St. Clair Bourne, pioneering filmmaker and television producer, dies at 64

By Richard Prince
Journal-isms
(December 15, 2007) St. Clair Bourne, among the most prominent African American documentary filmmakers and a chronicler of the form in a longstanding newsletter, "Chamba Notes," died Saturday, Dec. 15 in a New York hospital after an operation to remove a brain tumor. He was 64.

"He was a real race man," his writing collaborator, Lou Potter, told Journal-isms. "The director and producer of more than forty films, Bourne has often created closely empathetic works that focus on individuals, usually—like himself—black and male — Paul Robeson, John Henrik Clarke, Langston Hughes, Imamu Amiri Baraka (nee LeRoi Jones), and Gordon Parks, the subject of the recent Bourne-produced 'Half Past Autumn,'" Clifford Thompson wrote in a 2001 essay in the publication Cineaste.

For the past year, he had been working on a documentary about veteran Memphis-based civil rights photographer Ernest Withers, who died in October at age 84, and continued a project on the Black Panthers. Bourne was best known for the documentaries on Renaissance man Robeson and Afrocentric historian Clarke, and for "Making 'Do the Right Thing'," a 1989 work about Spike Lee's now-classic film about race relations in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant section.

But he also went to Ireland with a small group of black ministers and activists and produced and directed "The Black and the Green," released in 1983.

"The 40-minute film, presented as a journal, explores parallels between Northern Irish Catholics and American blacks. In the Belfast ghetto, the delegation members are strangers in a familiar land of crushed tenements, graffiti-stained walls and heavily armed law officers," Richard Harrington wrote in the Washington Post.

"'The Black and The Green' ends up seeming pro-Irish Republican Army in the same sense that a film about Selma in the '60s might have ended up seeming pro-black, but then, 'I'm a filmmaker from the '60s,' Bourne says. 'I try to be humanistically political. I don't try to impose easy answers. And to me it's a step in my own development, and perhaps for documentaries in America, if a situation that is not clearly identifiable as 'black-American' can be looked at by black Americans."

Bourne's father, St. Clair Bourne Sr., worked for the New York Amsterdam News and the old People's Voice, another black New York paper, in the 1930s. "My father was a journalist who worked with the black press. So that was the first major influence on me," he told an interviewer from Black Camera for a 2006 interview.

"I grew up during the Civil Rights Movement and would look at the reality of what was going on and observe that what was being represented on television was incorrect. While most of the network documentary units weren't, say, sympathetic, they at least were interested in telling the story. The problem though was that they were telling it from a different culture. They didn't understand the people and just got it wrong. I felt that as someone who was interested in journalism and whose father was a journalist that I could tell the story better than the networks could. So I had to learn the tools of documentary filmmaking. I went to film school and tried to combine activism with TV journalism. My decision to become a filmmaker then was the result of these factors."

The New Yorker began his career with the old public television "Black Journal" series in the late 1960s, which evolved, after the involvement of Tony Brown, now dean of the Hampton University communications school, into "Tony Brown's Journal," which still airs. It was during the "Black Journal" period that he began "Chamba Notes."

"When I first worked for 'Black Journal,' it was what I call 'innovative TV journalism,'" Bourne said in the Black Camera interview. "It was innovative because editorially we took the position of the black subjects in the documentaries we made. We tried to capture what they thought and what they did, and very rarely was that done by other filmmakers.

"Most of mainstream and public television journalism in the late 1960s, and even during the '70s, was from the point of view of an outsider looking at a subculture — white people looking at black people. What we said was that we identify with and are a part of the subjects we are filming. We have more skills than they do, but we are subject to many of the same pressures and circumstances as they are. We spoke out on behalf of them and us at the same time. I call this critical stance the 'internal voice' of our practice of documentary filmmaking. Thus, one of the characteristics of my films is to express the internal voice of my subject, whether it is black or otherwise."

Thompson wrote about an exchange between actors Danny Aiello and John Turturro a third of the way into "Making Do the Right Thing." "The transition is so seamless that it may take a moment to realize that we are watching a scene not only from 'Making Do the Right Thing' but also from 'Do the Right Thing' itself, and that Bourne has so skillfully blended his viewpoint with Lee's that, if only for an instant, it is unclear which is which, or if there is any meaningful difference."

Bourne is survived by a sister, Judith Bourne, a lawyer in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands.


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