I’VE MADE TV DOCUMENTARIES MOST OF MY LIFE. A lot of them are historical. And in those that address contemporary issues, I’ve nearly always felt the need to include some historical background.
After all, as the Mississipi-born William Faulkner wrote in 1951, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” which I suspect may have prompted the Harlem-born James Baldwin to take it further, with his famous 1963 insistence in Ebony magazine that “History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us.” But how, just how, do you faithfully represent history in today’s media?
I’m prompted to reflect on such a broad question by a lot of current chatter among documentary-makers. The talk is conducted these days probably more online in chatrooms and the like, Reddit perhaps, or Quora, than it ever was in professional seminars, film-festival parties, or in favored arts-community bars and cafés. And much concern is being raised about the looming impact on our work that could come from Artificial Intelligence — with its capacity for creating so-called “Deep Fake” material. It’s made me ponder afresh what I do, and how I do it – and with what values serving as guidance for me.
Three decades of my documentary-making were spent filming in many countries around the world, with London as my homebase and UK television as my main outlet. And then I emigrated to the US in 1991. Initially, I taught Broadcast News and Documentary-making at Columbia University’s Journalism School, but within a few years I found myself on the Gulf Coast of Florida, shooting my first documentary made entirely in America for an American TV network, ABC.
The film told the story of a long-hidden racial massacre: the fiery destruction in 1923 of an African American township called Rosewood, and the murder by a white racist mob of its citizens. The number of African American deaths is impossible to gauge – estimates have ranged from the low double-figures up into the hundreds.
Finding visuals to illustrate this terrible story was strikingly difficult. Only two grainy photographs existed: first, a scene captured during the massacre’s immediate aftermath, showing county sheriffs as they sifted through the ashes and debris … and second, an image of a single structure — maybe a home, maybe an outbuilding — being enveloped in smoke. But whatever the filmmaking difficulties, the sheer horror of the event, and the many decades of its concealment by authorities, demanded that my documentary must be made, one way or another. I was forced to come up with all manner of filmic sleights-of-hand to tell the story visually.
Notice that I do say sleight-of-hand — not faking. The various techniques I resorted to ended up having a life of their own outside of this single film. In years to come I would return to Columbia as a visiting lecturer at the Journalism School. My Florida work became the basis of a lesson-plan for those once-a-year visits. The college dean informally described them as Tereshchuk’s Class on Making Something Out of Nothing. Let me explain what I mean by sleight-of-hand.
On location making ROSEWOOD MASSACRE: The Untold Story, as it came to be titled, I owed one example of its many inventive improvisations to a hard-drinking, cigar-chomping local historian of Florida’s Levy County, called Stan Turner. I should say that local historians are a mainstay of much documentary-making. I’d say we documentary-makers probably couldn’t exist without them. And in my experience they form one of the most enjoyable tribes of human beings to spend time with.
Stan was Caucasian, a weighty Caucasian, tipping the scales at around 280 pounds, I’d say. Whenever he kept an appointment with me he wore — in what seemed like a parody of Southern gentlemanly dress — a three-piece, sand-colored suit, with a decidedly sweat-stained ring around the collar.
Stan happened to harbor a passion, not just for his county’s past, but for vintage automobiles as well, and he guided me and my video crew to a nearby resident’s small collection of well-maintained, totally operational, early 1920s Model-T Fords.
One moonlit night we revved them up and filmed them rattling along anonymous country trails, with their bulbous headlights arcing brightly through the dark branches of cypress and dogwood trees hung with thick Spanish Moss. The cars provided an atmospheric representation of a sinister journey that was an essential part of Rosewood’s horrific story. Our bouncing, careening, antique Fords recalled a hasty drive made by armed men from a KKK rally evidently held nearby, men intent upon wreaking deadly havoc upon Rosewood.
Stan helped me find proof that the rally actually took place — we even located a poster (right) drumming up attendance for it — and after long hours poring over records in a dusty basement beneath the Board of County Commissioners’ building, I found a contemporary reference to Klansmen making that ominous drive, from rally to massacre.
IT WAS ALL PART OF THE TIGHTROPE WALK necessary to my filmmaking. I had so little visual evidence available to me that I simply had to get creative. But my ingrained journalistic calling, reinforced formally by what were called professional News Standards, constrained me from becoming too imaginative.
I’d been commissioned by ABC’s News Division, which enforced strict rules against indulging in any kind of fakery. We were to be especially careful not to follow the tacky example of so-called “True Crime” cable channels, where total freedom reigned for actors to be cast in the role of historical personages, and more. They’d usually be filmed in heavy-handed reenactments of homicides and other heinous acts.
During my Rosewood assignment, every time I found what I thought could be a neat way of evoking an event on video, I still had to be scrupulous about sourcing my imagery as being true to verifiable history. And I had to be careful to use the visuals in a purely allusive manner, never claiming they showed exactly how a particular event had actually taken place.
Stan, along with a clutch of his fellow historians, came up with many incidental artifacts, buildings and other evocative local details that I could employ, in purely suggestive ways. At another point in the filming I needed to somehow illustrate a group of thugs abducting a teamster called Sam Carter, the first Rosewood resident to be killed, as far as our researches could tell. His capture, and then murder, was recounted to me with deep emotion on camera by his niece, Robie Mortin.
She was a young girl when it happened; she and other surviving members of her family fled, seeking refuge in a town forty miles away. It was a searing interview, full of childhood terror about the event itself and pained recollection of its long-term traumatizing effects. “My family, my Grandmother, told me never to mention Rosewood, how we were robbed of our birthright,” Robie said. “She was always afraid someone would come after us later on, ‘cos my uncle was killed for nothing.”
Uprooted from her home at eight, Robie was eighty-five when I interviewed her (she was to live on until the age of ninety-four). Only a day earlier I had also interviewed the doyen of African-American history studies, Professor John Hope Franklin at Duke University, who with reference to Rosewood underlined for me William Faulkner’s and James Baldwin’s insistence on applying the past’s lessons to our current times. Franklin urged me, “It’s very important that we must uncover not only Rosewood but also all the other ‘Rosewoods,’ if I may say so, and deal with them in the present.”
His words echoed for me the next day as I sat with Robie, especially when she summed up her reflections: “All I want from the whole thing is the recognition of it,” she said … “I want for people to say that it did happen — and to recognize when they come to write the history books that my Uncle Sammy was the first person killed there, for no reason at all.”
To accompany Robie’s interview I filmed in tight close-up the turning of a 14-spoke wheel on a wooden wagon as it rolled forward over rutted ground. I was evoking Sam Carter’s fatal last ride, bound and gagged on his own cart. The wagon was a bona fide example of the kind built by John Deere in 1920. I borrowed it from its regular setting, where it served as a decorative period-piece to advertise a farm machinery store. I only found it thanks to a historian, a colleague of Stan Turner’s who specialized in — and knew well-nigh everything about— the rural stretches of Florida’s Panhandle.
I hadn’t intended to show Robie the cart we were using to suggest her uncle’s. But despite an aching knee that day, she insisted on seeing me off when I was leaving her small palmetto-fringed house, walking me to her front garden’s gate. Among our crew’s small convoy parked outside was a flatbed carrying the antique cart. She caught sight of it and gasped: “That’s my uncle’s!” Initially, on her face was a childlike look of stark terror, that then softened to a wide smile in my direction. I felt her sense that we — I the writer, the videocrew, the local historians — were all endeavoring to tell her story as fully as we could.
And what relevance, you may ask, does this old story have in the age of A.I? We’re of course now in a world where, technically speaking, there’s no need to scour the highways and by-ways of rural Florida for something like Sam Carter’s wagon. We can simply conjure one up from our computer keyboard. But, I’d venture to suggest … the likelihood of our media audiences being conned by AI-produced “Deep Fakes” ultimately has to depend (as it has with all communicators, in all modes of communication over centuries) upon the motives and ethics of the human being who’s telling the story, whatever tools they might be using.
The complete documentary is at: https://vimeo.com/305154002
