Filmmaker Shola Lynch long has been a crucial part of the Black women’s documentary tradition, one that Jacqueline Bobo etches out in her piece in this volume and that includes filmmakers Elizabeth Mitchell, Zora Neale Hurston, Eslanda Goode Robeson, Madeline Anderson, Jacqueline Shearer, and Yvonne Welbon. However, a longform, academic interview with Shola Lynch has been too long in coming. Lynch’s unique path to documentary filmmaking, beginning with her work with Ken Burns, reveals the evolution of political documentary under her care. Lynch’s award-winning documentaries, Chisholm ’72: Unbought and Unbossed (2004) and Free Angela Davis and All Political Prisoners (2012), highlight her keen curatorial work in finding, selecting, and editing images and sounds into an intricate historical vision. But across these films, Lynch also cleared ground around the idea of “Black women’s politics,” coalescing a new set of sounds, images, and synecdochic signifiers representing this oft ignored concept. Lynch motivates the documentary form to present the lives of Black women deliberately marginalized from the American historical narrative due to the radical and futuristic nature of their political projects. In Chisholm ’72, Lynch determined to focus specifically on Congresswoman Chisholm’s bid for the presidency in 1972 rather than her time in Congress, a bid many historians have not taken seriously but which, as she reveals, was highly serious and deeply prescient in its aim to mobilize all the people to vote and as one of the first presidential bids based legitimately on intersectional coalitional politics. Using archival footage from many sources including student documentaries and news outtakes, Lynch’s careful treatment of Chisholm’s determined and tramontane ability to build meaningful bridges across difference and the politician’s ability to rhetorically out-master her white colleagues clearly showcase the politician’s history-making mind and intervention. Not only has Lynch gathered a diverse assemblage of moving images revealing details of Chisholm’s story never before examined and compiled them into an archive, but Lynch’s adroit choice of interviewees, including Barbara Lee and Octavia Butler, are precisely the right intellects to explore her legacy. The scene of Chisholm receiving news that the delegates have not chosen her is perhaps the most righteously tear-provoking scenes in the history of campaign trail documentaries. Lynch’s willingness to look deeply and carefully into the interior moments of Black women political figures and to lock on instances where those interior moments make public appearances is a distinguishing and powerful contribution. It is comparable to Madeline Anderson’s provocative portraiture of Black women striking workers in I Am Somebody (1970) looking into the camera with resolve, peace, and settled determination. These are moments that that the cinema has rarely before captured, let alone theorized as Lynch and Anderson evocatively do in their work.

In the interview, Lynch also discusses the relationship between cinematic theory and practice and reveals the methods and research that lay behind her documentaries—even recounting the mundane and bureaucratic as elements of her process and naming, for example, the value of annotation as a motif across her work. She draws out, too, a concept she calls the “historical imagination”, a force that animates the relationship between Black women’s bodies, their affect, and cinematic historiography. Lynch emerges from the interview as an historian, not just in her work curating Schomburg collections but also in her painstaking primary research and historiographic intervention around visualizing Black women whose lives and intentions remained obscured either by political fetishization or the tyranny of history’s victors which made them “outtakes” of history. Her insights on the process and value of historical filmmaking lead us into spaces of historical speculation, affective intensity, and new understandings of documentary form. The interview shines light on her craft and method in bringing forward a documentary historical lens for Black women’s inner and outer political space. Through her filmmaking she has developed an historiographic approach that emphasizes the value of media images, of developing depth and public interest in Black stories, and of activism in building archives that work against the tide of racism, erasure, and the pursuit of corporate interests. Especially now, as we are witnessing the start of the second Black woman’s presidential bid, Chisholm’s history, as Lynch carefully builds it, is important to revisit and to understand for what it tells us about Black women’s mediated histories and futures.

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Let’s just start at the beginning: when did cinema become interesting for you?

There was no point in my life where film wasn’t a part of my interests, even when I was a kid and just an audience member. I will never forget seeing The Wiz (1978) on the big screen. Diana Ross and Michael Jackson—just the spectacle and the beauty…and Nipsey Russell! It was such an event to go to the theater sit there with mom or dad and a big tub of popcorn and be taken away by sights and sounds that were being projected for you. I remember feeling that way about Jaws (1975) also, but for different reasons: terror! But none of those early experiences made me feel that I had to be a filmmaker. As a kid growing up in New York City on the Upper West Side in the 70s and 80s, I couldn’t imagine that filmmaking was something I could do. Who did that? The only people that I could see who lived that life were Spike Lee and Julie Dash. They were so committed as auteurs. My father was a history professor, so I grew up around—and in—books, some of them photo or art books, but books—text. It was books that animated my imagination, especially literature. But at a certain point, probably in graduate school, visualization became important. I found myself drawn to photographers. Not that I wanted to be a photographer but I started to see how the visualization of certain ideas, people, and events cemented their reality in the mind. This meant that history could be something more than facts in a book that weren’t particularly interesting; we could get to know people whose lives were beyond the mainstream definition of history. Mainstream history at the time left me wondering: where are the stories? Who were the people? In college I remember discovering, really, history through African American literature because that narrative storytelling provided a hook, an entry point into the past that went beyond a disconnected collection of facts. So my ambition became to retell history through artifacts and visualizing it. At the time, I could only imagine that happening within a museum or institution so I got a Master’s in American history and public history resource management. I thought I would be a curator in a small historical museum somewhere in the United States telling stories through stuff.

That’s amazing, Shola. You’ve really lived a lot of different dreams all the way through to completion.

What I learned from being an athlete is that you have to have a vision. You put together a plan, but that plan is never THE plan because there are always things you can’t quite imagine that happen. You have to follow the opportunities that come your way. Sometimes you can’t see them all before they get there. Sometimes your plans don’t work out and you have to pivot. But that doesn’t mean the bigger picture of your goal has to be abandoned. It just means that your method may not be working. So, when I couldn’t find a way—especially in New York City, which is very old school—to curate at a historical institution, someone I knew said: “Well, have you heard of this guy Ken Burns? He makes films—historical films. You might be interested.” So, I watched all Ken Burn’s films—including The Civil War (1990), which I now watched in an intentional way. I decided that this would be a great path and I wrote him a letter. Well, it got filed, like all letters. Then I met a man named Dave Madison Lacey by accident at a Contemporary African art gallery. I went because there was going to be wine and cheese, and I was just out of graduate school and cheese sounded great: “free wine and cheese! Contemporary African art! How lovely.” When I encountered Lacey, he happened to be in conversation with Horace Ove. Oh, the whole encounter was very Jeffrey Holder-ish. They were big and boisterous and full of laughter and Caribbean energy, especially Horace Ove. I had just come from the Brooklyn Historical Society where they had told me, “We’d love to hire you, but there’s a hiring freeze. We hope you’re unemployed in six months.” I was beginning to feel a little desperate. So, I went up to them. They were talking about film. And I said, “I’ve recently become interested in film, particularly historical films.” They said, in essence, “Who are you—just interrupting our conversation?” After we had some liberal arts banter about history, Dave came around. He said, “I might be able to help you.” and he handed me his card. It said “Dave Madison Lacey: Florentine Films.” Ken Burns had just hired him because they were beginning to plan for Jazz (2001), the 10-part series. And I said, “I sent my resume to Florentine Films!” He said, “That’s it…Mail me your resume and I’ll make sure everybody gets another look at it.” I said, “I can do better.” I pulled out my resume and handed it to him. Later he brought me into the office. We had lunch or coffee, he introduced me to everybody. So now my face was attached to the resume and the name. A few weeks later, they called me in because they needed a researcher. They hired me, eventually, as an associate producer for Frank Lloyd Wright (1998) and then Jazz. But my entry point, my calling card, was what I knew. I was really good at research and I knew how to annotate properly, which a lot of people don’t know how to do at all. Burns’ writer on these projects was getting really frustrated. Because researchers xeroxed items without citations and the writer couldn’t go back and find the references. The researchers weren’t doing old school researching.

That was the beginning. It never occurred to me that I would become a filmmaker. But after four or five years of working in Ken’s filmmaking environment—seeing his vision for history and for storytelling as a director and how he brought everybody in to facilitate that vision, I decided I wanted to try filmmaking. Because there wasn’t that much room in his vision for the things I was interested in exploring as a filmmaker. I knew I could fill a gap.

That is how came to make my documentary on Chisholm. In part, I was frustrated. I wanted to see myself in Black history, and was looking for Black woman whose story I could tell. I rediscovered Chisholm by chance through an NPR announcement on her birthday saying that she was the first Black woman elected to Congress. It occurred to me that I was only looking at dead people. “She’s still alive,” I thought, and a light bulb went off. Why do we wait until people are gone to tell their stories? It means they can’t participate fully. In some ways, that’s more convenient for the storyteller.

So, I decided to focus on Chisholm, a living political and historical figure. When I told Ken about it, he was encouraging but said, essentially, “I can’t really help you do it. But if you need somebody to vouch for you, absolutely.” That alone was awesome. I realized that what I had learned by osmosis, by watching his process from start to finish and spending time in the editing room and with his top-notch producers, it was my grad school. I really had learned the craft and business of documentary filmmaking. I was an apprentice in that way.

Amazing. Were there differences between how you set up your productions and how Ken did? Scale would probably be one.

I would say definitely scale. I was testing myself with Chisholm. I wanted to know if I could be a director. It’s really easy to criticize others’ directing choices but at a certain point, you have to say, “Okay, shut up or put up. Period.” That was the athlete in me. I remember through the process, I never called myself a filmmaker until it was done. Then I got into Sundance! It was a huge validation of the work, Chisholm’s story, my storytelling, and the group of us that I got to bring together. Filmmaking is very collaborative; especially on the level that I was doing it. It’s very family. With each project like this, in your crew, you’re choosing a family to see the film all the way through. I had very strong collaborators, one of them being Sam Pollard, who was still editing at that time. I couldn’t believe that he was interested in working with this first-time filmmaker on a story that many considered small—a marginal piece of history.

What was it like working with Sam Pollard?

Pollard was an incredible collaborator — assertive and opinionated but left plenty of room for me as a first-time director. He was teaching at NYU and editing docs. I couldn’t have asked for a better experience. It doesn’t hurt that the doc got into Sundance! But, Ellen, I’ll tell you, one of the reasons I was able to raise the money for the film pretty quickly over two years is because nobody important was invested in it. It was kind of cute to have this young woman of color tell the story about a woman of color who does something really amazing but loses. We just love the story of Black people and Black women doing what’s right but not winning in the end, right? She doesn’t win the nomination. She wins in other ways. I know the breadth of what she did, but the way it was thought of—that belittling—left room for me, left an opportunity for me to retell the story. That retelling of her story, reset her legacy. Which I never could have imagined really, but it did. People quote her from my film. They don’t actually cite the film, by the way, ever, which I think is a problem in academia. If you’re if you’re quoting somebody’s work, annotate properly. Certain themes are part of my whole trajectory. One of them is: annotate properly! Another key to success for me was this: though it wasn’t easy, I was always really honest about what I liked and didn’t like. That turns out to be the most important skill that you can have as a collaborator and as a director. I’m not afraid of failure. That is the biggest lesson I think I took from athletics. You lose a race and you’re devastated. But then what’s the big picture? So I was never afraid of failing. I would rather know.

Well, that’s also a theme in your work: wanting to know what’s going on—what’s really happening. Because a lot of history, it reiterates what we already know, right? It sort of retells the same story slightly differently. And I think what’s really powerful about Chisholm ’72, partly, is that it shows all of these people who come to politics and political awakenings from her bid for president. I mean, in addition to what I first noticed and what everyone first notices, which is how brilliant she is, I noted how much she’s talking like we are a democracy that is multiracial, multi-gender that really has a multiplicity of people from different backgrounds. It’s an amazing story, but the impact is also obviously in the telling—in the way that you put this together intentionally to showcase certain themes about her life and her bid for president.

Notes

1. Thu, Dec 07, 2023 1:35PM. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. ⮭

Ellen C. Scott is Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at UCLA. Her work explores the role of Black thought, labor, and writing across film history. Her first book Cinema Civil Rights (Rutgers University Press, 2015) exposes the Classical Hollywood-era studio system’s careful repression of civil rights but also the stuttered appearance of these issues through latent, symptomatic signifiers. After tracing these films from their first conception through restrictions imposed on them by industry and state censors, the study ends by assessing how Black political figures and journalists turned Hollywood’s repressed racial imagery into fodder for their own resistant spectatorship and full-blown civil rights demands. An Academy scholar, she is currently working on two book projects, one exploring Black women’s critical writing on the cinema from the birth of cinema through to the early 1980s when Kathleen Collins and Jessie Maple became the first Black women to make feature films. Her second project examines the intersections between the history of slavery and American film history.

Shola Lynch is an award-winning American Filmmaker best known for the feature documentary FREE ANGELA & All Political Prisoners and the Peabody Award winning documentary CHISHOLM ’72: Unbought & Unbossed. Her independent film body of work and her other collaborative projects feed her passion to bring history alive with captivating stories of people, places, and events.

In 2016, Shola became a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. From 2013 – 2024, Shola served as the Curator of the Moving Image & Recorded Sound division of the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Shola is excited to now be member of the Spelman College faculty to train a new generation of storytellers as the Diana King Endowed Professor in Film, Filmmaking, Television, and Related Media in the Department of Art and Visual Culture and the director of the documentary film program.

Shola is currently finishing a documentary about the American sprinter, cultural icon and still World Record holder, Flo Jo. She is in production on an Apple Original film, Number One on the Call Sheet, which will celebrate Black achievement in the film industry, and explore what it takes for Black actresses to find success in Hollywood. She has also been tapped to helm an upcoming documentary on Reverend Jesse Jackson.

In addition to her more than 28 years making documentaries, Shola has a MA in American history and public history management from the University of California, Riverside, and a MS in journalism from Columbia University.

Shola believes deeply in the value of preserving history and its power in storytelling.

For more: sholalynch.com