PUTNEY — An award-winning documentary filmmaker will come to Putney this week for a special screening of his film that charts the history of a song that became an anthem for the civil rights movement.
The Next Stage Arts Project will present a special screening of the film Strange Fruit on Thursday, Nov. 17, at 7:30 p.m.
The film will be introduced and followed by a discussion with producer, director, and editor Joel Katz.
Strange Fruit, released in 2002, explores the history and legacy of a song that portrays the lynching of a black man in the American South.
“Southern trees bear a strange fruit,” the song begins. “Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,/Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,/Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.”
“There's a short quote in the film: 'Until the last racist is dead, 'Strange Fruit' is relevant,'” Katz said in a telephone interview on Saturday.
Best known from Billie Holiday's haunting 1939 rendition, the song “Strange Fruit” was originally a poem written and set to music by a Bronx schoolteacher, Abel Meeropol, under the pen name Lewis Allan.
Meeropol and his wife, Anne, later adopted the children of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were convicted of treason and executed in 1953.
“I think it's kind of an incredible story,” Katz said of the 57-minute film, which tells a dramatic story of America's past by using one of the most influential protest songs ever written as its epicenter.
The saga brings audiences face-to-face with the terror of lynching as it spotlights the courage and heroism of those who fought for racial justice when to do so was to risk ostracism and livelihood for white people - and death for African-Americans.
The film examines the history of lynching and the interplay of race, labor, the Left, and popular culture that would give rise to the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s.
The tale of “Strange Fruit” - the song's genesis, impact, and continuing relevance - is an amazingly complex one that weaves the lives of African-Americans, immigrant Jews, anti-Communist government officials, civil rights leaders, radical leftist teachers and organizers, music publishers, record company executives, and jazz musicians.
Eighth-grade screening
On Friday, Katz will also host a screening and workshop for eighth graders from Putney Central School and The Grammar School as part of an ongoing collaboration between Next Stage Arts Project and area schools.
Almost 10 years after the film's release, Katz said, Strange Fruit continues to find audiences in a number of schools, and the filmmaker gets a steady stream of correspondence from teachers.
Katz said that he “very intentionally” filmed a scene at DeWitt Clinton High School, the school where Meeropol was teaching when he wrote “Strange Fruit.”
“I wanted to show them that this was not a rusty artifact of a song,” he said.
In his view, the high school students portrayed in the film outstaged the professional artists and writers who spoke about the song, a list that includes former New Jersey Poet Laureate Amiri Baraka and iconic folk singer Pete Seeger.
The collaboration between schools is an essential part of the nascent nonprofit's mission, said Billy Straus, the organizing force behind the Next Stage Arts Project.
Straus hopes that the film and Katz's presence will provoke “an interactive, vibrant discussion.”
He hopes that the Strange Fruit screening and discussion will foreshadow similar future screenings of “interesting, somewhat quirky, not-likely-to-be-seen-by-many-people” films that “lend themselves to an educational tie-in.”
'Regional relevance'
Katz is an independent filmmaker based in upstate New York. His Corporation with a Movie Camera (1992), about how corporate representations have shaped Americans' ideas about the Third World, was broadcast nationally on PBS's New Television series in 1994.
His film Dear Carry (1997), a video based on the life of Carry Wagner (1895-1992), a New York jewelry designer and amateur filmmaker, is a documentary essay about ancestry, identity, cameras, and travel.
Most recently, Katz has released a cinematic memoir, White: A Memoir in Color, which he describes on his website as “a personal film about being white in America.”
The new film, he writes, “tells an emotional multi-generational story about my (white) family that encompasses immigration, assimilation, liberal idealism, bitter disillusionment, and ultimately reconciliation.”
Katz also works as associate professor and chair of the media arts department of New Jersey City University, and serves on the boards of directors of Third World Newsreel and the Black Maria Film Festival.
For his part, he thinks that Strange Fruit could provide some education for Vermonters on an essential chapter in American history.
“Vermont is one of the whitest states in the country,” Katz said. “Other areas of the country have dealt with these issues with an intensity and for a long time. There's some regional relevance there.”