Grassroots Filmmaking?

Within grassroots justice work, the idea of “goals” is a nebulous one. Goals, per se, are often necessarily short-term: to get someone to a 12-step meeting while they still want to go, to get arrested in front of the press before the weekend news cycle, to get the electric bill paid. Longer-term goals grow or shrink in proportion to the size of the “organization” – to register fifty people to vote, or to get a referendum passed; to have an office that is not a corner of your kitchen table, or to pay a second person a living wage. Goals for “grassroots” arts groups are similar: each day is spent with half of one’s brainpower going to the creative endeavor that gives your life purpose and feeds your soul, and the other half to beating back the minions of poverty and a marginal social status – this ratio of brainpower distribution fluctuating wildly from week to week. What is a long-term goal in this paradigm? Those for whom “career success” is important will either leave these groups eventually or stay and become painfully bitter. The grassroots life is forever about the needs of the moment, process, and immediate interpersonal relationships, not about a “career path” or personal achievement. To think in larger terms – or to become a larger, stable “nonprofit organization” – changes the rules of the game you’re playing and also many of the daily players. It changes how you think about the concept of “goals.” As a filmmaker and artist, my cinematic goals grow from my experiences in and allegiances to the grassroots world.

I am from a family of political rabble-rousers and proverbial starving artists. My cinematic goals (like all my goals) are shaped by this and the nourishment I received in my upbringing among teachers, preachers, and seekers, surrounded and cared for by inter-faith, inter-racial, and same-sex couples, moving up and down the ladder of American class, lucky to know and be known in city, suburb and countryside. As an adult, the communities in which I am most at home don’t hold much serious truck with “movies,” because the movies that have reached them have rarely said truthful things about them or the people, places, and practices they love. “Movies,” in the eyes of many people I admire, are part of the problem, socio-politically speaking, and because of my own values, my own attitude towards narrative film and television is a gnarly ball of passionate ambivalence.

I know that the criticisms of the industry as a whole are usually fair by half – that the art and craft of A/V-storytelling has been largely corrupted by the forces of the so-called free market, and that most of the films and shows that reach most viewers are not worth a damn in the struggle for universal freedom, to say the least. But I also know that the potential in cinema and TV to inspire, comfort, and connect people is, in a word, huge, and that sometimes “beauty breaks in” (as Edna St. Vincent Millay might say) – I do, after all, love the movies and shows that I love. I also know that there are plenty of people who want better from the industry and who are working to make things better and to make better things. So, while my overarching goal, like all grassroots goals, has to take into account the whole of this knowledge, it cannot just passively accept the bad with the good and still be truly justice-minded; it must seek actively to stimulate and fortify the good while mitigating or weakening the bad, in as much as it is able, in the limited arena of its current environment.

A grassroots goal is both small in scope and large in hope, and this is mine, cinematically speaking: it is to help facilitate the production of films that aim, foremost, to tell the truth about people of limited social power who seldom get to see themselves represented, let alone accurately, and to do this in a manner of production that does not make me a hypocrite (professing values of feminism, anti-racism, environmental sustainability and fair distribution of resources while hiring a crew that is 90% white cis-men who toss three plastic Poland Springs water bottles into the trash on set every day and purchase expendables at chain stores owned by ultra-conservative oligarchs who won’t pay employees for sick days, for example). I would like the films I work on to be visually compelling and conceptually smart too, but who doesn’t? Directorially, I favor long takes and on-location naturalism full of minute, high-contrast texture with an attention to production design that offers semiotic allegory for those who seek it – but aesthetic achievements are less important to me than components of behavioral integrity and the mindset of human service. If and when there is an either/or choice to be made (because of budget or time or process), it’s the people – on set, depicted on screen, and in business with the production – that will matter more than any clever camera move or potential eventual accolade. If, because of these priorities, the films I help to make have to be “small” or “niche” films, or must be made with volunteer labor on evenings and weekends, or they only screen in classrooms and churches, so be it. Stories shared in small groups are important too, as any experienced community organizer knows very well.

Currently, I am primarily a writer. How I might best use these skills is always developing and maturing, as I do. I have come to see directing as an extension of “writing,” like a revision or a translation. The stories that have come to me while at a student at Stony Brook have been almost entirely dystopian near-futures – stories set in Americas that are politically and/or ecologically compromised. Lately, I have been inspired by science fiction, Brecht and the Absurdists to try heightening and expanding the dangers of our real world in hopes of making issues more visible for contemplation, as well as accessible to emotion. Right now, particularly, I am wrestling with the challenge of being a white writer committed to diversity building, wanting to find the right way to give voice to characters of color without entering a zone of appropriation or “speaking for” anyone inappropriately. As an answer to this, I have become more and more interested in intentionally intercultural collaboration (with other writers and with actors, but also with people who are not professionally engaged in film work, necessarily, but whose stories I value) and other non-traditional ways of developing characters and scripts. It may be that each new story calls for a unique way of approaching the issues and challenges special to it. That is, of course, the grassroots way.

Every now and then, the time is right for a grassroots “movement” – the grass grows tall and sends its pollen everywhere: maids and truck drivers become national leaders while the mighty are temporarily waylaid by hay-fever migraines from the seeds of justice spreading on the winds of zeitgeist. The internet and the relative affordability of digital filmmaking equipment make more plausible the possibility of a new filmmaking movement that is less dependent on old practices and restrictions, that functions more locally and more personally than other filmmaking systems have done. Much has been said about the potential “democratization” of media now that more and more types of people seem to have more access, but as always, there are strong forces working against egalitarianism. One can hope and even push for a movement towards justice in this arena – I would love to be a part of fostering and supporting such a movement – but its creation can’t be held up as a personal “goal,” because its achievement could never be rightly thought of as a personal success. If you’re committed to justice first, you don’t work for yourself or for your own goals as such, you work for the cause: nothing is ever an end; everything is always a means. The only real personal goals in this paradigm, in this life, are to stay true, to stay healthy, and to stay the course, in whatever specific field you are working. It’s those “achievements” by which I want my “film career” to be measured. To tell Charlene’s story honestly and with integrity – that’s my cinematic goal. To tell Roberto’s story, tell Biyu’s story, tell as many people as I possibly can in whatever way is moral and accessible in the moment. Pay the electric bill. Don’t get evicted. Don’t let anyone steal the camera.

Rachel Ellis Adams, May 30, 2017