Stan Woodward's roots go deep in South Carolina, so when he returned to his home-state and saw root traditions and folkways threatened by a "New South"
growth that was neglecting the preservation of these roots and folk heritage traditions and their tradition bearers, Stan put his artform to work and returned to his kind of "first-person" documentary filmmaking that ethnographic film scholars have termed "vox populi" - in the voice of the people. This important work has encompassed many Southern culture and folk heritage foodways and traditions, resulting in The Woodward Studio Folk Heritage Video Archive - an archive of more than 1,200 hours with a special focus on Southern folklife, characters, and foodways. A grant from the National Endowment for the Arts through McKissick Museum and the Folklife Resource Center at the University of South Carolina enabled Stan to set aside time to edit a number of works from this archive. They are contained in the Southern Routes Collection - a suite of documentaries ranging from chronicling two iconic Southerners, the likes of whom have been used by Southern writers to draw their characters in novels, to short films that open windows into Southern life, folkways and culture not seen before at this level of intimacy.
From the time of Stan's 4-year odyssey in the making of the documentary classic, IT'S GRITS!, in the 1970's, he began realizing how food is a medium - a door through which, when opened, presents an avenue - a "path of least resistance", as he calls it - into the soul and personna of the South. And he takes us through that door and into a storytelling exper-ience that reveals his love for the people of the South who are instinctive about remaining in touch with their agrarian "struggle-against-the-odds" past. This, when combined with Stan's having come from a family of storytellers, allows him to move comfortably, genuinely, with ethnographic sensitivity and with extraordinary trust and acceptance into local and often remote communities to enable the viewer to become one with the way they honor the past in the present.
"The thing I like most about the folk I have documentaed in my work is the way they maintain great respect for the people who came before them - their elders - by continuing traditions in community with their neighbors, family and friends that stand forth against the attrition of these values and traditions that I believe is destroying community as we have known it in the South. "
"From the bond of food that cuts across all racial, social, and economic ties to the annual gatherings of thousands of blacks and whites who return home from across the nation to the SC Lowcountry to attend centuries-old campmeetings-in-the-woods, it's all about returning to and staying in touch with ancestral roots. And from these documentaries a picture forms of a place and its people that Southern authors have been inspired by and have drawn upon for their stories and characters for years... ever since there
was a place called 'the South.'
"I believe that time is the most in jeapardy among all the components that keep alive our folk heritage traditions in this new digital instant-everything age," says filmmaker Woodward. "Who will have the time and the ability and will, nowadays, to suspend their impatience long enough to sit, and listen, and watch, as tradition-bearers work to keep alive the heritage of their ancestors in tangible and sharable and enjoyable ways of fellowship and community. Iin turn, by viewing these people and their folkways, we are reminded of andthey help us put into perspective the cost of being lost in the definition of ourselves as 'consumers' by those who wish to define us and shape us in this way for the purpose of developing nitch markets that get ever more 'nitched'."
Taken altogether, the sweep of Stan's
spontaneous camera over several decades and shot in a "first-person singular" documentary narrative style encompasses a remarkable slice-of-life look at what is so hard to put one's finger on about the South - the almost invisible threads that all these people have running through them in common and down through time that weave together the folklife tapestry of the South.
Most recently, Stan has restored and included in his collection several of his earlier works: The American Super-8 Revolution (a classic documentary that captures the early introduction of filmmaking in the classroom - 1972); The People Who Take Up Serpents (jointly produced by the filmmaker who assisted writer, Gretchen Robinson as she produced the first work in the SC Arts Commission's Independent Filmmakers production grant program - 1974); and The TOWER of the POTOMAC (the visitation by German post modernist environmental scuptor, Mo Edoga, as he worked with the public schools in Prince William County, Virginia and constructed a "tower" from driftwood from the Potomac River bound together with shipping cord and made by the eye, strength and hand coordination of the artist - 1994)
The documentaries in The WORKS in the Woodward Studio Limited's collection provide a view of Southern culture and its folklife and foodways through the storytelling aesthetic and folk heritage preservation sensibilities of Stan Woodward. Nowhere else is there such a concentration of documentaries on the communal cooking of stews in huge black iron kettles by stewmasters, hashmasters and burgoo kings, nor the related stories like Nothing to Prove and Hallowed Ground. They form a tapestry of Southern folk heritage foodways and related folkways that provide a deep and penetrating look into Southern Americana.
For instance, from it's rich Folk Heritage Video Archive at The Woodward Studio Limited has come the 5-volume series called SOUTHERN ROUTES - a collection Stan was able to edit made possible by a Creativity in Folklife grant from the National Endowment for the Arts Folklife and Traditional Arts program. And this lifeswork concludes with the final major work in Stan Woodward's long and much-recognized career of recording "root" documentaries - NOTHING TO PROVE: Mac Arnold's Return to the Blues.
"Having experienced a stroke that has resulted in my having to end my field work and shooting of documentaries about the people who really give the South the wonderful part of it's character and difficult to define cultural essence from the ethnographic and anthropological point of view, I look forward now to having the time to delve into this bountiful archive of material and continue editing short works that fill out the spectrum of what I see as honoring the tradition-bearers of skilled folklife practices, continuances and culinary art forms that mainstream media doesn't have the time for and that can't "turn a quick profit" from the production. My hope is that as these records of the folk recede from us in time, they will grow in value in the way of reminding us of our true heritage - our agrarian roots, and the hard labor and joy of community that is captured here."
- Stan Woodward, Producer and President of The Woodward Studio Limited
