Past
Talking Back: Video Letters to POV
Overview
P.O.V.’s commitment to social-issue filmmaking has generated a few firestorms over the years, including a vociferous response—pro and con—to last year’s broadcast of Tom Shepherd’s Scout’s Honor, an investigation into the anti-gay policies of the Boy Scouts of America. Slawomir Grünberg says he still receives e-mails in response to School Prayer: A Community at War, the 1999 film he co-directed with Ben Crane. But when she’s asked if P.O.V. ever was in danger of being taken off the air, Ellen Schneider refers back to the show’s fourth season. “I’m sure that during the Tongues Untied era we feared for P.O.V.’s future,” she says. Marlon Riggs’s funny, angry, erotic essay on what it means to be black and gay in America provoked strong responses, and when you consider that it shared the 1991 schedule with Peter Adair’s HIV documentary Absolutely Positive and the pro-Salvadoran rebels film Maria’s Story by Pamela Cohen, Catherine Ryan and Monona Wali, it’s clear that P.O.V. was engaging in bold programming from the beginning.
“I’d seen Tongues Untied on [New York’s] Channel 13," Marc Weiss recalls, "and I asked Marlon Riggs to submit it. He said, ‘I’m not willing to make any changes in it.’ I told him, go ahead and submit it, and I’ll tell you later whether we’re willing to do it on those terms.” In the end, says Weiss, “It went on the air uncut, uncensored and unbleeped. You probably couldn’t put a Tongues Untied on the air today.”
A film the P.O.V. staff expected to rouse controversy was Tom Joslin and Peter Friedman’s deeply personal home-movie documentary about living—and dying—with AIDS, Silverlake Life: The View From Here, which aired in 1993. That was the year P.O.V. launched its “Talking Back” segment, in which viewers are invited to send in videotaped responses to the films. Anticipating a flood of tapes, Schneider and Weiss had set aside extra time for the “Talking Back” videos, but they received only one. “We had to go back to people who wrote snail mail and urge them to find a camcorder and record what they’d said in their letters," Schneider recalls. "And people did it! It’s riveting stuff." The P.O.V. staff was surprised and delighted by the number of positive responses to Silverlake Life. “The film cuts across class and race and gender,” says Schneider, “and I think that’s what great documentaries do.”
Schneider first joined P.O.V. in 1989 as a communications consultant, which, she says, “was not necessarily an easy or obvious task. There was nothing else like P.O.V. on television at that time. Much of my work was calling up TV critics and telling them how much we wanted them to see it.” Schneider remembers that for the first few seasons, the show had a backlog of unseen documentaries to draw on, since P.O.V. was pretty much the only game in town. “Now there are so many more documentaries on television,” she says, “but that abundance, those new venues, have helped clarify P.O.V.’s role as an interactive form. It’s one thing to be a disseminator of documentaries, but it’s even more interesting to encourage viewers, users and participants to engage in a conversation.”
Flag Wars (2003)
Source: Flag Wars / Talking Back
Doug, Old Oaks resident:
"I participate and I try to give back to the best of my ability to my community. I'm a gay man. I've had a loving partner for five years. I have every right to be in my community and in my home as anyone else does....I've gone out to everyone, and I know everyone, and I participate in their lives. And I think that that's what it takes is just getting to know all the people and doing what you can to be a good person, a good neighbor, to be decent and to live your life to the best of your ability."
Moderator:
"A lot of times there's the question of 'white flight.' In other words, there was a movement before the current movement. There was a change before this change ... That was a factor moving into that neighborhood when I moved in. I was the second black family on my street. And when the little neighbor boy came into my house and told my mother that he had to move because 'the niggers were moving in.' Right? ... it hit us that a change was going on. And that was the change before the change."
Vivian:
"You moved back into the community that you lived in before. When you came back in, it wasn't your community anymore. You were the intruder. Just like the niggers that moved into your neighborhood. You were the intruder. So don't expect anybody to come and shake your hand, pat you on the back, and tell you how good it was of you to come in and move into our neighborhood and make it a better neighborhood for everybody. Because when we move out to your neighborhoods, we don't get that."
Nina Masseria, Carriage Trade Realty:
"The beauty of is that as a team we can accomplish so much, but if we sit here and argue about who said what and who did what -- does somebody not in this room just want equal rights for everybody, no matter who the hell they are?"
"I'm a part of the Black community and I'm a part of the gay community, and I don't know if it were Black gays moving in, would this movie be made? Or, if it were Latino gays or, any other kind of gay person -- is it the 'gay', or is it the color? I'm confused."
Rubin, Olde Towne East resident:
"I get very concerned when I see well-intentioned White people show their true colors. And the more you push a liberal, the more they -- they will really come out. Very interesting. So, now a writer said that liberal and progressive people have a great sense of justice, but little sense of injustice. And -- and I think that's the case that we see here."
Nina Masseria:
"When I moved to the neighborhood in 1979, you could ride the rats down the alley at night when your car lights hit it. So, we still don't have the same services. But there has not been adequate code enforcement. If something's broken on your house and it doesn't meet code, and it costs $100 to fix, but you wait 20 years to tell them about it, it's probably going to cost 20 or $30,000 to fix. When this house was in absolute terrible shape on the inside, no human being should have been living inside that house. The system failed. We failed."
Linda Mitchell's sister-in-law:
"Linda would have not been in that home that she held so dear had it not been for some of these White faces up here, fighting like hell for her. Now they helped her find funding. She didn't necessarily want to stay in her home, the only home the child knew. She loved that home. But it wasn't about bricks, and mortar, and marble. It was about her momma and daddy, and her daddy got up every day and he went to work and he had three jobs, and he bought that home and they were proud of it. But Linda, God love her heart, toward the end of her illness, really believed that her momma and her daddy were coming back there someday to get her, and one day last May they finally did. Those angels came and took her home and she's not suffering anymore. But Linda couldn't have stayed there without the help that she had."
Patsy Thomas, Columbus City Councilmember:
"I don't want anyone to think that we're not dealing with racism, because we are. Because you have the stereotype, you've said something to the other person, so when you walk by -- down the street, you walk -- you're just walking it and not realizing who that person is. It's your neighbor. They live two doors down from you. But we're not treating each others as neighbors."
Arthur, Columbus resident:
I think it's not about Black and White, it's about green. That's what it all boils down to. It's about people that have something, and those don't have anything. I think for the community to move forward, they have to look at the people that don't have anything and try to bring them up to the same standards.