A field of study within the discipline of folklore; films used to document or present
folklore. Films that are edited to be shown to an audience are called “folkloric films” by
Sharon R.Sherman. Video is often subsumed under “film and folklore,” and with its
increasing use, “folklore and video”—or perhaps “folkloric videos”—may become a
commonplace term, perhaps incorporating film within its definition, much as film now
does for video.
Like the documentary “films of fact” shot in the 1900s, some American folkloric films
are made up of short clips of interesting phenomena captured for posterity. Other
folkloric films have a heavily narrated expository style similar to documentaries made
prior to World War II and lasting through the 1960s. Certain folkloric films utilize either
a cinéma vérité or a post vérité approach that combines synchronous sound or voice-over
with linear depictions of folklore as events (including interactions, performances, and
creative processes). Yet other films are reflexive and intersubjective, incorporating the
filmmaker as one of the subjects.
Many folklorists who use film are tied to the models adopted by their documentaryfilm forerunners and to the conceptual premises of past folklore scholars. Thus, in
folkloric films, the rural often takes precedence over the urban, and the past assumes
greater importance than the contemporary. For example, John Cohen searched for Child
ballads in Appalachia and documented folksinging in The High Lonesome Sound (1962);
Les Blank documented little-known peoples in the once isolated regions of America, such
as Cajuns and Creoles in the Louisiana Bayo, in Dry Wood and Hot Pepper (1973) and
Spend It All (1970); and Bill Ferris presented musicians in rural Mississippi in Gravel
Springs Fife and Drum (1971). However, these filmmakers have examined contemporary
activities and the urban scene as well. Usually, they began with a Romantic stereotypic
notion of the folk for their initial films and then recognized a need to broaden the
definition of their work as their film corpus grew.
Folklore filmmakers most interested in texts often employ the techniques of narration
and montage, showing the viewer the means by which representation is achieved. The
montage structure employed in such films as Ferris’ I Ain’t Lying (1975) and Made in
Mississippi (1975), and in Blank’s food films (such as Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers
[1980], provides a means for discovering what the filmmaker thinks about the subject
being documented. For historic-reconstruction films, such as Pat Ferrero’s Hearts and Hands (1987), the narration may be assembled from the words of journal, diary, and
letter writers.
Although many folkloric films document a community, such as Blank’s Zivili (1987)
about Serbian Americans, frequently American folklore filmmakers choose a
biographical “Everyman” to represent the group. Blank, in several films, (such as Yum,
Yum, Yum: A Taste of Cajun and Creole Cooking (1990); has Marc Savoy explain aspects
of being a Cajun; Jorge Preloran looks at Luther Metke as an exemplar of both the elderly
and the log-cabin builder in Luther Metke at 94 (1979); Ferris documents James Thomas
as a bluesman and a storyteller in Delta Blues Singer (1969) and I Ain’t Lym’ (1975); and
Sherman presents Kathleen Ware: Quiltmaker (1979) and chainsaw sculptor Skip
Armstrong in Spirits in the Wood (1991). Such folklore filmmakers have documented
people as both cultural or artistic representatives and as unique personalities.
For folklorists, cinéma vérité (film truth), with its syncsound portable cameras,
provided a fieldwork opportunity to document events from beginning to end and to test
the theoretical perspectives about folklore as human behavior established the late 1960s.
Long takes and sync-sound filming became the rage. At last, the people being studied
could speak for themselves and provide their own functional analyses without the
imposition of a narrator or scholar. The focus on the individual shown in such
documentary films as Showman (1962), a portrait of movie mogul Joseph E.Levine, by
Charlotte Zwerin and Albert and David Maysles; and Don’t Look Back (1967), a
D.A.Pennebaker film on Bob Dylan, became examples for folklorists of how filmmakers
might document individuals to arrive at the “truth.”
Those films that acknowledge their power to seemingly represent experience and
reveal the means by which they do so go beyond the ideals of cinema vérité into the
openly subjective realm of what Sherman has named “post vérité,” in which the art form
of the documentary is a given. Whereas cinéma vérité was art masquerading as
objectivity, post vérite, unmasks the illusion of objectivity and displays it. For example,
in Gimme Shelter (1970), a documentary of the Rolling Stones concert tour of America,
flashbacks confuse what is “real”; in Woodstock (1970), an observational camera style is
fused with split-screen images, sound mixes, and rhythmic shots chosen for their balance
with the audio track. The long takes disappear into edited rhythms, as they do in Roberta
Cantow’s folkloric film Clotheslines (1981). The interview, abhorred by cinéma vérité
for proclaiming the constructed nature of film, may occupy a central role in post vértié, as
in such folkloric films as Tom Davenport’s A Singing Stream (1987), Judy Peiser’s All
Day, All Night: Memories from Beale Street Musicians (1990), and Paul Wagner’s The
Grand Generation (1993). For Paris Is Burning (1991), Jennie Livingston creates a post
vfritefAm from a melange of interviews, cinéma verite techniques, and inter-titles.
In the United States, for die most part, cinéma verite films were used to tell the stories
of the “other people,” those without access to media production. With post veritt, the
“others” may become the cinematic weavers of their own stories, directly addressing the
camera as the “experts.” In recognizing the blatancy of film as art, post vérité films may
also cross into the realm of reflexivity. For example, Zulay Saravino takes over the
making of a film about her culture and turns it into one about her own transcultural
experiences in America and Ecuador in Zulay, Facing the 21st Century (1993). In the
film, Saravino shows herself editing the film about herself. Unlike documentary films that look at people within the filmmaker’s own society,
films that Sherman calls “ethnodocumentary” are a specific type of documentary film that
tends to document the “other”—people who are conceptualized as being unlike the film
team or the ethnographer. As ethnographers become less concerned with cultural
overviews and more interested in events in culture (a feast, a funeral, a festival), their
films have become more like folkloric films. The folkloric film focuses primarily on
traditional behavior, documenting many of the most fundamental features of our lives and
ranging widely from rituals, ceremonies, and folk art, to folk narrative and folksong, to
the lore of various peoples bonded by ethnicity, age, gender, family, occupation,
recreation, religion, and region. The folklorist, as Richard M. Dorson has pointed out,
often conducts fieldwork at the folklorist’s “back door.” Many folkloric filmmakers have,
indeed, examined traditions in their own locales, sometimes even among their own
families.
Differences of major emphasis and locale set the folkloric film apart from other
documentary-film traditions, although any film having folklore content might aptly be
called a “folkloric film.” Just as anthropologists define certain films as “ethnographic”
when they successfully elucidate anthropological approaches, the true folkloric film may
be defined as one whose content deals primarily with topics that folklorists study and
whose intent is to meet the dictates of folkloristic research and teaching. Such films
include ones created by folklorists themselves or by nonfolklorists who are filmmakers or
videographers recording folklore. Put simply, the point of these films is to document
folklore, no matter who is making them.
A unique twist to the study of film and folklore is the popular use of folklore as the
primary plot line or unifying thread for commercial feature films. The Serpent and the
Rainbow (1988), for example, exploits the practices of voodoo. The urban legend about a
baby-sitter frightened by a telephone caller is the basis for When a Stranger CaUs (1979).
The film Avalon (1990) plays upon family and ethnic narratives to structure the larger
narrative of family and ethnic-neighborhood dissolution in the America of the 1940s
through the 1960s, using one family as exemplar. When Harry Met Salfy (1989) relies on
the courtship narratives of many different couples as a transition device.
Memorable in its re-creation of folklore is Candyman (1993), in which a folklore
graduate student conducts research on the legend or horror tale of “The Hooked-Arm
Man,” who has scared teenagers in lovers’ lanes for decades. In this film, the legend
comes to life, and the man with the hook torments the graduate student. With the
popularity of Jan Harold Brunvand’s books on urban legends, this genre of folklore is
familiar to a vast audience, and thus viewers have undoubtedly seen the irony.
Nonacademic feature films in general release often incorporate folklore as a detail—
for example, a woman singing “Barbara Allen’ (Child 84) in The Piano (1993). Animated
films, such as Anansi the Spider and John Henry, are targeted at the educational market.
But the folkloric films perhaps the most popular with general audiences are Walt
Disney’s animated Mdrchen [fairy tales]. From Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)
to Gnderella (1950) and Beauty and the Beast (1991), the Walt Disney Studio has
presented a number of “Disneyized” folktales to huge audiences. Viewers may accept
these renditions as the original tales, an idea reinforced by the same images repeated in
spin-off products such as books, dolls, games, and other toys. Folklore becomes a thematic wellspring for films. Folk beliefs about vampires and
werewolves have spawned a whole genre of horror films. Folk-like heroes and plots
emerge in stories created or adapted from books by screenwriters, films such as The
Never-Ending Story (1984), The Princess Bride (1987), and Friday the 13th (1980).
Other visual forms of popular culture appropriate themes such as “the quest,” “journey,”
or “adventure” found in folktale and epic, reconfiguring them in video and computer
games.
The video camera, like the movie camera before it, has changed the way people
document dieir lives. In essence, what filmmakers and videographers choose to record in
both pro fessional films and “home movies” or amateur videos often involves presenting
a vision of the self by documenting the central aspects of life, such as rites of passage
(birthdays, bar mitzvahs, graduations, weddings); calendrical and religious holidays
(Christmas, Passover, Mardi Gras); and performance events (from children’s sports to
ethnic festivals). Folkloric films also create biographies of individual folk artists,
documenting the traditional processes in which they are engaged (for example, play
activities, folksinging, craft creation). These subjects form the key narratives of the
folkloric film and the folkloric video, which build upon these “narratives oflife” by
explaining how such events and processes function in the lives of those depicted.
Sharon R.Sherman
References
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Indiana University Press.
Rollwagen, Jack R., ed. 1988. Anthropological Filmmaking: Anthropological Perspectives on the
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Press.
Ruby, Jay, ed. 1982. A Crack in the Mirror: Reflexive Perspectives in Anthropology. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press.
Sherman, Sharon R. 1991. Visions of Ourselves: Filming Folklore, Present and Future.
Western Folklore 50:53–63.
Waugh, Thomas, ed. 1984. “Show Us Life”: Towarda History and Aesthetics of the Committed
Documentary. Methuchen, NJ: Scarecrow.