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Today's
Stories
October
11 / 13, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
Kay's
Misleading Report; CIA/MI-6 Syrian Plot; Dershowitz Flaps Broken
Wings
October 10, 2003
John Chuckman
Schwarzenegger
and the Lottery Society
Toni Solo
Trashing
Free Software
Chris
Floyd
Body
Blow: Bush Joins the Worldwide War on Women
October
9, 2003
Jennifer
Loewenstein
Bombing
Syria
Ramzi
Kysia
Seeing
the Iraqi People
Fran Shor
Groping the Body Politic
Mark Hand
President Schwarzenegger?
Alexander
Cockburn
Welcome
to Arnold, King for a Day
Website of the Day
The Awful Truth about Wesley Clark
October
8, 2003
David
Lindorff
Schwarzenegger
and the Failure of the Centrist Dems
Ramzy
Baroud
Israel's
WMDs and the West's Double Standard
John Ross
Mexico
Tilts South
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
Repub Guru Compares Taxes to the Holocaust
James
Bovard
The
Reagan Roadmap for Antiterrorism Disaster
Michael
Neumann
One
State or Two?
A False Dilemma
October
7, 2003
Uri Avnery
Slow-Motion
Ethnic Cleansing
Stan Goff
Lost in the Translation at Camp Delta
Ron Jacobs
Yom Kippurs, Past and Present
David
Lindorff
Coronado in Iraq
Rep. John Conyers, Jr.
Outing a CIA Operative? Why A Special Prosecutor is Required
Cynthia
McKinney
Who Are "We"?
Elaine Cassel
Shock and Awe in the Moussaoui Case
Walter
Lippman
Thoughts on the Cali Recall
Gary Leupp
Israel's
Attack on Syria: Who's on the Wrong Side of History, Now?
Website
of the Day
Cable News Gets in Touch With It's Inner Bigot
October
6, 2003
Robert
Fisk
US
Gave Israel Green Light for Raid on Syria
Forrest
Hylton
Upheaval
in Bolivia: Crisis and Opportunity
Benjamin Dangl
Divisions Deepen in Third Week of Bolivia's Gas War
Bridget
Gibson
Oh, Pioneers!: Bush's New Deal
Bob Fitrakis and Harvey
Wasserman
The Bush-Rove-Schwarzenegger Nazi Nexus
Nicole
Gamble
Rios Montt's Campaign Threatens Genocide Trials
JoAnn
Wypijewski
The
New Unity Partnership:
A Manifest Destiny for Labor
Website
of the Day
Guerrilla Funk
October
3 / 5, 2003
Tim Wise
The
Other Race Card: Rush and the Politics of White Resentment
Peter
Linebaugh
Rhymsters
and Revolutionaries: Joe Hill and the IWW
Gary Leupp
Occupation
as Rape-Marriage
Bruce
Jackson
Addio
Alle Armi
David Krieger
A Nuclear 9/11?
Ray McGovern
L'Affaire Wilsons: Wives are Now "Fair Game" in Bush's
War on Whistleblowers
Col. Dan Smith
Why Saddam Didn't Come Clean
Mickey
Z.
In Our Own Image: Teaching Iraq How to Deal with Protest
Roger Burbach
Bush Ideologues v. Big Oil in Iraq
John Chuckman
Wesley Clark is Not Cincinnatus
William S. Lind
Versailles on the Potomac
Glen T.
Martin
The Corruptions of Patriotism
Anat Yisraeli
Bereavement as Israeli Ethos
Wayne
Madsen
Can the Republicans Get Much Worse? Sure, They Can
M. Junaid Alam
The Racism Barrier
William
Benzon
Scorsese's Blues
Adam Engel
The Great American Writing Contest
Poets'
Basement
McNeill, Albert, Guthrie
October
2, 2003
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
What's
So Great About Gandhi, Anyway?
Amy Goodman
/ Jeremy Scahill
The
Ashcroft-Rove Connection
Doug Giebel
Kiss and Smear: Novak and the Valerie Plame Affair
Hamid
Dabashi
The Moment of Myth: Edward Said (1935-2003)
Elaine Cassel
Chicago Condemns Patriot Act
Saul Landau
Who
Got Us Into This Mess?
Website of the Day
Last Day to Save Beit Arabiya!
October 1, 2003
Joanne
Mariner
Married
with Children: the Supremes and Gay Families
Robert
Fisk
Oil,
War and Panic
Ron Jacobs
Xenophobia
as State Policy
Elaine
Cassel
The
Lamo Case: Secret Subpoenas and the Patriot Act
Shyam
Oberoi
Shooting
a Tiger
Toni Solo
Plan Condor, the Sequel?
Sean Donahue
Wesley
Clark and the "No Fly" List
Website of the Day
Downloader Legal Defense Fund
September
30, 2003
After
Dark
Arnold's
1977 Photo Shoot
Dave Lindorff
The
Poll of the Shirt: Bush Isn't Wearing Well
Tom Crumpacker
The
Cuba Fixation: Shaking Down American Travelers
Robert
Fisk
A
Lesson in Obfuscation
Charles
Sullivan
A
Message to Conservatives
Suren Pillay
Edward Said: a South African Perspective
Naeem
Mohaiemen
Said at Oberlin: Hysteria in the Face of Truth
Amy Goodman
/ Jeremy Scahill
Does
a Felon Rove the White House?
Website
of the Day
The Edward Said Page
September 29, 2003
Robert
Fisk
The
Myths of Western Intelligence Agencies
Iain A. Boal
Turn It Up: Pardon Mzwakhe Mbuli!
Lee Sustar
Paul
Krugman: the Last Liberal?
Wayne Madsen
General Envy? Think Shinseki, Not Clark
Benjamin
Dangl
Bolivia's Gas War
Uri Avnery
The
Magnificent 27
Pledge
Drive of the Day
Antiwar.com
September
26 / 28, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
Alan
Dershowitz, Plagiarist
David Price
Teaching Suspicions
Saul Landau
Before the Era of Insecurity
Ron Jacobs
The Chicago Conspiracy Trial and
the Patriot Act
Brian
Cloughley
The Strangeloves Win Again
Norman Solomon
Wesley and Me: a Real-Life Docudrama
Robert
Fisk
Bomb Shatters Media Illusions
M. Shahid Alam
A Muslim Sage Visits the USA
John Chuckman
American Psycho: Bush at the UN
Mark Schneider
International Direct Action
The Spanish Revolution to the Palestiniana Intifada
William
S. Lind
How $87 Billion Could Buy Some Real Security
Douglas Valentine
Gold Warriors: the Plundering of Asia
Chris
Floyd
Vanishing Act
Elaine Cassel
Play Cat and Moussaoui
Richard
Manning
A Conservatism that Once Conserved
George Naggiar
The Beautiful Mind of Edward Said
Omar Barghouti
Edward Said: a Corporeal Dream Not Yet Realized
Lenni Brenner
Palestine's Loss is America's Loss
Mickey
Z.
Edward Said: a Well-Reasoned Voice
Tanweer Akram
The Legacy of Edward Said
Adam Engel
War in the Smoking Room
Poets' Basement
Katz, Ford, Albert & Guthrie
Website
of the Weekend
Who the Hell is Stew Albert?
September
25, 2003
Edward
Said
Dignity,
Solidarity and the Penal Colony
Robert
Fisk
Fanning
the Flames of Hatred
Sarah
Ferguson
Wolfowitz at the New School
David
Krieger
The
Second Nuclear Age
Bill Glahn
RIAA Doublespeak
Al Krebs
ADM and the New York Times: Covering Up Corporate Crime
Michael
S. Ladah
The Obvious Solution: Give Iraq Back to the Arabs
Fran Shor
Arnold and Wesley
Mustafa
Barghouthi
Edward Said: a Monument to Justice and Human Rights
Alexander Cockburn
Edward Said: a Mighty and Passionate
Heart
Website
of the Day
Edward Said: a Lecture on the Tragedy of Palestine
The Great Alejandro Escavedo Needs Your Help!
September 24, 2003
Stan Goff
Generational
Casualties: the Toxic Legacy of the Iraq War
William
Blum
Grand Illusions About Wesley Clark
David
Vest
Politics
for Bookies
Jon Brown
Stealing Home: The Real Looting is About to Begin
Robert Fisk
Occupation and Censorship
Latino
Military Families
Bring Our Children Home Now!
Neve Gordon
Sharon's
Preemptive Zeal
Website
of the Day
Bands Against Bush
September
23, 2003
Bernardo
Issel
Dancing
with the Diva: Arianna and Streisand
Gary Leupp
To
Kill a Cat: the Unfortunate Incident at the Baghdad Zoo
Gregory
Wilpert
An
Interview with Hugo Chavez on the CIA in Venezuela
Steven
Higgs
Going to Jail for the Cause--Part 2: Charity Ryerson, Young and
Radical
Stan Cox
The Cheney Tapes: Can You Handle the Truth?
Robert
Fisk
Another Bloody Day in the Death of Iraq
William S. Lind
Learning from Uncle Abe: Sacking the Incompetent
Elaine
Cassel
First They Come for the Lawyers, Then the Ministers
Yigal
Bronner
The
Truth About the Wall
Website
of the Day
The
Baghdad Death Count
September
20 / 22, 2003
Uri Avnery
The
Silliest Show in Town
Alexander
Cockburn
Lighten
Up, America!
Peter Linebaugh
On the Bicentennial of the Execution of Robert Emmet
Anne Brodsky
Return
to Afghanistan
Saul Landau
Guillermo and Me
Phan Nguyen
Mother Jones Smears Rachel Corrie
Gila Svirsky
Sharon, With Eyes Wide Open
Gary Leupp
On Apache Terrorism
Kurt Nimmo
Colin
Powell: Exploiting the Dead of Halabja
Brian
Cloughley
Colin Powell's Shame
Carol Norris
The Moral Development of George W. Bush
Bill Glahn
The Real Story Behind RIAA Propaganda
Adam Engel
An Interview with Danny Scechter, the News Dissector
Dave Lindorff
Good Morning, Vietnam!
Mark Scaramella
Contracts and Politics in Iraq
John Ross
WTO
Collapses in Cancun: Autopsy of a Fiasco Foretold
Justin Podur
Uribe's Desperate Squeals
Toni Solo
The Colombia Three: an Interview with Caitriona Ruane
Steven Sherman
Workers and Globalization
David
Vest
Masked and Anonymous: Dylan's Elegy for a Lost America
Ron Jacobs
Politics of the Hip-Hop Pimps
Poets
Basement
Krieger, Guthrie and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Ted Honderich:
Terrorism for Humanity?
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
|
Weekend
Edition
October 11 / 13, 2003
Charles
Burnett's "Warming By the Devil's Fire"
Three
Films That Tried to Tell the Story of The Blues, One That Did
By BRUCE JACKSON
Charles Burnett's "Warming By the Devil's
Fire" is one of the three historical episodes in Martin
Scorsese's seven-segment PBS series on the blues.* The other
two were Scorsese's "Feel Like Going Home" and Wim
Wenders "Soul of a Man." Burnett's is by far the most
fully achieved and most interesting of the three.
This is the film's story: Junior (Nathaniel
Lee, Jr.) , an 11-year-old boy living in Los Angeles, is sent
home to Mississippi to be baptized. His blues-loving fast-living
Uncle Buddy (Tommy Redmond Hicks) picks him up at the New Orleans
train station. Buddy introduces Junior to the black South, to
the music it produced, to sex, to their shared past and present.
Junior does little in the film but look and listen; Buddy does
little but give Junior lectures, plop Junior into adult social
situations in which he is puzzled or astonished or eroticized,
or provide lead-in lines for sequences of archival footage. If
it weren't for the music and the archival footage, Burnett's
film would be unbearably tendentious. But there is the music
and archival footage, a great deal of both, and the way Burnett
weaves them in and out of that remembered Mississippi boyhood
summer of sin make for a film that is surreptitiously wonderful.
It is a film that has to be seen a second time.
The structure is bluesy, episodic. There
are narrative segments, but except for the beginning (where Uncle
Buddy picks up Junior at the train station) and the end (where
Uncle Flem the preacher takes Junior away from Buddy at a country
jukejoint) there is no necessary order to them. Most of the segments
could be rearranged and it wouldn't make any  difference in the narrative structure.
But shifting or deleting the segments would make a huge difference
in the development of feeling_which is the way blues works. The
film has narrative segments, but at heart it is lyrical, as are
blues.
Burnett uses a great deal more archival
footage than Scorsese or Wenders, and he uses it in a very different
way from either. Most of the time he makes little or no attempt
to integrate it into the narrative. His archival musical and
visual images appear, without introduction before or explanation
afterwards. They are in the visual air, like odors in the air
of a summer night.
The film is as much about memory as it
is about music. Continuity and reflection are provided by the
voice of the adult Junior (Carl Lumbly), looking back, trying
to make sense of it now. Sights and sounds swirl and blend in
his story and in what we see on the screen.
A note on Charles
Burnett
Burnett bases the film in part on his
own youthful experience. He was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi
in 1944, but moved to California at an early age. He has only
made a half-dozen feature films, a few shorter pieces, a few
films for tv. His work is not widely known in the general public.
He is highly-regarded by other filmmakers and critics, especially
for To Sleep with Anger (1990) and his first feature, Killer
of Sheep, 1977, which was an expansion of his UCLA MFA thesis
film, and which was one of the first films chosen by the Library
of Congress for the National Film Registry when it was created
in 1990. Burnett did everything on that film except act in it:
he was director, cinematographer, writer, producer, editor. One
of his teachers at UCLA was Basil Wright, a member of the BBC
documentary group headed by John Grierson. He got a MacArthur
in 1988, and he used that to help make To Sleep With Anger.
Martin Scorsese says that Burnett was
the first filmmaker he thought of when he got the idea of making
the blues series.
The two well-meaning
white guys
Scorsese's film, "Feel Like Going
Home," coagulated around Scorsese's notion that all black
music of whatever sort and from whatever source was equivalent.
A huge portion of "Feel Like Going Home" is devoted
to a fife and drum band, which Scorsese never connects to the
blues, and conversations between a young black American blues
revivalist musician and African musicians who have little to
say about American music other than platitudes.
Wim Wenders' "The Soul of a Man"
is romantic docudrama married to lumpy Politically Correct White
Guy documentary.** He first attempts to recreate the experiences
of Skip James and Blind Willie Johnson in the early 1930s and
then offers long takes of deadly talking heads_a Swedish couple
who seem straight out of a Monty Python parody about humorless
BBC ethnographic documenarians. The couple talk interminably
and show some of their depressingly wooden old footage of the
excellent blues musician J.B. Lenoir, who surely deserved better.
Along the way, Wenders cuts to performers like Bonnie Raitt and
Lou Reed, all filmed in approximately the same light and perhaps
in the same studio, performing blues songs. There is no comment,
no connection to anything. I assume that we're supposed to know
that these shots of white musicians playing the blues have some
kind of Meaning. What Meaning? I dunno. Maybe it's this: 'If
these well-known modern musicians are playing the blues then
the blues must be good.' Perhaps there is some deeper meaning
known only to Wim Wenders. But he never tells or shows us what
it is, other than that these white musicians cover those older
songs. The whole film is bracketed by a visual riff on the blues
and galactic travel. Barf.
Both Scorsese and Wenders have made important
and successful documentaries about performing musicians. Scorsese,
in The Last Waltz (1978), had The Band at his disposal to perform
and interview as he wished and Robbie Robertson as his producer.
It was a terrific film about The Band. Wenders, in The Buena
Vista Social Club (1999) had Ry Cooder ramrodding the whole thing,
and a bunch of spectacular Cuban musicians performing and talking
in gorgeous filmic situations. That was also a terrific film.
But in the blues series, it was Scorsese
and Wenders on their own, trying to reconstruct a past with which
neither of them had any real links at all. They had good feelings
about the music, they had contrived asides, but it takes more
than good feelings about music and contrived asides to make a
film that works. Some of the nonhistorical films in the series
did that, and so did the film by Charles Burnett.
Convicts in stripes
The moment that for me best illustrates
the difference in Burnett's "Warming by the Devil's Fire"
and the films by Scorsese and Wenders comes early in Scorsese's
"Feel Like Going Home." Scorsese shows archival footage
of a performance by Leadbelly, who wears convict stripes and
stands and sings "Goodnight, Irene, " while four other
convicts in stripes sit on the floor around him and a white man
at screen right putters with something we can't see. One of the
four attentive convicts rocks in rhythm to Leadbelly's song.
There is a cut to one of them, looking soulfully toward where
Leadbelly must be in the reverse shot. Then it cuts back to Leadbelly
singing and playing his 12-string guitar.
It's all bullshit. That footage wasn't
shot in a prison; it was a Hollywood screen test. Everything
in it was staged. Everybody was acting, including Leadbelly,
who was acting in his own sad exploitative docudrama, hoping
something good would come out of it. Nothing ever did. It was
an experience that went nowhere for him; it was an experience
he hated.
Scorsese doesn't tell the viewer any
of that. If he knows it, he should have; if he doesn't know it,
then that tells you about the kind of technical counsel he sought
and found in the making of his film. So far as I can tell, both
he and Wenders thought their warm fuzzy feelings for the blues
was all the solid information or counsel they needed. They were
wrong.
Burnett also has a long convicts-in-stripes
sequence in "Warming by the Devil's Fire." The setup
is Uncle Buddy telling Junior that there was a flood where they
now stand and that black folk were forced to work at hard labor
because of it. The sequence opens with convicts in stripes getting
out of a barred wagon and ends with them getting back into it.
Between those two archival shots are scenes of black laborers
doing a wide range of brutal work. The music in the sequence
varies, though much of the time it is Texas convicts singing
"Lost John," an axe-weilding tree-cutting song, which
is perhaps the only kind of gang labor we don't see them doing
in the sequence.
The difference between what Scorsese
and Wenders did and what Burnett did is this: their images are
either staged misplaced, while the images and sounds in Burnett's
film are all real. His musical and visual pastiche is grounded
in authentic performance. He lays a variety of musical utterances
over a variety of visual images and knows perfectly well what
he is doing. Burnett understands the difference as Scorsese and
Wenders did not. His visual and aural images are based on his
sense of the music; theirs is based on their sense of themselves.
Memory
In one segment of "Warmed by the
Devil's Fire," Junior wanders into a country church and
hears sounds of voices talking and singing. Burnett cuts back
and forth from him alone in the church to archival footage of
activity in similar churches. When I first saw that scene I thought
it passive and contrived, a way to work black church music into
the movie without actually filming a black church service. Then,
the night after "Warming By the Devil's Fire" aired,
a good friend of mine who had been watching the series every
night, told me he hadn't much liked Scorsese's or Wenders's films,
he had liked Richard Pearce's "The Road to Memphis"
(which was the third film in the series aired), and he had really
liked "Warming by the Devil's Fire." He talked specifically
about the scene in the church: "I been there, Bruce,"
he said, "I been right there. That brought it all back to
me. He really got it."
And that was when I realized that Burnett's
film wasn't about the blues or the fictional Junior's experience
of Mississippi in the 1950s, but rather about the memory of the
blues and the memory of having experienced that music. Instead
of trying to document something that can't be documented_the
experience of blues musicians in the 1930s and 1940s or the experience
of his own youth_Burnett chose to compose instead a rhapsody
to the memory of music, to a place where everything has equal
legitimacy, where every remembered tune and image can interweave
and be omnipresent.
I thought of Scott Momaday's The Way
to Rainy Mountain, the book in which Momaday shows how Kiowa
myth means. Instead of explaining each narrative, Momaday recounts
a myth, then tells something historical that relates to it, and
then he tells something out of his own life as a child with his
Kiowa family. He doesn't equate the three parts; what he does
is put the three parts side by side, each informing the other.
I also thought of William Faulkner's
last novel, The Reivers, which he labeled on the title page,
"A Reminiscence." The first two words of The Reivers
are in small caps. They are, "Grandfather said." The
rest of the novel is the story that grandfather told. The voice
of whoever said, "Grandfather said" surfaces only a
few times in what follows. But those few times are enough to
remind the careful reader that this is not simply a story, but
the memory of a story.
Likewise Charles Burnett's "Warmed
by the Devil's Fire." It is not just a film about a child's
trip to the family home or a film documenting blues. It is a
film about the memory of both. That trip and those old blues
moments are in the past; the memory of both is very much in the
present. Burnett's film is about something alive, not about something
frozen in amber.
The crossroads
Let me tell you about the film's final
three sequences.
A shot of Buddy's car coming up to and
stopping at the intersection of two dirt roads. The sun is bright.
The next shot is nighttime. The camera comes up from the front
of the car and looks into the windshield.
Buddy: We goin' to wait to see if the
devil comes. This is the crossroads where Robert Johnson sold
his soul to the devil,***
Junior: What devil?
Buddy: The real devil.
Cut to a shot of a full moon in the trees
over the crossroads. Then back to the car where Uncle Buddy is
conveniently asleep and snoring and Junior is wide-eyed awake.
Cut to a shot through the windshield
from Junior's point of view. A ghostly figure we realize is W.C.
Handy talks. Then a sequence of archival shots of W.C. Handy
talking, Handy singing "St Louis Blues," which segues
into "St. Louis Woman" with shots of women singers
and women's voices, and finally that segues into a long segment
of Bessie Smith sitting at a bar singing it and being maltreated
by a man. It is from the only film Smith ever made, the 16 minute
short, St. Louis Blues, made in 1929.
Junior wakes Buddy up.
Buddy: You saw anything?
Junior: A ghost.
Buddy (laughing): I was only jokin' when
I say that stuff about the devil. Can't nobody sell his soul
to the devil.
Junior: I did see a ghost.
Buddy: Okay, okay, okay. You saw a ghost.
Yeah."
Cut to Junior walking alone with the
adult Junior's voiceover saying, "That couldn't have been
the ghost of W.C. Handy then because he was still alive. It could
have been the devil playing tricks again."
And then_70 minutes and 45 seconds into
the 84 minute and 45 second film and without any transition_Burnett
goes to a musical sequence that is 9 minutes and 25 seconds long.
It is, I think, the longest sequence in the film. Not only is
it not specifically connected to what came before, but the individual
pieces are not, or are only marginally, connected to one another:
Elizabeth Cotten plays "Freight Train" and talks talking
about working as a child and getting paid 75 cents a month and
after a while getting a raise to $1 a month; Willie Dixon sings
"Nervous" after which Dixon sits with some other musicians
and talks about blues, with a brief dropped in cut of Big Bill
Broonzy from someplace else; Son House talks about the blues;
back to Willie Dixon singing "Nervous" at his bass;
then to Victoria Spivey singing "T.B. Blues"; then
Brownie McGhee & Sonny Terry doing "Key to the Highway"
for a white audience at a folk festival; then John Lee Hooker
alone on a stage singing "Boom Boom," with a great
shot showing what his hands are doing on the guitar for more
than a minute, the kind of shot you never see in the fast-cut-post-MTV
world; then a slow archival shot of a moving female ass and people
dancing.
Then Burnett moves back into the fictional
film for the final four minutes and twenty-two seconds.
That consists of Buddy's car pulling
up outside a jukejoint at night. Buddy and Junior go inside,
with John Lee Hooker's music continuing from the previous pastiche
but now providing the rhythm for the jukejoint's dancers. That
musical overlap moves the archival construct into the filmic
present.
Someone comes over and tells Buddy he's
crazy to bring a kid into a place like that. Archival shot of
people dancing. Back to Hooker. Back to Buddy at the bar. A fight
in which someone is knocked out after which Buddy says to Junior,
"Havin' fun? Now you got a good reason to get saved."
Cuts back and forth from B&W shots in his Burnett's jukejoint
scene to archival footage of people doing the same dancing, while
the adult voiceover of grownup Junior says, "As Buddy would
say, the people who played the blues are my kind of people."
Hooker's singing and guitar continue.
Then the man who chastised Buddy comes
in with Uncle Flem to rescue Junior. The adult voiceover says,
"I learned so much on that trip back home. I never forgot
a second of it. I draw a lot from that time I spent with Buddy.
For years Buddy was Buddy. The years went by and Buddy left the
book for me to finish. [In the course of the film, Buddy several
times refers to a book he's writing about the blues and how the
blues played out in the lives of the people he knew.] I did,
in my own way. [By making this film.] Buddy ended up becoming
a preacher, like so many of the blues players."
The final shot is Buddy and another man,
both in suits, both holding bibles.
The two keys to it
all
One of them is outside the film, the
other inside, and it comes at the very end, after the PBS promos
and the film's own credits.
The outside key is in Burnett's interview
on the PBS "The Blues" web site, in which he says:
I really admire a work by James Agee
called Now Let Us Praise Famous Men. He and Walker Evans went
across the South and documented workers--black and white--during
the Depression. What made that book remarkable was that it provided
this sense of history told from a certain perspective. Yet Agee
was also concerned about exploiting the subject; he wanted to
be as objective as possible. The result was a document that gives
a feeling of the period that would have been lost otherwise.
That's one of the things I was trying to achieve--to go beyond
information and convey a feeling for how these people lived and
how they felt.
Which is to say, I'll describe things
to you, as Agee did, but what matters is helping you feel what
the life those descriptions are about felt like. Agee used his
own and quoted words and Walker Evans's photographs, and Burnett
used his enacted scenes and the archival footage, but the heart
of the matter in both works was in the emotional meaning undergirding
all of it. It's those emotional resonances you have to learn
to read in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and to experience in
"Warming by the Devil's Fire."
The inside key to "Warming by the
Devil's Fire," comes at the very end of the film, after
all the final credits have rolled save the dedication. It is
almost a throwaway. It consists of a slow motion shot of Mississippi
John Hurt on a stage, with a voice-over of Hurt saying, "I've
liked music ever since I was a little boy. I just liked music."
NOTES
*In April 2001, Belinda Clasen, associate
producer for the series (her title then was series researcher),
told me that they planned six one-hour films:
Show One (Spike Lee) The origins of the
Blues Show
Two (Charles Burnett) "City" versus "country"
blues, and the advent of the race record
Show Three (to be decided) Americas Post War blues boom
Show Four (Wim Wenders) The birth of the blues capitol on the
south side of Chicago
Show Five (Marc Levin) The color of the blues becomes increasingly
black and white
Show Six (Mike Figgis) The influence of the blues on world music
The group of films aired by PBS in October
2003 was:
Feel Like Going Home by Martin Scorsese
The Soul of a Man by Wim Wenders
The Road to Memphis by Richard Pearce
Warming by the Devil's Fire by Charles Burnett
Godfathers and Sons by Marc Levin
Red, White & Blues by Mike Figgis
Piano Blues by Clint Eastwood
**Full disclosure note: I provided the
producers of the Wenders episode transcripts of some of my conversations
with Skip James and some unreleased recordings of Skip and John
Hurt.
***Crossroads as metaphor turns up a
lot in blues, and the story of Robert Johnson selling his soul
to the devil in exchange for musical ability turns up a lot in
folklore about the blues. Those stories and how they move through
culture are examined in at least three recent and forthcoming
books: Barry Lee Pearson and Bill McCulloch's Robert
Johnson Lost and Found, Patricia Schroeder's Robert
Johnson, Mythmaking and Contemporary American Culture,
and Elijah Wald, Escaping
the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues.
There's a good bit of information on Johnson on Wald's website,
http://www.elijahwald.com/rjohnson.html
Bruce Jackson
is editor of the Buffalo
Report and author of Wake
Up Dead Man: Hard Labor and Southern Blues. He can be
reached at: bjackson@buffalo.edu
Weekend
Edition Features for Sept. 26 / 28, 2003
Tim Wise
The
Other Race Card: Rush and the Politics of White Resentment
Peter
Linebaugh
Rhymsters
and Revolutionaries: Joe Hill and the IWW
Gary Leupp
Occupation
as Rape-Marriage
Bruce
Jackson
Addio
Alle Armi
David Krieger
A Nuclear 9/11?
Ray McGovern
L'Affaire Wilsons: Wives are Now "Fair Game" in Bush's
War on Whistleblowers
Col. Dan Smith
Why Saddam Didn't Come Clean
Mickey
Z.
In Our Own Image: Teaching Iraq How to Deal with Protest
Roger Burbach
Bush Ideologues v. Big Oil in Iraq
John Chuckman
Wesley Clark is Not Cincinnatus
William S. Lind
Versailles on the Potomac
Glen T.
Martin
The Corruptions of Patriotism
Anat Yisraeli
Bereavement as Israeli Ethos
Wayne
Madsen
Can the Republicans Get Much Worse? Sure, They Can
M. Junaid Alam
The Racism Barrier
William
Benzon
Scorsese's Blues
Adam Engel
The Great American Writing Contest
Poets'
Basement
McNeill, Albert, Guthrie
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