Introduction
Below is an email interview that Professor Tracy H. Strain (THS) completed with me via a series of emails across the last week of September, 2023. The format and length of the interview were the result of a last minute opportunity to engage with Professor Strain; and my questions were partially the product of undergraduate research I completed in spring 2023 on Zora Neale Hurston for a digital archive building class at the University of Pittsburgh, “Cinema and Revolution,” taught by Professor Liz Reich. My questions are marked with numbers and begin “(KB).”
As a Black woman who hopes to work in the industry and a dual major in Anthropology and Film Studies both Hurston and THS are inspirations for me. Professor Strain’s 2023 documentary Zora Neale Huston, Claiming a Space, was one of my main sources on Hurston; and Hurston herself has been a personal model. So my interview with Professor Strain focuses on these two subjects. However, THS’s responses to my emails challenged my research on Hurston, providing alternative questions that would better situate Hurston in her time, field, and personal history. Our emails also addressed THS’s own history and concerns how – and which – stories get lost from their would-be archives: films, books, and interviews alike.
In particular, THS’s response to my question about career constraints on Black women filmmakers, in her own life, and those she understood to have affected Hurston underscored the complexity of rendering and representing Black women media-makers as they lived and worked: at rich as well as restricted intersections of sociopolitical, historical, and artistic dreams and times. As a whole, THS words below suggest a number of lenses with which we might experiment in viewing Black women’s film history. One is place; another, affiliations (her comments about Henry Hampton and Blackside resonate here); yet another, intimacies and private choices. As she puts it toward the end of the interview: “Lives are complicated—and so are constraints.”
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Email Interview, September 24 - September 30, 2023
1. (KB): Firstly, I’d like to ask you about your experience as a respected Black intellectual, filmmaker, and researcher. What is your favorite piece of work you’ve done and why? Are there any particular notable moments in your career that have shaped who you’ve become? What do you consider your most important work or intervention in a film or televised piece and why?
(THS): After watching the premiere episodes of Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years on public television, I wanted to work at the company that produced the series, which was Blackside, founded by Henry Hampton. I saw working there as a way to combine my American Studies undergraduate major and to learn different things from what I was studying at the production company where I had begun my career. I was excited to work at a company run by an African American because I had never had that experience and expected that things would be different. Years later, I landed a freelance job there as an associate producer on The Great Depression series. I learned so much about historical storytelling, ethics, archival research, working with academic experts, 16mm filmmaking, and collaboration there. Yes – it was different in such a positive way that I came back to Blackside in 1997 to write, produce and direct – my first time in these roles – two films for the series, I’ll Make Me a World: A Century of African American Arts.
For I’ll Make Me a World, it was extremely challenging to make two films at the same time, but I was determined that given this opportunity, I would work as hard as needed to tell these stories well for myself, audiences and the company. Any struggle I had as I was getting paid to learn and think about jazz, theater, ballet, visual arts, and more about U.S. and international histories greatly paled to what the artists I interviewed shared with me about how much they put up with to pursue their art and creative visions. For the series I had the great honor of interviewing Jacob Lawrence, Gwendolyn Knight, Elizabeth Catlett, Billy Taylor, Arthur Mitchell, Raven Wilkinson, Delores Browne, Jacques d’Amboise, Virginia Johnson, August Wilson and Lloyd Brown, to name just a few.
At our I’ll Make Me a World rough cut screenings – with our advisors in attendance – I received such a positive response for the unfinished episode that included stories about James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun making it to Broadway and Black ballet dancers, that I felt that I could and should trust my instincts. The story about Black ballet dancers was one that derived from me with the initial research provided by my sister, and I had to work to prove to Henry Hampton that it would be a compelling story. I was blessed that the Boston Ballet believed in what I was trying to do and allowed me to film their production of Swan Lake because there was very little archival footage of Black ballet dancers. When I found out that the song “Nature Boy” was released the same year that Baldwin left the United States, I knew I found music—and lyrics—that would work for the mood of the film (original and Grover Washington’s solo saxophone rendition) and would provide a wonderful contrast with an orchestra performance of Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake.” And I already was interested in making a feature documentary about Lorraine Hansberry before I included an aspect of her life and A Raisin in the Sun in I’ll Make Me a World.
Though it took 14 years to do so, I completed Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart, the first feature film about Hansberry in time to premiere at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival. It is a documentary that focuses on Hansberry as an artist/activist rather than what was typically presented about her before my film: a one-hit wonder and Black first who wrote the American classic A Raisin in the Sun and then died shortly after. The vast majority of people, including academics, had no idea how radical she was. I felt blessed to have people in my life who helped me make that long-time dream come true. Without having worked at Blackside, I am not sure if I would have been able to have made the film.
2. (KB): Based on your research, both included or cut from the documentary Claiming a Space, what are some risks that Zora Neale Hurston took when doing her work and how/why were these risks so necessary to take? Do you consider her choice of ethnographic film to have changed the field of Anthropology? Do you think this was Zora Neale Hurston’s intent?
(THS): Maybe you want to ask a different question because this one is making assumptions that are not accurate.
Zora Neale Hurston was determined to conduct research and tell stories of the Black experience. Other than traveling alone in the south as a woman and Black person in a decent car and a pistol, I do not see Hurston as someone who was taking risks. I see Hurston as someone who was compelled after she started studying anthropology to provide research-based information to show that rural Black culture in a variety of places was connected to Africa, beautiful and significant and stood her ground in a number of situations.
Charlotte Osgood Mason purchased the motion picture camera that Hurston used to film the Black people she encountered in various places. Mason wanted to collect Black material for her own purposes and Mason was not at all a fan of academia so there was no academic ethnographic impulse there. The motion picture material like all of the material Hurston collected was owned by Mason.
Anthropologists at the time that Hurston was filming Black people considered film cumbersome and unable to capture the detailed information that was considered important to document. No, her films did not change the field of Anthropology during her lifetime. No one in the field was paying attention to her after a certain point. She was not resurrected until the 1970s when Alice Walker did so. Today many Black anthropologists feel empowered by the films, her field work and what she tried to accomplish, and some consider her a “foremother.”
3. (KB): What information or research did you find that did NOT make your final cut for Claiming a Space that you wish could have been included? If you want to list a few, feel free. And if possible, can you state why these were cut; if the decisions were difficult to make; and/or how and why you came to make them (feel free to say that you can’t answer fully if there are professional constraints there). Finally: how do you feel inclusion of these or another aspect of your research/plans for the film might have changed the documentary overall?
The documentary “Zora Neale Hurston: Claiming a Space,” which I made for the PBS series American Experience was completed in 11 months and was originally planned to be a one-hour film. Because of that, I asked questions of a limited scope. Going in, I knew that Their Eyes Were Watching God was going to be the film’s climax because it represents the most dynamic integration of her literary powers and social science research. Plus, it was her most famous book. I approached the content of what to include in the documentary based on thinking: “What does an audience need to know to make that scene work emotionally, intellectually, and creatively?” This book is some people’s favorite book, and I wanted other audiences to understand that genius and hopefully provide some new insights for those who already held the love.
I knew that the climatic scene, and the storytelling overall, would not work if I did not provide some basic information about anthropology at the time Hurston was operating, as well as before her time, for some of her decisions to make sense. I needed to include just enough so that audiences could understand what she was up against being Black, female and passionate about Anthropology. When I had my first cut of the film, it was 40 minutes long and I really didn’t know what to cut out. Fortunately, I was eventually given two hours to tell the story.
To answer your question about what could not be included in the film. If “Zora Neale Hurston: Claiming a Space” had been a series, which implies having more screen time, I would have included information about her decisions to end her marriage and romantic relationships because she was so focused on her career. There are some details I took out including some about when she was on her own as a young person because there was no appropriate archival. This includes when she worked as a maid to an actress in a traveling Gilbert and Sullivan troupe. You can only put so much into a two-hour film, so decisions about what to keep are made based on the storytelling.
4. (KB): Finally, picking up from my question regarding constraints… Your documentary focuses on the many limitations that Black intellectuals faced during and within the Harlem Renaissance and notes how Hurston herself had to work through funding and/or financial problems. Was there more you wanted to share about this, specifically with regard to Black women; Black women filmmakers at the time; or Hurston as a filmmaker/ethnographer/artist overall? Do you find there are similar kinds of constraints you face for as a Black woman artist and scholar; a Black female filmmaker; a person working in and alongside current movements in art, higher education/the university, film and broadcast, documentary specifically, and Black culture and politics?
(THS): There is nothing more I can think to share about Hurston’s constraints at the moment. Lives are complicated—and so are constraints. Yes, of course, I have faced constraints in my life that feel eerily similar to what Hurston faced, but I do not know any Black people raised in the United States in any field who have not. There will always be gatekeepers, and I will continue to engage and work for structural and other changes in institutions and practices to make things more open and equitable. And I was inspired by Hurston’s ability to just dive right in and make things happen for herself—alone and with others.
Biography
Tracy Heather Strain is the Corwin-Fuller Professor of Film Studies at Wesleyan University. She is drawn to individual stories that reveal the ways that race, gender, ethnicity, class and sexuality work to shape lives and reflect and challenge society’s historical, artistic, political and cultural narratives. Her films in the award-winning series Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick?, Race: The Power of an Illusion and I’ll Make Me a World: A Century of African American Arts serve as early examples. She is co-founder (with Randall MacLowry) of the production company, The Film Posse, and currently at work on an independent film Survival Floating. Her 2023 documentary, Zora Neale Hurston: Claiming A Space, has just premiered on American Experience. Strain’s 2017 film, Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart, was the first feature about Lorraine Hansberry. Strain incorporated her 36-year practice, rooted in discovering, researching and directing new and often unknown stories to advance social justice, build community and empower the marginalized into a documentary described by Robin D. G. Kelley as “a gorgeous visual love letter…in its brilliance, honesty, and vision.” The documentary won several awards including a Peabody and NAACP Image Award for directing.
Kayla Brockington is a 3rd year University of Pittsburgh student with interests in Anthropology and Film and Media Studies. She interned at the London-based production company Starpoint from January to April in 2024. She was also one of the organizers of a University of Pittsburgh Black Media Scholar series event in April, 2023, featuring Zeinabu irene Davis and Marc Chery, and a screening of their 1999 film, Compensation.