"Folklife Through the Lens "

 Stan Woodward's Film Lectures use clips from his extensive archive of footage on the folklife and folk heritage traditions of the South. Loaded with stories and anecdotes from his many years of traveling and documenting the South, capturing the fabric of Southern culture in his "vox populi" spontaneous camera style, presentations can be tailored to fit classrooms, auditorium settings, or any organization's needs.       

"I feel there is no more spontaneous, intimate, and natural way to enter into the folk culture of the American South than through the doorway of food that opens into the lives of the people who call themselves "Southerners".   When entering through the doorway of folk heritage foodways and cooking, all the political, social, racial and cultural restrictions disappear and what is left is the pure essence and personality of Southern culture."   - Stan Woodward, Producer

Film Lectures are customized and tailored to the audiences. Previous presentations have been made at local arts councils, Museums, University departments of Southern Studies, Folklife, History of the American South and classes in Media Studies, Mass Communication and Journalism.

                                                                        

Special Add-on Option for Local Arts Councils:

When Stan Woodward screens IT'S GRITS for community arts councils he offers the option to invite attendees to bring their home video cameras. He runs a hands-on session that provides the audience the "one,two, threes" for capturing archival-quality videography for any subject that documents and preserves family heritage, history, stories, and traditions. He shows how these can accrue to a family video archive or even local history chapters interested in preservation of folklife and local culture for future generations.

E-mail woodwardstudio@charter.net for more details

"The Video Preservation of Local Folklife and Folklore"

In this presentation the filmmaker illustrates with footage taken from his archive how to be alert to folk heritage traditions and other cultural traditions that a community often takes for granted until the "keepers" of those traditions have died away.

   "Often these 'keepers' of a tradition are the last in their lineage. Many times they are relatives in the family. But we are so use to them that we take

them for granted and are too close to them to value the importance of documenting for archival purposes their folk heritage practices and traditions.    And   what is a folk heritage tradition? It is the practice of an art self taught or passed on to an individual by a tradition-keeper or members of a traditional community.   It is an art not formally or institutionally-taught, but self generated or passed on through intentional mentorship or by careful observation. In the  art of storytelling, it may be the memory of a direct experience in a historical moment - as the story of a battle in a war and the details of what happened

to the story-teller, or the one who passed the story on to him or her. It may be the recalling of people and events in that person's life that help shed           

light on what went into making that a historical event. "        - Stan Woodward

 

         " I believe as the video camera has penetrated into American culture and into every home that people  can document stories and traditions within their

own family or community where those traditions are passing away as the generation of elders pass on. This is also true for documenting and archiving local and regional folklore and folklife for posterity. "  - Stan Woodward

 

Supported by power-point presentations, Mr. Woodward takes the audience with him on the various "shoots", providing stories and information that goes beyond what we see on the screen. We learn how his storytelling approach to documenting Southern folklife and Southern culture parallels and fits into the larger context of Southern writers as image-makers who have collectively formed an ethos and iconic mental picture of the South in all it's complexity. We will see how Southern folklife documentaries have often shattered this collective image of the South and where they are able to overcome or fall into the stereotypes that derive from this collective view.

The Folklife Through the Camera program is audience-interactive, as the filmmaker makes connections between the people in the audience and their life experiences and those of the subjects in the documentaries:

             "Folklife is us - it is you and me", says Stan, "Us in our social and cultural contexts; in our our traditions - the ones

              that come from family or from community - those who pass on their knowledge, arts and skills to us with no formal

              training or education. This takes the form of "heritage culture" and is the pure passing-down of root culture and

              practices that keep them alive from generation to generation. In fact, this describes what is at the very heart of folklife.

              A perfect example is found in the Blues. Listen to the story of how harmonica player, Max Hightower, was mentored

              into the Blues by living in the root culture where the Blues was sung and played as a musical expression of uncles.

 

             "But the tyranny and power of the 'televistic' super-culture that has grown to dominate American life - motivated

              by making money, and lots  of it - and the advent of a digital world connected worldwide by the Internet has radically

              changed the face of culture. How does this impact and change traditional culture and it's continuation?  My program

              sets the folklife we see in my documentaries up against the realities of this new paradigm. And it is against this backdrop

              that we consider the urgency to preserve traditional culture and folklife on video - now. "    - Stan Woodward