idea of how to make the next film than I did how to write a novel. I hadn't lived, let alone learned my craft.

I went off and organized marines, and then a union local, and then took part in the successful defense of a political prisoner for five years. I took stills, sold some, and began to feel like I could go back and begin a career, which I did at 26, with a full apprenticeship behind me. I moved on from there to become a journeyman.

If you had unlimited funds is there a movie you’d love to make now?

I'd love to make a film about the last free tigers on earth that live in a giant mangrove swamp in South Asia that’s the size of Rhode Island. I want to make it through the eyes of Alan Rabinowitz, a Jewish kid from Brooklyn, who grew up to be one of the great protectors of wildlife in the world, and a master of the martial arts. The film about the tigers needs another million dollars in addition to what the producers have already raised, but shooting starts soon in India and Bangladesh.

When someone hands you a script and wants you to read it, what do you look for?

For 15 years I received dozens of scripts to read. They would be disappointing nine-tenths of the time. Sometimes I would have to take one because I really needed the work, and so Creep Show 2 was born. Now, luckily, directors call or email and ask, “Do you want to shoot a documentary about a company of reservists who fly helicopters and are deployed to Afghanistan for a year?" That became Kansas to Kandahar (2006). Or “What about filming a crazy, fascinating, rich family in Orlando, Florida?" That turned into Queen of Versailles. Or, “Would you consider work on the first avowedly gay bishop in Christendom?” That evolved into Love Free or Die (2012). Now, I get to say, which I didn’t at the beginning, "When do we start?"

[Jonah Raskin, a frequent contributor to The Rag Blog, is the author of Field Days: A Year of Farming, Eating, and Drinking Wine in California, and Marijuanaland: Dispatches from an American War. He is a professor emeritus at Sonoma State University. Read more articles by Jonah Raskin on The Rag Blog.]

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