TeleVISIONS (October/November 1975)

13/TeleVISIONS EVERYONE IS HISTC Continuing Appalachian Culture By Richard Blaustein Since September 1974, the Special Projects Division of the National Endowment for the Arts has been supporting a major experiment in the use of portable video and cable TV as ameans of studying and encouraging the active preservation of southern mountain folklore. Jointly sponsored by Broadside Video and the Sociology’Anthropology Department of East Tennessee State University of Johnson City, Tennessee, the Southern Appalachian Video Ethnography Series (SAVES) project aims to involve undergraduate students in the production of video documentaries dealing with diverse aspects of their region’s folk culture, including traditional instrumental music, song, dance. story-telling, crafts, subsistance techniques, and religion. These tapes being used in classrooms as well as to local audiences in upper East Tennessee and southwest Virginia via cable. Author (with microphone) interviews Appalachian dollmaker. Philadelphia, Alan Jabbour, a fellow student ‘of rural white American instrumental music who had been head of the Library of Congress’ Archive of Folk Song, became actively interested in our work. Shortly after "being appointed director of NEA’s newly established Special Projects Division, he came to Johnson City to talk with Ted Carpenter and me. Out of this meeting came the idea of ‘seeking NEA funding to continue and expand the work that we had done during the previous year. I was released from part of my course load and instituted a formal course in anthropological fieldwork methods including training in the use of the portapak. We tied into a new cooperative work/study program at ETSU under which students could receive academic credit and a salary while working at a full-time job. Thus students who demonstrated outstanding interest and aptitude in the fieldwork ccurse could then be tapped for assistantships, be given the opportunity to completely devote themselves to developing their skills as anthropologists and videomakers. In Sept. 1974 Southern Appalachian Video Ethnography Series project was officially launched with Bob Williams, as our first student. We began transferring Broadside’s folklore collection into a separate SAVES library. Bob took on the task of teaching other students how to shoot and edit videotape, and they in turn began to teach others. I was pleased to see this pattern of students teaching other students, which had emerged at the start of our collaboration with Broadside, expanding in this way, and it was also gratifying to see how rapidly the documentary and technical quality of our tapes began to improve. Orders for copies cf our tapes started to come in from schools and universities in the Southern Appalachian region and elsewhere, Most folklorists and anthropoligists have just started to become aware of the potential of portable videotape as a research and teaching tool. Although photography and film were mentioned only in passing; portable video was still too new and untested to be seriously considered by our professors. Our training in fieldwork methods. concentrated almost exclusively on ‘Sound recording. 1 was first awakened to the possibilities of portable videotape as a collecting and classroom tool at a conference — on Appalachian education held at the Highlander Center in New Market, Tennessee during the early spring of 1973. Ted Carpenter, a former VISTA volunteer who had branched off into experimenting with portable video in the coal-mining counties of the Tennessee Cumberlands, showed excerpts from several of his tapes. I was excited to learn that he would shortly be coming to Johnson City to set up a public access video center. Almost immediately I borrowed a portapak and tapes from Broadside and began videotaping some of the traditional musicians in my rural neighborhood, and also encouraged my students to produce their own tapes. One student undertook a video essay on the growth of commercial country music in nearby Bristol; another recorded interviews and performances with several well known musicians in the Blue Ridge counties of Virginia and North Carolina, and also began a study of step dancing; another student worked with an excellent traditional storyteller in her home town. The most spectacular project to emerge from our initial involvement with Broadside was carried out by a student named Wayne Barrett. During the spring of 1973 several members of the Church of God In Jesus’ Name near Newport in Cocke County, Tennessee were bitten and killed by rattlesnakes during services. This resulted in an immediate confrontation between the church and the Tennessee courts, which was heightened by an influx of network TV news people. Wayne felt that the mass media coverage of this church and its unusual practices was shallow and biased, and so he decided to attempt to study their belief system from their own perspective with the aid of the portapak. At first the church elders were suspicious of Wayne's motives, but after talking with him and seeking divine guidance through prayer, they decided to cooperate with him. Wayne visited the church regularly over the course of the following weeks, taping interviews and services. ; Not only were Wayne and the other students actively engaging in fieldwork and developing a professional orientation to folklore and anthropology through their work with portable video, but their tapes were also being incorporated into classroom discussions, arousing the attention and involvement of other students. A learning situation was being created in which students were taking on an active role in determining the content and direction of their course work and using each others’ projects and experiences as a basis for continuing research After one of my early tapes was favorably received at the Conference on Visual Anthropologyheld at Temple University in and we also began to cablecast SAVES material on the regional cable network served by Broadside as a regular weekly series called “High Country”. We began tape exchanges with anthropologists and folklorists working in other culture areas, such as Scotland and Zambia. It is hard to objectively evaluate the SAVES project at the end of its first year. We have had the opportunity to explore some of the dimensions of the portable videotape medium in the field, the classroom, the studio and the community cable system, and a creative environment has been established within which students have been able to work with modern communications technology while producing documentaries providing themselves and others with greater insight into their region’s cultural heritage. Note: A brochure listing and describing tapes in the SAVES collection is available upon request to all interested parties. Tapes may be obtained through purchase or exchange. SAVES, c/o BROADSIDE VIDEO, Elm & Millard Sts., Johnson City, TN. 37601. [615/926-8191] VIDEO PENPALS By Theresa Mack During the ’74-’75 school year, Susan Presson’s fifth grade class in SandersClyde Elementary School in Charleston, S.C. exchanged videotapes regularly with Lois Betts’ fifth-sixth grade class at P.S. 75 in NYC. Each class divided itself into small groups and one group at a time worked on making a 20 minute tape which was mailed off every 6 or 8 weeks to the penpal class. : The making of each tape involved planting and organization. Often, as the kids prepared to go out shooting, they made notes for themselves on topic-ideas and possible interview questions. Sometimes they made storyboards detailing what they wanted to include in their tape and how they wanted to shoot it. After two or three shooting sessions, the group would view their tapes to decide how to edit them. They wrote up logs, descriptions and evaluations of each shot. Then by referring to their logs the children wrote their editing scripts. If you are interested in teaming up with a video penpal, try writing State Arts Councils for names of schools and teachers using video. Or you might meet someone at a conference or workshop you'd enjoy exchanging with. Here are a few interested organizations: Louisville Communications Center, 125 Cagle St, Louisville, MS. 39339; The Communications Center 105 North Mulberry, Elizabethtown, Ky. 42701; Vermont Council on the Arts 136 State St, Montpelier, Vt. 05602. gees pen hope You wily write Back sevd Me A prctwe # ai hepe We ave GINS to Ce pals For evep se SoyAN Wie ’ ’ ) Swi We encouraged the kids to focus on the personal and familiar, and so, many of their tapes dealt with their own neighborhoods, pastimes, concerns and experiences. We felt that exploring the familiar with video would give the tapemakers a greater consciousness of their own environment, and the tapeviewers a feeling for life in their penpals’ city. Knowing that there was someone waiting to see their tapes added excitement and meaning to each group’s production. Interesting interviews, clear narration, and good camera work became more important than ever to the kids since they knew that their tapes would be watched closely by children in another city. The letters they exchanged were their main form of feedback about the tapes they received and a way to make more personal and individual contacts than the videotapes allowed. The kids’ end-of-year evaluations of the project showed that they really enjoyed and valued their video experience. Making their own videotapes was unquestionably a popular activity, but viewing each others’ tapes was more difficult, and some kids didn’t like it at all. It’s always a temptation, even for people who make videotapes, to judge someone else’s tapes according to slick television standards. And since the penpal tapes dealt with everyday life in a straightforward. manner, with little comedy, drama, or sensationalism, the kids were easily bored when they watched each others’ tapes. Perhaps the next step in the exchange if the school year hadn’t ended would have been more honest, direct reactions and critiques of each others’ tapes, as a way of learning more about each other and more about making good videotapes.