HND@Grassroots: Season 2, Episode 2 (20), "Moving Midway," with Godfrey Cheshire (Transcript Included)

By John Lichman, Vadim Rizov, Keith Uhlich, and Godfrey Cheshire

[Editor's Note: The views expressed in this podcast are those of the commenters, and do not necessarily reflect the official policies, positions, or opinions of The House Next Door.]

[Moving Midway opens today at the IFC Center and the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, both in Manhattan. Click theater names for screening information.]

INTRODUCTION

The second season of The House Next Door's "Grassroots Tavern" podcast series begins, fittingly, with our second episode (twentieth overall) as I've not yet gotten around to editing the first (a multi-part summer-movies roundtable that I hope to go live in the coming week or so). Par for the stumblebum course.

Beyond that, a few other changes to the format: a new title ("HND@Grassroots") and a rotating series of hosts, as indispensable House contributors John Lichman and Vadim Rizov are moving in ever bigger and bigger circles and can only devote so much time to weekly, extended drink 'n' chat. You never know, though: the lure of Grassroots can be as captivating as the call of the Sirens.

Moving on from the pretentious purpling to Moving Midway, the primary subject of this installment. Godfrey Cheshire joins myself, John, and Vadim for a chat about his directorial debut, a documentary about his family's North Carolina plantation that premieres in New York theaters today after a very successful festival run. We dovetail that discussion with some nine-years-later musings on Godfrey's influential 1999 essay "The Death of Film/The Decay of Cinema." You'll find our conversation after the break as both audio file and text transcript. (KU)

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PODCAST

Embedded below. Any problems, it can also be found here as a downloadable mp3 file. (TRT: 46 minutes, 39 seconds)



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TRANSCRIPT (edited for style and clarity)

VADIM RIZOV: Good evening faithful listeners. The unfamiliar voice you hear booming toward you is Vadim Rizov, normally silent partner, as John Lichman, in his last days of corporate servitude, has been unfortunately detained. I’m joined as always by Keith Uhlich, House editor and podcast moderator.

KEITH UHLICH: Howdy-ho, Vadim.

VR: And we’re joined, for a podcast first, by an actual director rather than a spectator: Godfrey Cheshire.

GODFREY CHESHIRE: Nice to be here, Vadim. And director as well as film critic still.

KU: Indeed.

VR: We're here to discuss Moving Midway, which is opening the day that you hear this at the IFC Center…

GC: ... and Lincoln Plaza Cinemas.

VR: It's a long-gestating documentary about… and you should probably take it over from here, ‘cause it’s your film.

GC: Well it’s about many things, but it’s primarily about the Southern plantation in two senses. It’s about my family’s plantation in North Carolina. A few years ago my cousin decided to pick up and move the buildings to another location because of the way the urban sprawl was encroaching on the property, making it very unpleasant to live there. And that decision threw my family into a bit of emotional turmoil. The land had been in the family since 1739 and the plantation had been there since before the Civil War. And so we show the moving of the plantation and what happens. But the other thing is that I look into the mythology of the Southern plantation.

If you go anywhere around the world and you say “Southern plantation,” it evokes an image, a response, sometimes a very emotional response. But a lot of that, I think, is based on popular culture and popular myth rather than the history of things. So, while I’m observing the moving of my family’s plantation, I look at how the history verges into the myth. And then the other element of the film is that, during the moving, I discover that I have a hundred African-American relatives that I didn’t know I had, thanks to one of my plantation-owning ancestors. This bringing together of the black and white parts of the family is the final act of the film.

KU: I’ve followed the film since its first screenings and it’s gone through a few incarnations, specifically with regards to the score. Cold you talk a little bit about the scoring of the film and what the changes were from the initial screenings to the final product?

GC: Yes. It’s funny… some people who have seen the film a few times since it was first shown publicly, which was at the Full-Frame documentary festival in the Spring of ’07, have gotten the impression that the film has changed in various ways, the story and picture. But in fact that’s not true, the picture hasn’t changed at all. It’s the score that’s changed. And that’s changed because, initially, we used some music from various sources that we thought we could get the rights to, and it turned out that we couldn’t. So we had to take that music out and replace it with music by our composer Ahrin Mishan, who’s a really good composer, and I was really happy with the music he had composed up until that point. We had to replace these various tracks with just more music from him, and I was really happy with the result because it gave it more of a cohesive feel overall, almost in a subliminal way. It was like you weren’t changing from one kind of music to another, the music was consistent throughout (although we interweave Aaron’s music with some blues music that comes from a woman named Algae Mae Hinton, who’s a well-known Piedmont blues artist whose family presumably came from one of the Hinton plantations). That’s the name of my mother’s family, the Hintons.

KU: And Robert Hinton is the other primary character in the movie…

GC: He’s my primary collaborator, and this was one of the remarkable things that happened. During the making of the movie, after I’d been in North Carolina filming some initial interviews with my cousin, I went back to New York and I was really scratching my head thinking, “Okay, how am I going to deal with slavery in this movie?” And I had some rough ideas, but then, low and behold…

KU: And if I might just interrupt: at that point, how far along in the filming had you gone?

GC: I had just shot a bit. I had shot the last Christmas party at the old location, which you see in the film. And then I shot some initial interviews with my cousin Charlie, who owns the plantation, about his plans, and also with a couple of my other relatives about their feelings about all of this. So I had shot some footage that was actually important to the final film, but it was just initial footage. Then I go back to New York and I look in The New York Times one day and there’s a letter to the editor from a guy who says he’s a professor of African-American studies at NYU. His name is Robert Hinton and he grew up in Raleigh. And I went, “Oh my god, what a coincidence.” I called him up and I found out that, of all the Hinton plantations in the South, his grandfather, his grandfather, was born a slave at our plantation. So I went and met him and he quickly became my primary collaborator because, I mean, he’s great on camera, but also he had already done a lot of research into the Hinton family. He knew in some ways more about our "family" than I did. So he was the ideal collaborator and he continued this dialogue with me about the plantation throughout the remainder of the making of the film.

KU: One of your collaborators was Ross McElwee, correct?

GC: Ross wasn’t a collaborator. He was a consultant. He was a consulting producer. He gave us some notes that were helpful and important. But Ross is someone whose work I’ve really admired from the very first and was something I was particularly interested in covering when I was based in North Carolina. I’ve followed it and written about it up until now. So he was a main sort of inspiration. I’ll say “inspiration” more than “model.” I guess I was concerned when I first started out that people might think that my film was simply a Ross McElwee knockoff because I dealt with my own family in North Carolina as he always does. But the more I got into it, the more I started cutting together what I planned to do, the more I saw that that really wasn’t a problem. And there were a few reasons for that.

One is that Ross is always the main character in his films, whereas I made myself a very peripheral character, kind of a narrator, in mine. I centered my film on my family. Second was that Ross always films in a particular style: he goes around with the camera on his shoulder and talks to people. And I didn’t do that at all. I had somebody filming me with a crew and such, so it was more like a different kind of film style. But I also mix together this story about my family with this kind of essay about what the Southern plantation was in history, and that’s something that Ross doesn’t do. As a matter of fact, he himself commented that that part of the film was more like a Ken Burns film, but done in my own style. So when I got to the end of it I realized nobody would mistake this for a Ross McElwee film, which was good. Definitely he was an inspiration and I didn’t try to separate myself from him. I just saw that what I was doing was very different from what he does.

KU: In hearing you talk about this, I’m recalling something Paul Schrader once said about the difference between being a film critic and being a filmmaker. He said, I think, that it wasn’t until he became a filmmaker that he realized how much of a different mindset one really had to enter into, at least for him, in order to create in each of those arts. I wonder what you've discovered in your move between these two mediums?

GC: Well I'll tell you one thing that I thought about, and I haven’t talked about this anywhere else yet.

KU: Exclusive!

GC: Yeah! … I moved to North Carolina for almost a year to film the moving of the plantation and the preparations for that spanned a period of several months. And while I was down there, I taught a course in the history of film at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. And it’s the first time I ever taught that subject or taught undergraduates and I really, really enjoyed it. I especially enjoyed engaging with the subject, the whole history of film. And I realized that, as many areas of that history that I’m perpetually fascinated with (everything from the American cinema of the 70s to the French New Wave to Italian Neorealism to the studio films of the 30s), the thing that engaged me the most were the first two titans of cinema, namely Griffith and Eisenstein.

I thought a lot about the two of them as I was thinking about what I was doing with my film. Because Griffith evolved this language that had a lot to do with montage. Not only filming for purposes of montage, but what happens within montage, how you create meaning or excitement or emotion by combining one image with another or one secret with another. He developed cross-cutting. He developed intellectual montage, the thing that Eisenstein took and developed into dialectical montage. And these things were important to me because, when I started out with my film, I decided early on that I wasn’t just going to show the moving of my family’s plantation. I was going to intercut that with this essay on the plantation as a mythic image within American culture. Going between these two things and creating this kind of montage between different forms and different subject matters was my primary objective. And it seemed very exciting to me.

And yet at the same time, it was very difficult to execute in a way that really came off. This is why the latter stages of the making of the film, the editing, was totally different than the shooting. And was the most challenging and fascinating and difficult, finally, to realize. It all had to do with making that montage between these different things actually work in a way that somebody sitting there watching goes along with rather than have them say, “Wait a second. I don’t want to go back to this history part.” Or, “Wait a second. I’m being told a lecture.” Or whatever. It needed to flow. The whole thing needed to flow together, and that was what I thought about from a critic’s standpoint as I was making the film.

KU: And what did you discover from the filmmaker point of view? Did you find it to be a natural instinct?

VR: Or alternately, when you watch documentaries now, do you have any more sympathy for them than you brought before?

GC: I think I have a bit more sympathy, but I think that I’m more acutely attuned to the editing choices that they make and how they structure the material that they have because, as I say, that was what was most challenging to me. I would imagine that most documentary filmmakers feel like the film is made in the editing. And I think, really, this is what makes it so different from fictional filmmaking because I think with fictional filmmaking so much of it is made in the script. Of course it depends on the film. In some cases, the director brings it alive in the shooting and the performance is more important. But I think that, basically, most [fiction] films are dependent on the script, and most of what’s in there that ends up being valuable is determined in the early stages of the film whereas [in documentary] it’s the latter stages of just looking at all this material. We had 200 hours of material and trying to figure out how you shape it into something that works on a moment-to-moment basis ... that was the thing that was so challenging to me.

KU: Well here comes John.

GC: Here comes John.

KU: John is joining us. … This is Godfrey.

GC: Good to see you.

KU: Okay, John’s going to get a drink. Coming back to the discussion…

GC: Well you asked what do I think of other documentaries? My film was in New Directors/New Films in the spring with two other documentaries about the American South: The Order of Myths and Trouble the Water. And because I was so involved with New Directors, I didn’t have a chance to see these films until just recently. I really thought they were absolutely terrific. And I feel like, rather than being competitive with other documentary filmmakers, I’m very much more sympathetic at this point to them. Even James Marsh.

KU: (laughs) Yes! Regular House readers will know of Godfrey’s article on James Marsh and Man on Wire, which is going to be getting a response relatively soon if it hasn’t already. Hearing you talk about these other two documentaries, Trouble the Water and The Order of Myths, it seems that you may be speaking to a rise of a new kind of Southern documentary, or Southern-specific kind of film. I wonder if you might be able to expand on that idea with relation to Moving Midway and any other works you see rising from this particular region.

VR: A lot of those are post-Katrina docs too. Not The Order of Myths, but there’s been a large surge of those.

GC: Well there were a lot of Katrina films, but I think Trouble the Water is one that’s really, really stood out and for very good reason. It’s just an amazing film. Regional subject matter has always been important, to documentaries in particular, and the more the South goes through these changes due to all sorts of different factors, the more people are needing to examine the culture. All three films (The Order of Myths, Trouble the Water, and Moving Midway) deal not only with the South, but with race in the South. And the fact that they are all coming out at the time we have our first African-American candidate for president from a major party is pretty remarkable. There’s some sort of weird synergy or lining up of the stars going on there because I think race as a subject is thrown back into the national consciousness as something that has to be debated and re-examined periodically. And I think we’re right there now. I think that people have to think a lot and talk a lot about race. Obama has himself put that into the mix in terms of things that need to be talked about and examined this year. And hopefully these films on their own levels will help do that.

KU: In addition to race, I think one of the other issues brought up in your film is related to something that you did nine years ago, a week from our recording date (which would be August 26th and we’re recording on the 19th). You published a very influential article called “The Death of Film/The Decay of Cinema.” I just took a look at it online today and I saw the date. It’s interesting that it’s coinciding now with a film (a “film” I say) that you actually shot on video, which is one of the technologies that you examine in this two-part piece. So I thought it would be interesting to sort of dovetail some reflections on your essay with Moving Midway.

GC: That’s a big subject and I’ll just plunge right in. It’s funny, people have talked to me a lot more in the last year about the article than they did in the years before. It has stayed in circulation and people have been talking about it. But just more recently it’s been a lot more prevalent, and I think that it has to do with the fact that we’re right now seeing the effects of this change that I was talking about in a big way. Especially film critics. Film critics are like the canaries in the coal mine. They’re expiring at a very rapid rate. And I’m really surprised that just this year we’ve seen such a sea change.

I talk in the article about the digital revolution from certain angles. And there are certain things that I predicted that I think maybe were prescient, and then there are other things that I think perhaps were prescient but haven’t even come to pass yet. Because mainly what I was talking about was what happens when all cinemas are converted to digital, and therefore you have the capacity for a lot more than just showing movies in them. You have the capacity for a lot of things that we identify as television now—live events and all sorts of things. That has started to happen, but it hasn’t really happened in a big way because most of the theaters still haven’t been converted. I think that’ll happen in the next three, four, or five years, and then we’ll have another big change.

But the changes that we’re experiencing now have a lot to do with the way digital media is rapidly eroding print media, and the fact that people are now getting their information a lot more from digital sources as opposed to newspapers. Newspapers are laying off all sorts of staff left and right and film critics are prime victims of this change. And for several reasons. Not only because the newspapers have to cut their staffs back, but also because they’re finding that people don’t read the newspapers that much anymore for finding out what films to go to see.

When I taught this course that I mentioned at UNC three years ago, first day I gave my students a questionnaire asking various things about what films they liked, etc. And I asked, "What critics do you read?" and "Where do you get your information about film?" Hardly any of them read any local critics. They mostly read Peter Travers or Roger Ebert or A.O. Scott. Those who read any critics at all. And these were film-interested young people. Very smart ones too. And when I asked, “Where do you get your information?” I don’t think a single one of them said the alternative weekly that I write for in that market. They all get their information online. Therefore, the culture that they belong to is much more of an Internet/online kind of culture that steers them toward going to see The Dark Knight. The guy that runs the art theater that’s across the street from this university with 20,000 people in it tells me, “Students don’t come here.” It was the theater where I saw Fellini’s Satyricon and all these great films back in the 70s. And students don’t go there anymore. When I was there only students went there. Now he says it’s people who are in their fifties who live out in the suburbs and who don’t like to drive downtown.

We’ve seen a whole sea change of cinema culture thanks to all the various forms that digitalization has taken over the last few years. I’m very proud of this essay, but I feel, in some ways, when the 10th anniversary looms up, I should go back and rewrite the entire thing or do a postscript based on all the things that have happened since then. Because I think that it came along a time and it made people think, “Wow, the fact that film—literally, film, celluloid—is about to be replaced in this whole process that we call 'film.' It could have these enormous changes that nobody has actually reflected on.” I think that that was appreciated and that was valuable at the time.

KU: One of the ideas in "The Death of Film/The Decay of Cinema" is in part taken from Jerry Mander’s book “Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television,” which is about how film accesses or inspires beta waves in a person’s brain, whereas video, television, whatever you want to call it, activates more passive alpha waves. Am I correct in that?

GC: Yeah, I think so.

KU: Moving Midway was shot on video so I wonder if you think about the psychological effect? Does the video itself make people passive, or does the quality of the film keeps the audience active whether it’s shot on film or video? What has shooting on video revealed to you about that?

GC: I think the research that Jerry Mander was citing, which was back in the 70s, was comparing the effects of watching a movie image to watching television as it was then used, as it was then projected, which was sort of a couch potato experience, just sitting back and allowing these images to wash over you. I would say that since then the television image has gotten much more highly defined and much more viewer-controlled, and now that we’ve had digital come in-between that (for example, computer images that are very interactive), you’re having a much more active rather than a much more passive experience. That’s one issue and I would love to see further, more contemporary research about the various ways these media affect viewers and their brain waves.

But I will say that with my own experience of shooting on digital, I just gained a great appreciation for the fact that you couldn’t make a film like mine on film now because it would just be far too expensive. You couldn’t shoot 200 hours of something. I was talking to somebody in the editing world when I first started working on my film and he said, “You know, it wasn’t that long ago where if you made a documentary, you went out and shot 13, 15 hours and you had one editor who looked at every frame of the film, and you’d go over it and such.” He said, “Now, you shoot 200 or 300 hours, you have several teams of editors, and it’s just a completely different process.” It gives you a certain freedom that I felt was actually essential to my film because it was a very big subject, I wanted to interview a lot of people, and I wanted to shoot this long process of moving the plantation over an extended period of time. We had to have the capacity to shoot all of that. So my experience has certainly awakened me to the benefits of digital technology, for making documentaries especially. And I wouldn’t turn around and go back to film for any sort of aesthetic reason because I think that what benefit was there is sort of far outweighed by the expanded benefit of being able to shoot digital and having all this material that you can deal with.

As far as watching Moving Midway: if you’re watching it on a big screen, I actually prefer the HDCAM version to 35mm film. And I’m able to say this because we have just had the first prints made and, just a week ago, I saw the film on film for the first time. And I tell you what, I didn’t like it as much as I liked the HDCAM. It looks fine, but the HDCAM to me is the optimum version. Film and Digibeta are sort of number two. And DVD is definitely below the two of them. So I’m no longer the purist I may have seemed when I wrote that article.

KU: So brainstorming then: If you were to add a postscript to this article, what do you think you might talk about nowadays?

GC: Well, you know, I haven’t thought that through in any sort of coherent way. I think it’s an interesting challenge to put to myself. Certainly I would talk about things that I had not foreseen since I wrote that article, such as DVDs. DVDs were not a prevalent form when I wrote the article—they were just coming along. And they had an enormous impact both on film culture and the way that people perceive films. Digital, Internet, YouTube, all of these are things that impacted film culture greatly, and so they’ve impacted distribution. I think we’re in a very odd period of flux right now, and that change is very perplexing in a way because it really does suggest that a lot of the things that we value in film culture are being swept away. Including film critics, may I add.

KU: Yes. Which actually seems to be an underlying subtext in "The Death of Film/The Decay of Cinema" as I read it now. There's a parenthetical where you make a joking reference to “film critics? Don’t get me started...” or something to that effect. As if they’re going to be swept away, but not necessarily in the ways you were implying at the time. I think you were more writing about the term “film” itself. How do we use “film” as a descriptor if film no longer exists? But in the years since, it’s actually taken on a kind of deeper meaning. Actually, you seemed to get out—well, “get out” so to speak—of the criticism business right at the beginning of the sea change. And it wasn’t even necessarily by choice.

GC: I came to a parting of the ways with NYPress at the end of 2000 and I was sorry that that happened because I very much liked writing for NYPress and having that audience, that downtown audience. But it happened, and after that I sort of had to look forward and see where I wanted to go. I really gave a lot of thought to it during that year of 2001, including after 9/11. I thought about a lot of things having to do with life and my life and where I wanted to go. And I really came to the point of thinking: If I could have anything I wanted, would I like a bigger gig in film criticism or would I like to go in another direction? I decided I wanted another set of challenges and that those challenges should involve making films, and so I started heading in that direction. But I should point out that I didn’t get out of the criticism game altogether. I have continued writing for the Independent Weekly, which is a really good paper in North Carolina that I've written for before. I enjoy keeping my hand in by writing for them, and I’ve written articles here and there for other places, but most of my time has been dominated in the last few years by trying to finish this film and working on a couple of other film projects.

KU: What can you tell us about the Independent Weekly’s status as far as this whole changeover? Is there anything of note? Are they surviving?

GC: They’re surviving and they seem to be doing well. And I’m a little embarassed that I don’t have a better, more specific answer to that question. It’s something that I’ve wondered about just recently because of all this stuff that’s happened this year with film critics being let go and these newspapers downsizing their staffs. There seems to be this really, really rapid erosion of print media culture, especially in regards to daily newspapers. It's left me wondering if something similar is happening to the alternative press. I assume it is to a certain extent. I mean if you look at The Village Voice and if you look at…

JOHN LICHMAN: Well they’re all owned by the same person now.

GC: They’re all owned by the same person?

VR: Sixteen papers under the New Media syndicate.

KU: The New Times.

VR: And my reviews end up in Kansas City and god knows where else.

GC: Yeah, yeah. Well that’s sixteen papers, but I know that the Association of Alternative News Weeklies is a big group that has… fewer and fewer, right, but still… I don’t know the answer to that question.

VR: There was this really bizarre thing this week where this really hilarious conservative blogger, Dirty Harry’s Place, which is absolutely the best thing to cheer you up after a long day, praised the L.A. Weekly for my review of a documentary about stealing votes. And he praised the L.A. Weekly on its consistently excellent writing and open lefty agenda. And I just had to point out that it was never written for the L.A. Weekly. This was just what happens. And it didn’t make a damn bit of difference.

KU: It was originally written for the Voice?

VR: Yeah. But they never tell you where this stuff is gonna go.

KU: So now there’s very little of a localized voice. It’s more like you write for one paper, but then it gets spread out. And sometimes, as I’ve been told by a lot of people, re-edited in different markets.

VR: Yeah! I had a 700 word review cut down to what was basically an 80 word plot summary. I mean there’s all kinds of fun things going on.

GC: This change to me is largely tragic because of the impact it has on local cultures for cinema. I’ll give you one example that I found just shocking. A couple of weeks ago, my distributor and I were talking about getting into Atlanta. Now my film deals with the South and the plantation and Gone With the Wind. I mean what better, more appropriate market for it than Atlanta. And they said, “Well, we’re gonna have a hard time getting in there.” And I said, “Why?” And they said, “There’s no critic there.” There’s an alternative weekly there and they have critics, but what they meant was the Atlanta Journal Constitution, the big daily paper, which is the whole Southeast, probably the largest paper there. It doesn’t have a film critic anymore. They got rid of their film critics.

Same thing in Dallas. One of the biggest media markets in the country. You can’t have, really, a local film culture in that situation, and I’m very much aware of that because when I started out at The Spectator, an alternative weekly in North Carolina, there was no art theater there at that time. And the art theater that soon came along after and became successful told me that all their surveys show that my reviews are drawing people to them and that three-quarters came from outside of Durham, the city where the theater was. It was all this alternative weekly and the fact that I was writing in a sort of smart way about these films for the very educated market that alerted people to this and created a kind of film culture around this theater. And then Raleigh and Chapel Hill got their own art theaters. They have something like twelve or fifteen screens now devoted to art fare, whereas a lot of cities a whole lot bigger don’t have that. At all. They don’t have even one or two screens.

There’s such a connection between having a strong, consistent critical voice within the community, whether daily paper or alternative weekly, that is paying attention to what is playing in that market, that is interacting with the people that book the art theaters. But it is especially addressing an audience that’s there for that. All of that is so important to keeping that culture alive. You take that criticism away and it’s very hard for the theaters to survive. For that kind of culture to survive.

JL: Looking at the rise of digital media, it makes sense that one by one you take out a localized critic. At The House Next Door we have contributors from all over the country. So can you really tell the difference between a New York voice and between someone who’s in Las Vegas and someone who’s in California?

KU: Well, me personally I like to think so. Now maybe that’s naïve and maybe…

JL: Granted I can say I’m in New York, and I can be read by someone in L.A. who goes, “This reference makes no sense. I don’t get it.” Whereas other people will go, “Oh I’ve seen this before” or “I get this sleazy New York aspect.” It just seems like that’s eventually where it’s gonna go. Hopefully we can have localized digital content for New York, but it seems like major print’s getting rid of that because major print’s trying to outdo the Internet in terms of coverage, in terms of variety. It’s trying to ignore the local content to get that more all-expansive dollar, page-click, what have you.

GC: Right. And aside from or parallel with the issue of locality is that of just the individual critic, where you’ve got one critic whose voice you know and who you read from week to week. Whether you agree with them a lot or not is not the point, really. It’s whether you have a take that’s consistent that you can compare with your own. When you take that away, the individual critic and their personal point of view, what you get is just copy dealing with a movie that is just there basically to tell an anonymous reader some information about this movie and to give some sort of evaluation, but you don’t know where that person’s coming from really.

I read these wire service reviews in some of these papers and I don’t know who this person is. I don’t know what their point-of-view on French cinema is. And, to me, that’s like when I’m a critic in the South and I’m writing for a Southern audience, and I say here’s a film about the South that you really need to see: they know who I am, they know my history, they know where I’m coming from, and they know, thus, whether it will be worthwhile for them to follow my lead and go out there and see the film, as opposed to it being just some anonymous review by some guy they’ve never heard of from a paper in California that just gives them a certain amount of information that makes them go, “Huh, well, maybe.”

KU: It’s very easy for criticism, I find, to become consumer reportage.

GC: Well I think that ultimately that’s what it reduces to and that’s what the newspapers want it for. That’s the easiest thing for them to manage. They don’t want to manage an intelligent point of view that’s challenging to readers but is consistent and strong. They want something that is just basically information pabulum to put in between the movie ads and people can say, “Oh yeah, I saw a review of that. I don’t remember what it said or who wrote it or what the point of view was, but it told me that this was a movie about Batman.”

JL: A Peter Travers review.

GC: (laughs)

KU: Yeah, exactly.

JL: “This movie’s about Batman.”

GC: “… and it’s super.”

KU: I’d like to bring it back to Moving Midway, to approach it as a work of criticism. Because one of the threads in it deals with two films specifically, which are D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind. They’re woven into this image of the plantation that you were talking about. So there’s the sense of Moving Midway, the movie, as a history, a personal history, but also as a collective film history. Could you delve into that idea?

GC: And it goes beyond film. I wanted to trace the passage of the plantation through the American mind as a mythic image, and that image really begins before the Civil War, first of all with traveler’s reports that were published all over the Western world, which created this fascinating image for the people about the plantation, one that sounded like this kind of mythic realm. And then, starting about the 1830s, you have this writing that is underlyingly polemical. You have Southern writers defending the plantation as this wonderful place where you have these kindly aristocratic masters and these devoted servants. And, in a way, that’s meant to defend the South against the mounting attacks of the abolitionists. You can’t separate these books from that intent. And then you have Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the best selling American novel of all time, which is really the counter-myth, which is saying this myth [of the plantation] doesn’t hold true. Even though it’s allowing that a lot of it may be true, it’s saying it all falls apart on the basic inhumanity of it.

That has a huge influence on America going into the Civil War, etc. Then after the Civil War—this is almost the most fascinating part to me—the North wins the war, but the plantation myth that was created before the war conquers the entire world because it is brought back to life by publishers, first of all in the North, who create all this literature for, basically, escapist oriented people in the industrializing Northeast. And their escapism takes the form of romances of the West (Cowboys and Indians) and romances of the South (the vanquished aristocratic Confederacy). And so this whole thing goes into plays, and into popular literature and magazine articles, and also onstage into the minstrel shows, which were created before the Civil War, but which become a worldwide phenomenon after the Civil War. All of these keep broadcasting this mythic image of the South.

Then when movies come along in the first decade of the 20th century, those producers who are cranking out these movies at this really fanatical, factory-like rate need content. So they take all their content, or most of it, from the popular press, and they adopt the Western, and they adopt the Southern...

KU: And the minstrel show goes into film…

GC: Yeah the minstrel show goes in, but not in nearly as big a way if there had been sound. And in 1903, the same year you have The Great Train Robbery, Edison Studio also cranks out the first version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and these are sort of parallel things. So you have this huge amount of Southern-oriented works created by Northern producers, mainly for Northern consumption. And then, amazingly enough, or by some strange happenstance, the first great feature film that’s made in the United States, Birth of a Nation, comes from this polemic about the Civil War and Reconstruction by this fire-breathing North Carolina writer named Thomas Dixon. Dixon wasn’t really that interested in the plantation. He refers to it, but mainly he’s interested in the Civil War and Reconstruction. But a lot of it refers back to the plantation. It basically creates the feature film on the foundations of this literature that’s about the plantation. Then through the 30s there is a lot more plantation-oriented material like the Shirley Temple films, for example.

Birth of a Nation’s polemic was a very vicious polemic, very racist, very anti-Black. That caused some backlash, and so for years after that Hollywood really didn’t even include Black characters. But when they resumed doing it after sound came along ... sound came along with The Jazz Singer. Which was also referring back to this sort of plantation imagery and minstrel show and all of that.

KU: So the southern myth kind of gave rise to the birth of narrative cinema…

GC: Well look at the fact that—I mean I was really struck by this, that I had never seen it pointed out anywhere—that the bestselling American novel of all time, the most popular silent film of all time, the most popular sound film of all time, and the most popular TV serial of all time, Roots, all of these things, as well as the most popular American play—the theatrical version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin—all five of those things come out of the plantation myth. Nobody had ever pointed that out that I know of. And look at Gone With the Wind—the bestselling film of all time, but also the film that set the prototype for the big Hollywood spectacular that is our lot in life ever since. You know, the big, widescreen, color, star-studded thing that continues with us right now through Titanic to The Dark Knight.

KU: So Heath Ledger is the new Scarlett O’Hara?

GC: (laughs) I don’t know if I’d go that far.

KU: Gentlemen?

VR: I do remember some Russell Banks essay in Harper’s where he said that, after years of study, he concluded that the only real American story was the story of the African diaspora. He was trying to figure out what the great American novel had to be about and he concluded that had to be it.

GC: The great American novel may be Uncle Tom’s Cabin. I mean that sort of touches on that story.

JL: The South always prevails.

KU: Any final thoughts on Moving Midway?

GC: The thing that’s been most amazing to me, ultimately, is to have encountered this black part of my family that I didn’t know that I had. Early on, as I said, I met Dr. Robert Hinton at NYU, whose grandfather had been born a slave at our family’s plantation. But it was not until very late in the making of the film, almost at the last minute of filming, that by another miraculous happenstance we connected with some of the hundred African-American cousins I now know I have as a result of the plantation. This was the result of getting an e-mail from a guy named Al Hinton, who’s a middle school teacher out in Brooklyn, who’d been researching his family history online, came across references to Midway, and got in touch with Robert Hinton. And through Al we met his father, who turns 100 next year.

KU: Abraham?

GC: Abraham Lincoln Hinton. He turns 100 and I want Mr. Obama to know this, or whoever’s president next year, that he turns 100 the same year we’ll be celebrating Abraham Lincoln’s 200th birthday. 2009. He was born in 1909 and he remembers our common ancestor who was his grandfather. Our common relative was his grandfather; he was born in 1848, the year the plantation was built. So to encounter this person who actually remembers a guy who was born the year the plantation was built was just absolutely mind-boggling. But also, it has allowed me to at least make the first steps in bringing together this family, black and white, that’s been separated for generations in a way that I just think is very extraordinary and meaningful to me, and hopefully says something about the larger experience of race in the United States and in the South. Because I think there’s a lot that has been forgotten that needs to be recollected and needs to be studied and needs to be dealt with. A lot that’s been repressed that is important to how we deal with race now. So my film, in some sense, represents a kind of a personal excavation of that past.

KU: And it’s also the power of movies to bring people together in a way.

GC: Yeah, exactly, exactly.

KU: Making them, screening them, and exorcising some of these demons and, as I recall, the last line of your film is “It’s people.”

GC: That’s right. And you know, one thing that I’m sort of dealing with now, just a few weeks before the film comes out, is that I really want my film to get beyond an arthouse audience. I’m speaking particularly of African American audiences in the South, but a lot of other audiences in the South too. People who go to the country club rather than go to arthouses. I mean I think the film has a certain potential for creating a dialogue around this question of race in a way that’s not polarizing or threatening to a wide spectrum of people. I found that in showing it, and I would really like to continue that. I think that is a big challenge because so many of the movies we experience are channeled in these different directions. They’re for a mass audience or they’re for a young audience or they’re for an ethnic audience or they’re for an arthouse audience. And I would like to break down some of those walls and try to get my film out there.

KU: Let’s end on when the film is opening and where again. Just so people know.

GC: OK. It opens on September 12th at the IFC Center and the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas in New York. Then it will open the following Friday, September 19th in Raleigh, Chapel Hill, and Cary in North Carolina. And then from there it will go out through the South and other parts of the country.

KU: OK. … John? … Vadim’s done the intro. John can do the finale.

JL: Oh wonderful. Well, that is Episode 20 of Season 2. Godfrey thanks for being here.

GC: Thank you. I’ve really enjoyed it.

JL: Thank me for showing up for the last third of it.

KU: (laughs)

JL: Have we come up with a title, Vadim?

VR: This is a one-off…

KU: “Uncle Godfrey’s Cabin.”

VR: Oh god!

GC: (laughs) No, no.

KU: No, no we won’t do that.

JL: No let’s go with Episode 20, our special Moving Midway edition. So for Keith Uhlich and Vadim Rizov, I remain John Lichman, unemployed hack.

GC: (laughs)

JL: And now Bob Marley can sing us out.

KU: Good night everybody.

GC: Bye-bye.

_________________________________________________
John Lichman is a freelance writer who contributes to The Reeler, Primetime A&E [print only] and anyone with cash. He works odd jobs to afford his vices, sleeps on couches and can drink Vadim Rizov under a table.

Vadim Rizov is a New York-based freelance writer. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, The Onion AV Club and Paste Magazine, among others.

Keith Uhlich is editor of The House Next Door.

Godfrey Cheshire is a film critic for The Independent Weekly and a filmmaker whose feature, Moving Midway, opens nationally on September 12th.