One of the monstrous failings of American cinema is how it has neglected most of the best black filmmakers. Among the many careers that have been stifled is that of Billy Woodberry, whose first feature, the drama “Bless Their Little Hearts” (streaming on Vimeo), was completed in 1983. His only feature in the nearly four decades since then is “And When I Die, I Won’t Stay Dead,” a daring and accomplished documentary about the poet Bob Kaufman—which was completed in 2015, remains without theatrical release, and is now available on the Criterion Channel.
In “And When I Die” Woodberry (who has been teaching filmmaking for many years) finds an original way to evoke Kaufman’s remarkable life and work, even in the poet’s absence. (Kaufman died in 1986.) Born in New Orleans in 1925, one of the thirteen children of a German Jewish man and a black Catholic woman from Martinique, Kaufman joined the U.S. Merchant Marines (at the age of thirteen!) and, in the mid-nineteen-fifties, moved to San Francisco. There, he started to write poetry and became part of the literary circle that would, of course, become known as the Beats. (He has even been credited with coining the term “beatnik.”) Kaufman’s poetry won acclaim, but his chaotic private life (he was addicted to heroin and drank to excess) got in the way of his public activity. At the time of his death, he was living alone in San Francisco, largely in isolation from the literary world—some people in the community assumed that Kaufman had already died years earlier.
In “Bless Their Little Hearts,” Woodberry’s startling originality as a dramatic filmmaker was joined to a contemplative intensity—his devotion to his subject informs and tempers his display of style. The same holds true of “And When I Die”: with its narrative blend of archival footage, documents, and original interviews with people who knew Kaufman, it holds to the familiar norms of the historical-documentary genre while subtly yet boldly expanding it with a powerfully personal and experiential aspect. Woodberry’s archival research is prodigious: far from slapping a few instantly recognizable historical approximations onto the screen to evoke past events, he gives the impression of bringing to the surface dormant treasures after long hours of watching and pondering, and, with his ardently analytical and associative editing, he brings them back to life.
The most brilliant inspiration that Woodberry brings to Kaufman’s story is a simple twist: the film starts in the nineteen-fifties, with Kaufman’s literary achievement and his long decline—and then, with a startling stroke of form and of drama, cuts back to Kaufman’s early life. (Interviews with two of Kaufman’s sisters, his niece, and his first wife, Ida Berrocal Torres, heighten the sequence’s haunting power.) At the end of the film, in a climactic flourish that’s as bold as it is breathtaking, Woodberry introduces Kaufman in rare clips (from the film “Heartbeat,” by Will Combs) of long-lost footage, which show him reciting his own work, sending viewers off on a note of raw intimacy that seems to burst beyond the end of the narrative.
The story that Woodberry unfolds, guided by his interviews with Kaufman’s family members and friends (such as the poet A. D. Winans), is centered on the politics of the time, both nationally and locally. Living in New York during the Second World War, Kaufman, as a member of the National Maritime Union, was suspected of Communist sympathies. (The union was both strongly committed to racial equality and run by Communist leaders.) As a result, after the war, Kaufman suffered the Merchant Marine version of blacklisting, which made him largely unemployable, and he was subjected to F.B.I. surveillance and police persecution. He wrote fervent political poetry in the nineteen-fifties in which he compared Hitler to the San Francisco police—and named one brutal officer who had been harassing him. The harassment had another aspect: Kaufman, a black man, and Eileen Kaufman, a white woman, were married, and the police targeted Kaufman because of their interracial relationship. Winans recalls that Kaufman was arrested “thirty-eight or thirty-nine times for drunk and disorderly,” and Woodberry shows Kaufman’s police files to document the extent of the relentless harassment and surveillance that he endured.
In 1960, Kaufman, Eileen, and their infant son, Parker, left San Francisco for New York, where he got involved with the folk-music scene, centered on Washington Square Park—a movement that (as Woodberry displays in historical news footage and news clippings) was itself the target of police harassment. In the film, the writer Raymond Foye says that, on the very day in 1963 that the family was going to get a ride back to San Francisco, Kaufman was arrested—for walking on the grass—and sent first to the Tombs and then to Bellevue, where he was forcibly subjected to shock treatment. Winans tells Woodberry that, when Kaufman got back to San Francisco later that year, “he was a shell of what he was, not only from the shock treatments but abuse of drugs and alcoholism and the like.” Yet, despite Kaufman’s fragility—and despite a vow of silence that he took after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, which he (loosely) maintained for ten years—he continued to write, and published a series of short books that raised his profile in the arts community even as his personal problems increased and his health declined.
Woodberry’s most prodigious artistic feat, in composing Kaufman’s life, is to fill the film with Kaufman’s poetry and to give his writing a distinctive and vital cinematic identity. Throughout the film, the soundtrack includes readings of Kaufman’s writing by five people—Roscoe Lee Browne, Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis, Susanne Cockrell, and Woodberry himself—often joined by jazz music, which was a passion of Kaufman’s as well as a frequent subject of his work. (His son, Parker, was named for Charlie Parker.) Woodberry’s soundtrack includes music by Charles Mingus, Ornette Coleman, Jackie McLean, and Steve Lacy (who composed a setting for one of Kaufman’s poems, sung by Irene Aebi). Much of Kaufman’s work was prose poetry, and Woodberry’s film, too, is a devoted, impassioned prose poem, in which biography and history are fused with imaginative and illuminating renderings of Kaufman’s life and art.
Dee and Davis, as Woodberry shows, had a history with Kaufman. In 1978, they went to San Francisco to do an episode of their PBS series “With Ossie and Ruby” with Kaufman, but he got high and drunk on the day of the shoot and the production was truncated. (The show was broadcast in 1981.) But several years earlier Davis and Dee had made another public-television program about Kaufman’s life, for the series “Soul!” (It’s available to stream on Tubi.) In that episode, released in 1972, Dee and Davis speak of Kaufman’s substance abuse, imprisonment, and hospitalization. “He won’t grant interviews,” Davis says. “He won’t answer letters,” Dee continues. At the time of the broadcast, Kaufman hadn’t published any new work since 1965. Dee calls his literary abstinence “a suicide of the spirit,” and seeks to find out what happened to him. The show has only a scant biographical side, however; rather, it exalts Kaufman’s art with recitations by Dee and Davis of generous selections from his poetry—accompanied live in the studio by a nonet led by the saxophonist Lucky Thompson.
In an interview with the series’ producer, Ellis Haizlip, which is included in the broadcast, Dee and Davis have a wide-ranging and frank discussion about the need for American political power to be shared with black people—and the discovery, as Davis says, that “the old liberal mechanisms . . . will no longer solve our problems.” Davis discusses his involvement with a production company, Third World Cinema Corporation, which, he says, was founded in response to the fact that “the average Hollywood treatment of blacks and Puerto Ricans in film was very seldom true to the black and the Puerto Rican experience.” (Monica Castillo wrote about the project in Film Comment last year.) Davis planned to keep the profits from the company’s films among creators of color, and also to launch a program to develop future filmmakers from these communities. Dee adds, “In film, I don’t feel any real change. . . . I’m still yearning to do a really fulfilling film.” They challenged the very obstacles that a filmmaker such as Woodberry would face in attempting to launch and sustain a career—obstacles that nonetheless remain and that are among American society’s many ignominious failures.
