Over the last 50 years, the celebrated American folklorist Henry Glassie has been writing in-depth studies of communities and their art. Inspired by the writings and ideas of Glassie, Henry Glassie: Field Work is an immersive and meditative documentary set among the rituals and rhythms of working artists across Brazil, Turkey, North Carolina, and Ireland. The recipient of the Best Irish Documentary at the prestigious Galway Film Fleadh; Best European Science Film at EURASF; and NTR Kennis van Nu Audience Award at InScience International Science Film Festival, Henry Glassie: Field Work also had its world premiere at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival.
Below are some reflections on the film by its director, Pat Collins, and Glassie himself. Many thanks to Pravina Shukla for facilitating these writings.
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
by Pat Collins
I first heard Henry Glassie talking on Irish radio. It was a nighttime show called Arts Tonight and the host was the poet Vincent Woods. They spoke for an hour: about folklore and art, his time in Ireland in the ‘70s, in Turkey in the ‘80s and his growing-up years in Virginia. It remains one of my most memorable radio experiences, up there with football matches and the music of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s when we were tuning in to discover the sound of a larger world. But Glassie, in that hour, took me right back to the small world, the small world that is in fact an everywhere — and to an acknowledgement that the appreciation for art is universal.
A few weeks later I wrote to Henry (he doesn’t do email) and we corresponded on and off for several years. It wasn’t until 2016 that we finally met in person and I proposed the notion of a film. Glassie is one of the most articulate and thought-provoking people I’ve ever met. His engagement with his material, with the people he encounters, the artists he stands with and his philosophical outlook — all coalesce in a very passionate and engaged individual.
In 2018, Henry and his wife, folklorist Pravina Shukla, published a book called Sacred Art: Catholic Saints and Candomblé Gods in Modern Brazil. We travelled with Henry and Pravina to Salvador in Bahia and to a small pottery village called Maragojipinho and there we encountered dozens of artists who Henry and Pravina had spent so much time with over the previous decade. The artists opened their doors to us because the trust had already been established and we were able to spend time with them and capture their work in real time. We spent two days with Rosalvo Santana in his front room and filmed him as he made a saint from clay, Nossa Senhora Desatadora dos Nós, by hand and with the greatest attention and skill. We spent days wondering if we could track down the artist Samuel Rodrigues in the streets of Salvador. When we did meet him, he took us to his father’s forge, and we filmed him at work; in 30 intense minutes he made a Candomblé God from scrap metal. It was like a performance, pure attention and concentration.
We also travelled with Henry and Pravina to North Carolina where so many great potters live and work. Again, we spent days observing them at work — Kate Johnston and her husband Daniel Johnston and the English potter Mark Hewitt as he fired up the kiln and worked for days and nights in searing heat.
During the filming, Henry often said he didn’t care if he appeared in the film or not. I think he would have actually preferred if he wasn’t in it at all — that the artists we filmed would get the full attention of the viewer. It was something I struggled with, because I wanted to capture the way I felt when I heard him speak on the radio that first time. Though I did convince him to sit down for one interview in Brazil it wasn’t until we reached his home in Bloomington, Indiana, that we sat him down and spent two days asking him questions. I knew that his ideas would have to be a part of the film. Much could be expressed by just observing the artists at work, but Henry’s ideas were the glue that would bring the film together. But still, some of that reticence remains in the finished film: Henry doesn’t appear fully until mid-way through the film.
It was a great privilege to make this film. I feel it is a true collaboration and I couldn’t have made it without Henry’s input and generosity. His outlook and ideas and his writings are the reason this film exists. I hope it brings his important work to wider attention and that small communities everywhere see their own experience mirrored in the works and artists on display. Artists everywhere express the character and personality of their communities.
THE FILM ABOUT FIELDWORK BY PAT COLLINS
by Henry Glassie
Pat Collins makes the most beautiful documentary films in all of Ireland. A patient, compassionate man, Pat has a nimble eye and a deep appreciation for traditional art. Those virtues come clear in his film Song of Granite about the great Irish singer Joe Heaney. Once when he was driving through the country, Pat chanced to hear on the radio a conversation between me and my dear friend the poet and playwright Vincent Woods. We were rambling about my fieldwork in Ballymenone on the Irish border in the time of the Troubles.
Pat and I met later in Dublin. I liked him immediately, and he had a film in mind. I wasn’t interested until Pravina and I had finished our book Sacred Art. We had to return to Brazil, in 2018, to give copies of the book to all the artists in it, and I thought how good it would be to have patient, professional footage of the artists at work.
We met up in Salvador. Pravina and I had gone earlier to explain the film to our friends, the artists. Pravina was raised in Brazil, speaks Portuguese like a native, and she and I fade easily into the crowd. Pat arrived with his crew: his cameraman Colm Hogan, Colm’s assistant Roman, and Bob Brennan the soundman. With their van and cumbersome, abundant machinery, they created a conspicuous presence. All was unfamiliar, the heat, the vast city of beautiful black people, but they were brave, unflustered, quick to adapt, and always good company.
The film begins in Maragojipinho, a pottery town beside a calm river in the interior of Bahia. A flurry of work is followed by slow, close attention to Rosalvo Santana shaping clay into an elegant image of Nossa Senhora Desatadora dos Nos. The scene shifts to the city, to Nilo dos Santos making a woodblock print of Orunmilá, the Yoruba god of wisdom. Then, in my favorite bit, Samuel welds junk into a statue of Oxóssi, the Candomblé lord of the hunt. Salvador ends with our close friends, Edival who carves and Izaura who paints statues of the saints that are carried in processions through the streets and placed on the high altars of baroque churches.
Later that summer we met up in North Carolina, where I had a field project in progress, so Pat and his crew could film our friends, the potters Mark Hewitt and Daniel and Kate Johnston. The crew caught Mark at firing time and they filmed Daniel making a robust big pot with the technique he learned in Thailand.
Communications swept back and forth across the Atlantic. The film kept getting better. Pat used my photographs and snatches of a video by Tom McCarthy so Turkey, where I had done a decade of fieldwork, could be part of the story. Ahmet Şahin, one of the greatest ceramic artists of modern times, makes a touching appearance. Young women from the Öztürk, Balcı, and Kurt families in the mountains bring color to the film with their magnificent carpets.
For the final filming we were back in Ireland in March of 2019. We walked the lanes of Ballymenone, and I sat in Blake’s of the Hollow in Enniskillen to remember my hero Hugh Nolan. Then Pat worked hard to finish the film that had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September of 2019.
Pat couldn’t make it, but Tina O’Reilly, the producer, came, and she and I and Pravina did the best we could with all the interviews. After the screenings, we weren’t congratulated by elderly folklorists but by youthful filmmakers who, certain they didn’t want their own films to look like television or Hollywood, found in Pat’s film an inspirational alternative.
Before it could be released, the film had to roll through a cycle of film festivals, a cycle that was disrupted, then abandoned during the COVID pandemic. American screenings at the RiverRun Festival and at Indiana University were cancelled, but online screenings brought Pat Collins the award for the best Irish documentary of the year at the Galway Film Festival in 2020 and the Audience Award at the InScience Film Festival in the Netherlands, also in 2020. The screening at Indiana University this spring will be the film’s premiere in the United States.
Henry Glassie: Field Work will have its U.S. premiere at IU Cinema on April 21. Writers Henry Glassie and Pravina Shukla are scheduled to be present. All tickets have been distributed for this event. There will be no standby line for this sold-out screening.