{"id":125897,"date":"2018-05-29T11:00:17","date_gmt":"2018-05-29T15:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=125897"},"modified":"2018-05-29T12:48:17","modified_gmt":"2018-05-29T16:48:17","slug":"the-premiere-of-four-women-artists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/05\/29\/the-premiere-of-four-women-artists\/","title":{"rendered":"The Premiere of Four Women Artists<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Pecolia Warner, 1975.<\/p><\/div>\n

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Something shapes people. It\u2019s the world in which they act that makes their experience, that furnishes the economic background that he grows up in and the folkways and the stories that come down to him and his family. It\u2019s the fountainhead of his knowledge and experience. One of the reasons Southerners have this to talk about is that they don\u2019t have much else to talk about\u2014it\u2019s their source of entertainment, besides their source of knowledge. You\u2019ve got the family tales to wile away a long winter evening, and that\u2019s what they have to drawn on, especially in the little hamlets where people sit on the store porch and talk in the evenings. All they have to talk about is each other and what they\u2019ve seen during the day and what happened to so-and-so and also encourages our sense of exaggeration and the comic, I think. Because tales get taller as they go along. It is a pleasure but it\u2019s also something of deep significance to people.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Eudora Welty\u2019s introductory dialogue in the 1977 documentary film\u00a0Four Women Artists<\/i>, by William Ferris, is also a metacommentary on the filmmaker himself. Ferris was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, in 1942, grew up on a farm outside town, and began documenting his friends and community at an early age. Between the fifties and the late seventies, he captured\u2014in photographs and on tape and film\u2014the stories, the songs and music, and the spirit of Southern culture during Jim Crow and the fight for civil rights: among his subjects are musicians James \u201cSon Ford\u201d Thomas, Sonny Boy Watson, Lovey Williams, and Fannie Bell Chapman, and the writers Barry Hannah, Alex Haley, Alice Walker, and Robert Penn Warren. Best known as a folklorist, Ferris founded, with the filmmaker Judy Peiser, the Center for Southern Folklore, in Memphis, in 1972; in 1979, he became the founding director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, where he taught for nearly two decades. In 1989, he coedited the Pulitzer Prize\u2013nominated Encyclopedia of Southern Culture<\/i> and, in 1997, was named chair of the National Endowment of the Humanities.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But in 1977, Ferris had the famous Southern writer Eudora Welty on 16mm. And not only Welty, but three other Mississippi artists: Pecolia Warner, a quilter in Yazoo City; Ethel Mohamed, an embroiderer in Belzoni; and Theora Hamblett, a painter in Oxford. Ferris put these four portraits together in the twenty-four-minute film Four Women Artists<\/i>. Before she was a fiction writer, Welty was a journalist and photographer. \u201cI would see something I thought was self-explanatory of the life I saw,\u201d she says of the images she produced, before reading a portion of her story \u201cWhy I Live at the P.O.,\u201d from 1941, in which Welty uses spoken word to drive the narrative. That story was inspired by one of her own photographs, of a woman ironing behind a post office. (\u201cNot that it isn\u2019t the next to smallest P.O. in the entire state of Mississippi,\u201d the story\u2019s narrator complains.)<\/p>\n

The film\u2019s other women confirm Welty\u2019s introductory claims: that telling tales, through oral and visual culture, is a way of elaborating on and sharing knowledge, experience, and pleasure. Warner offers the best illustration of how this particularly Southern process works. She learned to quilt from her mother\u2014\u201cand if I didn\u2019t do it right,\u201d she explains, \u201cshe\u2019d pull it out, make me do it again. She said, If you\u2019re gonna do anything, do it right.\u201d Warner describes observing her mother working on a quilt with seven or eight other women. \u201cWhile they\u2019re sittin\u2019 there,\u201d she recalls, \u201cthey\u2019d get to talkin\u2019 about religion and talkin\u2019 about the Bible and all that and they\u2019d get happy and commence to crying and I\u2019m layin\u2019 up under the table, watchin\u2019 \u2019em.\u201d Warner relates this story on camera when she is seventy-three\u2014older than her mother would have been in the memory\u2014as she sits around a quilt with several younger women as her audience.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re pleased to premiere Four Women Artists<\/i> here. The film will be released on June 1 as part of Voices of Mississippi<\/i><\/a>, a CD\/DVD\/book set of featuring blues and gospel recordings, interviews, and documentary films by Ferris\u2014an archive of his life\u2019s work.\u00a0\u2014Nicole Rudick\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n

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