The Folkways Film series is a collaborative program with the Footcandle Film Society and Folkstreams. Folkstreams is dedicated to preserving the stories of America through its mission of "finding, preserving, contextualizing, and showcasing documentary films on American traditional cultures." Established in 2000 by Tom Davenport, a national heritage award recipient, filmmaker, and farmer, this non-profit organization is supported by the National Endowment for the Arts and has a long-standing partnership with the Southern Folklife Collection at the University of North Carolina. Since the 1960s, Davenport has stressed the importance of inclusion, specifically focusing on the "culture, struggles, and arts of unnoticed people from many different communities." Many of these non-commercial films focus on marginalized people, minority groups, non-traditional ways of life, displacement, endangered craft, and more.
Footcandle Film Society will be a production partner, providing technical support, guidance, and collaborative promotion. This local non-profit organization was founded in 2008 to allow Catawba County citizens to view films in a community setting, encouraging artistic exploration and discussion. These monthly films range from documentaries, foreign narratives, independent films, and award-nominated movies of all genres. (If you are a Footcandle Film Society member, please input your unique code at checkout to receive a 10 % discount on your purchase.)
Bring your lawn chair or a quilt. Food, beer, and wine will be for sale at all shows. Please take a look at each show below to learn more about each vendor.
Tickets:
Adult: $10
Youth 13-18: $5
Thursday, June 5th, 6:30 p.m.
Theme: Craft Traditions
Films: Crawdad Slip & Learned it in Back Days and Kept It
Special Artist Presenter: TBA
Thursday, June 12th, 6:30 p.m.
Theme: Foodways
Film: Southern Stews: A Taste of the South
Special Artist Presenter: TBA
Thursday, June 19th, 6:30 p.m.
Theme: Music
Films: Me and Stella and Musical Holdouts
Special Artist Presenter: TBA
***Musical Holdouts is a film intended for mature audiences
Thursday, June 26th, 6:30 p.m.
Theme: Dance
Film: Talking Feet
Special Artist Presenter: TBA
About the Films
June 5th - Craft Traditions
Learned it in Back Days and Kept it
Lucreaty Clark (1903 - 1986) was one of sixteen children born to a family in rural Jefferson County, Florida. Her grandparents had been slaves on the Rindell plantation, outside of Monticello. After emancipation, her parents remained as tenant farmers on the cotton plantation. In the early twentieth century, the area was still part of the system of plantations, small farms, and cotton production. In addition to many other rural life skills, Clark learned to make white oak baskets from her parents and in-laws—who in turn had learned from their parents. Long after the plantations were gone, she continued to fashion the baskets in the way she had learned from her family.
Making a basket is complex and time-consuming. The process of making oak splints starts with cutting down a tree, then removing limbs, peeling the bark, splitting the tree in quarters or eighths, and using a froe and mallet to split the wood into smaller sections. The basketmaker then splits the splints into the right thickness using a knife and hands, and scrapes them smooth. Some basketmakers estimate that it takes fifty hours to make a medium-sized basket.
Aside from her skills as an accomplished basket maker, Clark embraced a wide repertoire of traditional African American songs, games and folk knowledge essential to rural life. She was a remarkable representative of an era that seems very far away today. In 1985 She was awarded the Florida Folk Heritage Award. This film was made in 1981, five years before her death.
Crawdad Slip
Sid's father, Jim, talks about the hard times of the 1930's and 40's when wood-fired kilns would 'bout burn yourself up, and handmade pottery had so little value that Jim finally gave up on it and took to raisin' hogs and chickens. But not before he made Sid a wheel and taught him the fundamentals of pottery. To quit making pottery was the practical thing to do for Jim. Even Sid acknowledged that - he left to join the Marine Corp in 1969, and later took up school teaching, although he continued to turn pottery part-time. However, after twenty-five years a growing interest in pottery allowed him to return to practice his craft full-time. Circumstances had favored Sid. Now he could raise his children as potter's sons.
We visit Sid's grandfather's old shop with the kick wheel still standing beside the dusty, cob-webbed window where Emerson Luck turned out milk crocks and churns for fifteen cents apiece. "This is a deserted place," Sid says, as he looks around the dark, damp barn and discovers some of the first jugs that he helped turn. "This is a two-gallon jug made by my grandfather", he says, holding up the brown,salt-fired jug. "They made these jugs to store cider in and when they were done with 'em the kids would break 'em for the heck of it. So there's not a lot of them around, I would think". We visit the clay hole where Sid still digs for native clay. And the stream where he stumbled upon his favorite glaze while watching his sons catch crawdads, a glaze he calls his crawdad slip.
June 12th - Foodways
Southern Stews: A Taste of the South
This spontaneously-shot surprising documentary looks across the South to see the connections between the folk heritage traditions of communal cooking in gigantic black iron pots stirred with wooden paddles maintained into the 21st century by culinary folk artisans called “stewmasters” with their stew crews. With wit and humor, Southern Stews carries us from Kentucky and Virginia into Georgia and South Carolina to discover ancestral stews that honor an agrarian past and contain the blended history of our European, African, Native American, and frontier settler roots in one-pot meals.
From hunter stews in Kentucky to Sea Island stews first cooked by African American slaves, to the hash that is peculiar only to South Carolina and the "stew-wars" that crop up between Virginia's Brunswick County and the coastal town of Brunswick, Georgia, these pottages include ingredients of local meats and vegetables, onions and potatoes (and some say "roadkill" and others "the kitchen sink"). But no-matter the stew, when the huge cast iron pots are steaming and being stirred with wooden paddles, you know that stewmasters and crews are drawn into community in preparing for a large stew gathering at volunteer fire departments, rural churches, family reunions, or stew festival competitions…and the stories and "leg-pulling" around the pots are continual & never-ending.
June 19th - Music
Me and Stella
Geri Ashur’s Me & Stella traces the life of blues musician, folk singer, and composer Elizabeth Cotten—and her guitar, Stella—who is best known for writing the folk standard “Freight Train.” After spending her early teenage years writing songs and playing the guitar, Cotten put her musical career on hold for three decades. Encouraged by the very musical Seeger family, for whom she worked as a maid, Cotten started recording and became a star in the 1960s burgeoning folk revival at an age when most people are contemplating retirement.
The original materials for this film are in the Richard Brick collection at the Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Butler Library, Columbia University, New York
Musical Holdouts
This classic, entertaining documentary on American traditional music features varied individuals and groups who have not become part of the “melting pot” of American society.
From front porch banjo pickers in Appalachia and the Bluegrass Festival circuit to Black children on the Carolina sea islands, cowboys, and Cheyenne and Comanche Indians, they have all retained their cultural identities despite pressures from the mass media and popular culture. (This film is intended for mature audiences).
June 26th - Dance
Talking Feet
Talking Feet is the first documentary to feature flatfoot, buck, hoedown, and rural tap dancing, the styles of solo Southern dancing which are a companion to traditional old-time music and on which modern clog dancing is based. Featuring 24 traditional dancers videotaped on location in West Virginia, Kentucky, Virginia, and North Carolina.
This film project grew into the 1992 book Talking Feet: Solo Southern Dance of the Appalachian, Piedmont and Blue Ridge Mountain Regions, by Mike Seeger with notes by Ruth Pershing.
"Talking Feet is a film about a forgotten side of American dance culture: solo mountain dancing. Mike Seeger and Ruth Pershing take us to the southeastern mountains of the U. S., the source of this genre, and to a range of individuals (old, young, black, white, female and male) who grew up with the idea of talking with their feet. The film captures the deep sense of tradition and the value of freedom of expression these dancers share. Talking Feet is an exploration of a dance form rich in American do-it-yourself pride."
-- Frank Hall, dancer, dance anthropologist.
"Once we started meeting more and more people in different parts of the mountain areas it really opened up what we could do and how we heard the music and reacted to it. . . . They were beating out the rhythms with their feet and really paying a lot of attention to the changing of the phrasing of the music, rather than executing 'precision' steps and trying to do high kicks."
-Rodney Sutton of The Green Grass Cloggers and The Fiddle Puppets
Refund Policy
Hart Square does not offer refunds for ticketed events unless the event has been canceled.
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