A Montage for Mon Grand Père
It’s an honor to hear your heritage on the radio. I had the pleasure last week when a radio story featured Leyla McCalla, a Haitian-American musician. I heard her first few notes and wanted to share with my grandfather, a Haitian who emigrated to the US 67 years ago. My grandfather’s in his nineties but a certain sound still gets him to his feet, à la:
Leyla had the sound. I had just one problem. Leyla hasn’t posted her creole songs to Youtube yet. My grandfather only engages the internet for his finances. My grandmother ignores it except for e-mails from her family. She doesn’t like following links but she makes an exception for Youtube. I could get the music to my grandfather through a Youtube link to my grandmother. But what should I upload?
Just the music to a picture… And miss the opportunity for moving images?
I could put the music to footage of my life… but why?
I could put it to footage of him… but doing what?
What would serve both my grandfather and the music?
I have gone to too much school. I think too much about the media I encounter. I am too jaded to enjoy much of it and too poor to make my own. I don’t like this sour state, hyper-critical and under-equipped. I critique my ideas out of realization, squashing them with concerns over point and purpose, professionalism and potential, cost and compensation and copyright.
My solution (for now) is orientation. I make media for a single audience: a faraway friend, my partner, my grandfather. I think about what a photo or movie could mean to my audience-of-one and then let this guide me. The simple goal gets me over the critical-creative hump. My endeavors gain a goal and my concerns start to feel more excuse than prohibition. Now it also seems silly to share it beyond this goal, but why not. Perhaps there’s interest for a greater audience in seeing the media express a relationship between artist and immediate audience.
I would make a movie for my grandfather. What does he want to watch while he hears echoes of Haiti? Haiti, of course. (Though he closes his eyes when he dances and remembers.) A fellow-filmmaker-friend did a project in Haiti a couple years ago, I wrote and asked for B roll. Then I realized I am free. This is not my movie. I have no rights to the music, I have no client, nothing needs to happen. I have twenty-first century freedom of access and the tentacles of the internet. What can I create for grandfather? He’s endlessly curious about his isle, but he gets his media via television. He only sees Haiti after the Earthquake or cholera outbreak. He gets glimpses of Port-au-Prince slums and tent-cities not boulevards in Jacmel or Cap‑Haïtien.
I decided to show him other images of his isle, old and alternative. With Leyla as my muse, I cut a montage, ostensibly beginning when he left and progressing to the present.
In the crafting, I felt unusual freedom. I didn’t worry about killing darlings — none of the shots were mine, I had no stake in whether they made the cut. In relating to the footage only through editing, I was surprised by the power in certain images and the absence in others. I thought I would stress particularly arresting footage, images crafted with exceptional attention to form: elegant framing, striking light, careful artistry. These are the sort of images I try to shoot. Yet wading through such footage, it felt vapid. I could sense the attention more to form than content. I suspected excitement more in the artistry than in the subject or story. The vapidity despite such beauty shook me. It helped me too. I saw how my films, too, may suffer from my concern for form over feeling, artistry over intimacy.
Making movies for an immediate audience, folks I know and care for, helps me inject emotion. Better, it helps me anticipate the emotions I want to include, and notice when their missing. For example, this film was not to evoke nostalgia or tragedy, though my grandfather surely feels both when he thinks of Haiti. It is not to intrigue with exoticism or promote Haitian resilience, though I found both oft repeated. Wading through video searches for “Haiti”, “Haïti”, “Ayiti”, I see old media fascinated by voodoo, strange ceremonies, the persistence of outside influences: “What is an Anglo-Saxon maypole doing here? Your guess is as good as mine!” I wonder about the persistence of certain images: a colonial street front, a couple cathedrals, the presidential palace… then realize this is as much a reflection of who’s making the images (whiteman staying in the cities, pointing cameras at grandeur and familiarity, or extremity) as it is of whatever in Haiti is worth filming. I feel tragedy in all the stories lost, images missed, places passed, while folks filmed the same, inert spaces.
We image-makers are surprisingly consistent, predictable, and uninspired. When searching for historic Haiti now, one finds postcards instead of photo albums. Maybe the French have better archives.
I imagine what all those Haitians would have filmed, the cinema they could have created, the wealth of culture they could have left.
More modern looks at Haiti still dabble in the exoticism (e.g. Haitian machete fighting) but most are aspirational, showing white sands, turquoise water, and strong people. They show abject poverty and wide smiles… hope for Haiti, despite all that history. These are the films of surprised visitors.
Haitian videos look like this:
Among many others, of course.
My grandfather misses Haiti. He retired to a spot about as close as you can get to Haiti without leaving the States. He also feels distinctly removed from the culture, not least because of his dramatically different fortune, or because he’s spent most of his life as an American. My goal with the film was to account for time and space. Leyla imbues the movie with emotion. All the footage needed to do was show change. Hint at all that happened, all that was and all that remains, the context of the life of his parents, his siblings, his cousins, his grand-nephews and grand-nieces. He knows who lived there. He recognizes characters in the footage. The dapper folks at the market, pixelated into oblivion, may evoke more direct memories than the sharpest images of today.
Working with the media of yesterday helps me consider my responsibilities making media today. The stakes are different now. Filmmaking is no longer prohibitively expensive. Many people have cameras, at least on their phones. Haitians share their work on Instagram, Youtube, Snapchat… all over. A collection of young Haitian photographers even featured in a recent National Geographic. Most folks, there or here, will not be so lucky. Where their work goes, how it is seen and saved, how it becomes part of the story, narrative, and imagery of the island, remains open. More powerful media-makers continue to use Haiti for their own agendas, e.g. as an extreme landscape for athletic exploits or edgy investigations.
The #BlackLivesMatter Movement helps remind us that Black memories matter too. If previous generations didn’t record stories from Africans and the African diaspora, it’s all the more onus on us to make up for it now. Many of these folks had oral histories instead of written. They lacked the resources to create their own media, to document their own accounts and memories. Their absence echoes. Black storytellers tell of of growing up identifying with White characters, as White stories were all they had (e.g. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Yaa Gyasi).
The Internet helps change this. Children can find stories from all over now, not only through the books in their library or the shows broadcast on television. We probably now have too many images instead of too few. Cobbling together a story from the bounty of social media may be no easier. In a few dozen years, my grandchildren may have as much confusion and concern flailing through random media of their heritage as I did mine.
As I collaged from borrowed footage, and as Leyla has yet to post these songs on Youtube, I share the video only here:
