Friday Video: Color Outisde the Lines: A Tattoo Documentary.

Filmmaker Artemus Jenkins. From Kickstarter.

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This week’s Friday video is somewhat related to our ongoing Arkansas Tattoo Project research.  (If you want to know more about this project, go here to see all the recent posts.  You can also follow the project on Facebook and Twitter)

In researching various tattoo styles and forms of expression, I came across this Kickstarter video for an upcoming documentary.  Produced by Artemus Jenkins, Color Outside the Lines:  A Tattoo Documentary explores the work, culture, and styles the African American tattoo artists and their clients. It looks like it will also address the need for more black tattoo artists and some of the problems within the industry, including the prevalence of shops owned by white supremacists.

It looks really interesting.  Have you heard about it?   What are some of the tattoo documentaries you’ve seen and which ones would you recommend?

Director Sharon La Cruise Discusses the Film, “Daisy Bates: First Lady of Little Rock.

Film maker Sharon La Cruise. From PBS.

Last week’s Friday Video was a preview of the upcoming film Daisy Bates: First Lady of Little Rock.  Today on the University of Arkansas campus director of the film, Sharon La Cruise, will preset the film and answer questions.

Yesterday Ozarks at Large’s Antoinette Grajeda spoke with La Cruise about the making of the film including her research in Little Rock, her quest to discover why Daisy Bates was not initially seen as potential leader of the movement, Bates’s life as a social and political radical, and a her role in the desegregation of Central High.

“Daisy Bate’s life” La Cruise says, “is the classic example that life really is like ten percent of what happens to you and ninety percent of how you handle it.  Because that is how she lived her life because she could have had many options as far a path she could have went down considering where she came from and what she went through.  And she made a decision to do good with her life.  I’m hoping she’ll be inspirational to young adults….”

To listen to the entire interview go here and click on the link.

In case you missed the Friday Video here it is again.  Daisy Bates: First Lady of Little Rock will be airing nationally on February 2nd at 9:00 pm on the PBS series, Independent Lens.  The presreening will be held today at 2:00 PM at the Reynolds Center on the U of A campus.   The event is hosted in connection with Martin Luther King Jr. week and organized by the University Libraries and Diversity Affairs.

A Family Undertaking: Documentary on the Modern Home Funeral Movement from POV

From Netflix.

Yesterday we posted the most recent Seed and the Story column about the “Rest in Peace” Exhibit” at the Shiloh Museum of Ozark History.  I’ve gotten great responses to this piece and several people have told me stories about home funerals they remember from their own childhoods in Arkansas and beyond.  They told me about folks building coffins, creating the coffin liners, sitting up with the death, and grave digging.

I’ll be posting more about this in coming weeks and sharing some of these stories with you.

This has also sparked several interesting conversations about the nature of community, death rituals, and what makes for  meaningful ways to say goodbye.  One question comes up again and again: Have we lost something in our desire to professionalize death?  They’re are a variety of different opinions on this subject, all of them worthy of attention.

As a folklorist and community activist, I’m a firm believer that how we mourn our dead is just as important as how we welcome our youngest into the world.  The ways in which we honor our elders, attend to the grieving, and support those who’ve lost someone suddenly, is an instrumental part of what makes a strong and sustainable community.  I’d say it’s the foundation, really.  Or at least a big part of the foundation.  After all, a community can’t sustain itself without healthy ways of saying goodbye.   Certainly there are countless ways of doing this, and only a family can decide what it right for them and their loved one.  One tradition that’s very important where I live and work is Decoration Day.  There are countless others.

But all these discussions reminded me of a film I saw a few years ago entitled A Family Undertaking.   It’s a documentary about the home funeral movement throughout the United States.  Featuring interviews with families who choose to keep their dead in their homes, forgo funeral homes and embalming, and dig graves and make their own caskets, this film explores the decisions of families who bury their dead in much the same ways people did at the turn of the last century.  They sidestep the funeral industry and take part in all the details of burial.  For these families this way of saying goodbye is more personal and therefore healing.  The film also explores the options families have for the burial process in our modern age.

I checked online and was excited to see that if you’re a Netflix account holder you can currently watch the 2003 POV documentary online.  Just visit Netflix and type in the title in the search engine.

Here’s a brief summary of the film from the POV webpage:

What is old is often new again. Most funerals today are part of a multimillion-dollar industry run by professionals. This increased reliance on mortuaries has alienated Americans from life’s only inevitability — death. A Family Undertaking explores the growing home funeral movement by following several families in their most intimate moments as they reclaim the end of life, forgoing a typical mortuary funeral to care for their loved ones at home. Far from being a radical innovation, keeping funeral rites in the family or among friends is exactly how death was handled for most of pre-20th century America . . .

A Family Undertaking makes clear that the heart of the home funeral movement is the desire to rescue funerals from the impersonality of a mass-market industry, and to reshape them according to personal beliefs or family and community traditions. The film introduces us to individuals like the Carr family of South Dakota, preparing for the death of 90-year-old family patriarch Bernard, and Anne Stuart and Dwight Caswell of California, preparing for the end of Anne’s struggle with terminal cancer. Through their stories we see that “hands-on” care for the dead by family members, including children, can aid in grieving, bring a sense of fulfillment, and help loved ones to grasp the reality of a death. Their home funerals are remarkable documents of death made intimate, meaningful, and even joyful.

To read the entire synopsis, go here.

You can also read an excellent interview with filmmaker,  Elizabeth Westrate.  To read the entire interview click here.   She is also the producer and director of the film Passing on the Gift:  Heifer International’s Mission to End Hunger. 

Friday Video: Rerelease of You Got To Move: Stories of Change in the South.

From the Milestone Films webpage.

Each Friday on our Facebook page we’ve been posting a video that we’ve come across that explores the intersection of cultural tradition and grassroots action.  It dawned on me that I should also post those videos here for folks who may not be following the blog on facebook.  (To follow The Boiled Down Juice on facebook go here and “like” the page).

I’ve been seeing several posts lately about this amazing documentary, and so this week’s video is a preview of the re-release of 1985  film You Got to Move: Stories of Change in the South. The preview alone is an incredibly inspiring look at how regular people fight for justice and features the amazing work of Highlander Folk School, now known as Highlander Research and Education Center.

Here’s the opening quote from the preview which sums up participatory research and action so well. “Well no, I’m not a leader they would say.  But we say, “You know the problem.  If you know the problem, you see the problem, you know what needs to be done to solve that problem then you’re the one that have to take the ball and run with it.”"

From the Milestone webpage:

Milliarium Zero’s release in celebration of the legendary Highlander Folk School, YOU GOT TO MOVE follows a group of individuals in the process of becoming involved in grassroots social change in the South. These people have been active in some of the most significant movements in the past fifty years, from Civil Rights and labor organizing to citizens’ actions against toxic waste dumping and strip mining.

Produced by Lucy Massie Phenix Directed and edited by Lucy Massie Phenix & Veronica Selver, the film features Myles Horton, Bernice Robinson, Bernice Johnson Reagon, Bill Saunders, Rebecca Simpson, Gail & Richard Story, May Justice, MaryLee & Russell Rogers, Becky Simpson, members of the Bumpass Cove community and the Cranks Creek Survival Center of Kentucky.

You can watch a preview of the rerelease via youtube by clicking here.

And here’s an older preview that’s great too.