Filmmaking | Interviews

Rotten at the Root

1 Sep , 2003  

Written by Genevieve Butler | Posted by:

Filmmaker Gode Davis talks about his film 'American Lynching: A Strange and Bitter Fruit,' the first feature-length documentary to investigate the grim history of lynching in the United States.

With over 20 years of filmmaking experience to his credit, Gode Davis knows a few things about documentary filmmaking, and does not hesitate to specify what he thinks works. He has written numerous scripts and several documentaries, including the recent "American Lynching" which will be featured among only 13 documentaries in the 2003 Independent Film Project (IFP) Market "No Borders" program.

Davis’ work, which he described as having been more “international in scope,” became more focused on New England culture with his move to Rhode Island in 1994. His script for the PBS program "Tunnel Visions," a documentary about the controversial sewage outflow tunnel between the Boston Harbor and the Massachusetts Bay, was broadcast on WGBH, and he is a member of the local and national Writer’s Guilds.

When he is not actively engaged in a project, Davis reads voraciously and makes the rounds, watching films and attending festivals. The idea for "American Lynching: A Strange and Bitter Fruit," was inspired by a still image of a lynching witness from the 1999 Sundance film "The Black Press: Soldiers Without Swords." When asked about how these experiences have served him writing, directing, and making "American Lynching" interesting and original, Davis cuts right to the chase.

Davis: Anything you’ve ever seen in a documentary, we’ll have something of that, and a few things you’ve never seen. One of the things I’m hoping to do is take a play, in Providence… the Providence Black Repertory Theatre is going to perform a scene from an anti-lynching play of the 1920’s. What we’ll do is have that as background with certain images — they’ll actually be doing the play while you’ll see other visuals and audio. It’s a neat affect I’ve been playing with, which has a tinge of the experimental to it. But for the most part, we’ll be dealing with a more traditional style… we’ll have very brief reenactments perhaps, but I don’t like long, drawn out reenactments. Just something to give people an idea, if there’s no other way to convey a particular mood, or as an illustration of an event.

GB: Are these formal decisions intended to appeal to any particular audience?

Davis: We are definitely looking at public television as our main focus. PBS green-lighted the project, in February of this year, which is a real vote of confidence. On the other hand, I’m sure that HBO is interested in this product too. I’ll weigh the options, and I’ll also see what comes my way… with the IFP "No Borders."

GB: Would you describe your experience with "No Borders"?

Davis: We had initially applied into the "Spotlight on Documentaries" section as a documentary in progress. There were 60 films selected for that category, and we were hoping to get into that… they bumped us up to the "No Borders," where there are only 13 documentaries. I thought that was a better deal because it gives us a lot more visibility. I was pleased. It was one of the few times in my life that I applied for something and got picked for something better.

We go to IFP with the hope that someone will have an interest in our project, and decide to help us further along. I think historically, the IFP has been a place where there’s been a considerable interest in independent films that have been produced and have made an impact on American culture. I hope that this joins that line of films.

GB: Where did the idea to make this film come from?

Davis: The idea came from my experience in 1999, when I was invited to attend the Sundance Film Festival. I got a chance to see 34 films including ten docs, one was a film by Stanley Nelson, a New York City filmmaker… called "The Black Press: Soldiers Without Swords." I happened to notice a photo still of a young girl, about 12 years old, who was witnessing, with her family, the burning-lynching of an adolescent black boy. She was a white girl, and they had just come back from church, you could see that she was dressed in a Sunday dress, and she was maybe 10 feet away from where someone was being tortured and burned alive.

I had only thought of lynchings in a very abstract way before… I hadn’t known that certain lynchings were spectacle events where thousands of people attended, and that they were amusement or entertainment oriented. Like a carnival or something, but with the main attraction being somebody hung or burned alive…Sometimes they would roast meat, hot dogs and hamburgers, 150 or 100 feet away from where someone was being burned. There would be extra excursion cars on trains, all that stuff was new to me. But, I mainly focused on that little girl from the photo still. She drew my attention more than anything else. Those other things were things that came to mind as I began to research. I just wondered what it was like to witness a lynching. If someone would be traumatized by witnessing a lynching or participating in a lynching… This has been brought out a little bit in the last couple of years, mainly because of James Allen’s photo exhibit in New York City. This film made a deep impression on me. It immediately started asking me questions about what it was like to witness a lynching: what was it like to be there, to attend a lynching, to participate? And other questions sprung from that, and those questions were the basis for beginning work on this film.

GB: There does seem to be more interest in the history of lynching lately, including James Allen’s exhibition, and some recent scholarship on the song "Strange Fruit." Have these been influential to you?

Davis: There was another film, Joel Katz, a colleague of mine, put out a little more than a year ago…[and] of course the film "Strange Fruit" was about the song that Abel Meeropol wrote, originally for Billie Holiday. And of course she made it famous, and then other performers also did their versions of it — it became a song that had its own life in a way, that actually played quite a role, I think, in the Civil Rights movement, as well as bringing lynching to the attention of the American public. The film "Strange Fruit" also talks about Abel Meeropol’s adopting of the Rosenberg children. I met the Rosenberg boys in New York and told them about my film, and they were excited about it as well. His film is a very good film… and [it’s been one of the biggest sellers this year through] his distributor, California Newsreel, in San Francisco.

You’ve probably seen some of the scholarship on our website, we have a tremendous body of scholars. They are part of our project and have helped us every step of the way.

GB: Your website’s timeline begins with Colonial America and ends just after the height Civil Rights Movement in the 1960’s. Is there a particular time on that timeline that you will focus on in the film?

Davis: No, but we also have two contemporary threads running through the film. One deals with lynching-like events, or even occasional lynchings, though it’s very controversial to call them lynchings, even if they are, today because of the politics in place now.

We also have a thread of healing and reconciliation. A few towns and cities where lynchings occurred are beginning to erect memorials and other markers, and other types of regular ceremonies annually, to commemorate the victims of lynching events. That’s a really good trend that we’re going to try to encourage. We want to emphasize that it’s not just a grim story.

Another positive aspect are the dissenting voices now, and years ago, even at the height of lynching, when lynching was a dark, menacing thing that was affecting thousands of people every year in one way or the other. We will have the dissenting voices aspect of it which will be a strong component… [and] the story within the story, of different victims, to humanize them, to let people know the victims and other participants and witnesses. In a way this is like a Holocaust film, an American Holocaust film. Maybe ‘holocaust’ with a small ‘h’ because you don’t want to confuse it with the Nazi Holocaust because of the enormity of that…This was a Holocaust of a kind itself that occurred in America, but no one’s ever shone a light on it.

GB: Your purpose then is to shine light on this part of American history. Are there any other films that have exclusively focused on lynching?

Davis: This is the first feature length film dealing exclusively with the topic and all it entails. There were of course, many, many, many lynchings; tens of thousands in our history, before the Civil War, after, probably until now. Although there’s been two decades since an official lynching has actually been declared by authorities to be one, that doesn’t mean they haven’t happened.

GB: What is the official definition of lynching?

Davis: The term ‘lynching’ is a somewhat controversial term. I like to use the NAACP [definition]: three or more perpetrators in a mob-like group usually, I think that would be an essential…usually, I think a lynching would be someone killed by a mob, it could be a small group or a large one.

We’re going to be talking about the dynamics of lynch mobs, which is a more peculiarly American tradition. Lynchings weren’t particularly American, but lynch mobs were. Lynchings have always occurred in history, but the way that lynchings occurred and worked in the US was quite marvelous to watch, except in a bad way, because of course, they were a malignant type of force that took lives rather than brought lives.

GB: On your website, AmericanLynching.com, you ask the public to submit their stories and artifacts. Did the first hand accounts by witnesses, and your information about lynchings perpetrated on other groups, come to you through e-mails to the web site?

Davis: We’ve had pretty good luck with that as well. We’ve been able to get all kinds of artifacts and leads on lynching events. The American public has been very helpful. Occasionally, we get people who don’t like what we’re doing too.

GB: How has the content of your film been received so far?

Davis: It’s interesting — it goes by community. When you go to a community where a lynching occurred, you usually have a schism of some kind. A lot of people basically want to say that it’s over with, or done with, don’t want to bring it up again. There are other people who say we have to bring it up again if we’re going to heal as a community… [M]ost communities take the easier route, and don’t want to bring it up, so of the people that we wish to interview, maybe one in five will actually interview with us.

GB: In those communities that ‘take the easier route,’ have you found economic or political pressure behind the resistance to address this piece of their history?

Davis: There’s all kind of pressures with lynchings, and we’re going to get into them all too: the economic pressures, the peer pressures of different kinds, social conformity. With white on black, for example, the most famous kind of lynchings, you have a lot of times, just a person who transgressed a social code. Of course, that’s nothing new, but we’re going to talk about… these things, and why they happened in these communities, and why, in others, they didn’t or they were stopped. In one case, we found… there was a 15-year old girl who, with one weapon, was able to stop a lynching where there was a mob of 3,000 gathered. One 15-year old girl, who was the daughter of a sheriff, I think that’s pretty impressive. These are stories within the story. With her, if we did her story, we’d want to find out a lot more about her, what motivated her to stand up in front of a mob. It’s very fascinating, but it’s also a subject that’s shameful and tragic, so filmmakers have stayed away from it all these years.

GB: Have you had the opportunity to get feedback from people who have seen the work-in-progress tapes?

Davis: Yes, I have had some from a selective few that have seen the tape. Their comments have been varied of course, like with anything else that’s done well, they like certain aspects of what we’ve done.

We have a tremendous team in place, by the way, that helps us to execute well. And I’m not the only one on the team who resides in New England, which is good. We have Alf Wilson, from Walpole… who is our associate producer and probably will be our assistant director for some of our more complicated shoots. We have James Fortier, who directed "Alcatraz is Not an Island" last fall on PBS, which has also won several awards. Mike Yearling, who also worked on "Alcatraz Is Not an Island," has been very instrumental as our editor so far, in helping to put together what I would like to see.

It’s a two-hour film, a lot of people wanted us to make it an hour, but we can’t do it and do justice to the phenomenon. So we’re trying to stick to our guns on that one. I think if we create a two-hour film we won’t have much trouble broadcasting it.

GB: Will there be any emphasis placed on the history of lynching in New England?

Davis: Yes, one area in the film is northern lynchings… There was a near lynching in Newport, Rhode Island on July 4, 1913. A mob of about 10,000 people nearly ripped apart and beat-up, almost to death, a black man who had fired a gun up into the air. The bullet had come down, ricocheted, and hit a 12-year old white boy in the head and killed him.

GB: Has most of your work had a local connection?

Davis: Americans don’t tend to watch documentaries as much as they watch narratives. It’s a sad fact. They watch them more in Europe than they do here. So that’s a problem immediately, financially. There are occasional documentaries that do well like "Bowling For Columbine," Michael Moore’s film. Maybe this film will have that success, maybe it won’t, but they are few and far between, feature-length documentaries that make it to the art houses.

I try and avoid narrative reenactments. I saw a show about the Ku Klux Klan on the History Channel recently, and it was filled with reenactments that take you away from the immediacy and urgency that the film might otherwise convey. Many reenactments are inexact. Missing details, they’re easy to spot by a viewer, but not by a producer. Then to complicate that, there are reenactments that have too much realism, so you can’t suspend disbelief enough to get into it.

GB: Do you think this technique makes the same social issues too confined to the period, and thus easy to dismiss as irrelevant today?

Davis: That is why I ran two contemporary threads through this. I want this to be a relevant film. For the most part, because we need to heal from these events… They’ve never been addressed! We also need to recognize that they still could happen, and occasionally still do happen. If we just relegate them to the past, the distant past, as other filmmakers attempted to do, that’s not only a false picture, but it’s also unfairly reassuring.

For the living, we really need to continue making films that affect you viscerally. If we fail to do that, if we stop ourselves from doing that because it is not expedient, or it doesn’t make enough money, then the public is being done a disservice if filmmakers only work according to their own self interest.

GB: Do you see this film as commenting on documentary as well as investigating the phenomenon of lynching?

Davis: It has elements of self-reflection, as well just mirroring the culture and society of what was and what is. That by itself is a reward for a filmmaker, and for anyone involved in making a film like this. But, at the same time, there is a lot of opposition to turning up emotions that have been lying dormant for so long. That will be a challenge.

Among the people who were lynched in early colonial days, even in the modern era, were eccentrics. People who didn’t commit any crime, but were eccentric, and ostracized by their communities…Although some of them were criminals, I don’t believe there was ever a justified lynching… You might know the song by Bob Dylan, called "With God on Our Side," which talks about the idea that everybody thinks they have God on their side when they fight.

I like to pose questions, and the people I’m involved with, especially Mr. Fortier, and Mike Yearling, all like to ask questions… A lot of those are resolved when we edit. It’s quite exciting to see what goes on there. It’s a creative energy that equals my best feelings in creating a piece of printed work.

The biggest thing is keeping the team together, keeping everyone on the same page. If I can do that, I think we can make a nice film.

GB: Does the content of this film compound what is already a difficult struggle to make independent film?

Davis: The content is hard, but actually it has helped this particular project because people are damn curious about what we’re going to come up with. Also, unfortunately, something else Americans like… the violence and gore that is inherent in the stories of lynching. So, in some ways, that is how we have had a bit of an easier time getting people interested in this. It’s not necessarily going to carry us, but already people have been after me to tone it down, to create something that is more palatable to the middle class average American viewer. That’s a comment we received at ITVS. Of course we are very balanced, but some of the images are inherently gory, and are difficult to watch. But in reality, we will be doing different camera angles with them and some other things to draw attention, like you would see in the best documentary.

GB: What would be your advice to filmmakers who want to make work that isn’t as marketable as commercial work, that has difficult images or controversial content?

Davis: They need to approach it from a unique angle. They need to try to accomplish something that has never been done before. Some kind of angle. They need to then, if it can’t be immediately tied to a product… to consumerism, it needs to be expressed in a way that’s novel, and that, unfortunately, may help people sell things, because it attracts people’s attention and interest. That’s the way America works, unfortunately.

It’s not that we want… to only learn more about ourselves. Quite the opposite: Americans are not an introspective bunch, for the most part. It’s not a great testament to Americans to know that conformity, at times, has allowed people to either look the other way or commit or condone atrocities. But they do, and they have.

Even in 2001, after September 11, 2001, you had a situation where six people were killed… because they were people who were considered others or outsiders and there was this collective response. And one man, in Texas, and another in Arizona I believe, were actually lynched by small mobs. Whenever American imperialism has gone unfettered, and the idea that nationalism has replaced a real love of country, when you’ve had that happen, you’ve had a license to lynch.

My model for this film is a nine-hour film called "Shoah" by Claude Lanzmann. I saw that film in three 3-hour sittings at Sundance. I liked the juxtaposition of perpetrators and witnesses, victims, stories within the story: a testament to what happened. That, if anything is the major thread running through this film.

Visit www.AmericanLynching.com to find out more about the film, Gode Davis, and the other people involved in the making of ‘American Lynching: A Strange and Bitter Fruit,’ to read updates on the film’s progress, or to find out more about the history of lynching in the United States from the Pilgrims to the present. More information and schedules for the IFP Market can be found at http://market.ifp.org/market25/.


Visit www.AmericanLynching.com to find out more about the film, Gode Davis, and the other people involved in the making of 'American Lynching: A Strange and Bitter Fruit,' to read updates on the film’s progress, or to find out more about the history of lynching in the United States from the Pilgrims to the present. More information and schedules for the IFP Market can be found at http://market.ifp.org/market25/.

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