Madeline Anderson in Conversation: Pioneering an African American Documentary Tradition

I felt the history right under my feet.

—Madeline Anderson (2001)

Introduction

Madeline Anderson’s documentary oeuvre, though modest, is as seminal and compelling an account of the times as it is instructive. As such, she merits renewed consideration among a distinguished cohort of pioneering African American women filmmakers, including Eloyce Gist and ethnographers Zora Neale Hurston and Eslanda Goode Robeson. What follows is a conversation engaging with the evolution of her documentary practice, a practice honed by the vagaries of circumstance and the determinations of race and gender.¹ And perhaps more importantly, an undaunted ethos to make films “useful to improve our people” and conviction eloquently evinced by Anderson in these words: “I filmed history in the making, and it was an honor.”²

What can be said about Anderson’s chronicle of history in real time? In Integration Report 1 (1960) and The Walls Come Tumbling Down (1975), she took cause with local struggles for civil rights and black empowerment which corresponded with other national and international struggles for social justice and human rights. In Malcolm X: Nationalist or Humanist (1967), she interrogated and found wanting the efficacy of integration. In I Am Somebody (1969)—the most deeply personal of her films—Anderson documented what two labor historians contend was “one of the South’s most disruptive and bitter labor confrontations since the 1930s”: the strike largely by black women workers at the Medical College Hospital of the University of South Carolina in Charleston.³ Poignantly, she later declared: “I identified with them as a black woman, as a black working woman, as a wife and mother of children.”⁴

Figure 1.

Madeline Anderson at the Black Film Center/Archive (BFC/A), Indiana University, January 18, 2013.

Courtesy of Nzingha Kendall, BFC/A.

Identifying with her subjects, their plight and struggles is what distinguishes Anderson from most other documentary filmmakers of her generation. And, as much ethical as it is political, that conviction frames three fundamental constituents of her documentary practice: First, that film must have utility and social purpose; second, it must endeavor to give voice to protagonists who otherwise are marginalized and silenced; and third, it must resist and debunk the received view that African Americans are unable to manage their own affairs. Such tenets cohere and correspond to programmatic statements of Third Cinema—the counterhistorical reading of hegemony manifest and most prevalent during the 1960s and 1970s. What matters most then about Madeline Anderson is not her documentary style or artistic sensibility, but rather her sustained advocacy on behalf of black people and their self-empowerment. And it is here that her contribution to a profoundly humanistic African American documentary tradition is convincingly foundational.

Michael T. Martin (MTM):

I would like to begin with the statement you made at IU Cinema yesterday: “The purpose of my films is not to make money or to make me famous. I want my films to be useful.” What do you mean by “useful”?

Madeline Anderson (MA):

I think that media has to be utilitarian. I was criticized a lot for that view and I accept the criticism. I was not interested in making entertainment. I wanted my films to be used to improve our people. Many people dismissed my films as message films.

MTM:

Film has to have a social purpose?

MA:

Yes. At that time it was true and it’s true now. And you can still express everything that you want as an artist through your technique and sensibility. At that time, the documentary and the techniques of making them were very narrow. It was usually a picture and somebody’s voice-over. While I wanted to be a filmmaker and give information I also wanted to be an artist. So, I tried to express my artistic sense in my films even though they were documentaries.⁵

MTM:

Is giving voice to the protagonists in your films—enabling them to speak for themselves—a defining aspect, too, of your working practice?

MA:

This is true. Another aspect of...