Making a Community Documentary

We all hear a lot about town-gown relationships and how the community benefits from having college students, faculty, and staff involved with citizens of the local area. At any given moment there are plenty of collaborative efforts between Ithaca College and Ithaca community members.

One of the most fascinating such collaborative partnerships took place this past spring, when 17 students --- majors and nonmajors --- in assistant professor Simon Tarr's Nonfiction Film Production course set out to create a documentary about the history of the Southside neighborhood in downtown Ithaca. The interdisciplinary project was initiated and primarily funded by the Office of Multicultural Affairs (OMA), with additional financial support from the Center for the Study of Culture, Race and Ethnicity (CRE); the Cinema on the Edge series in the cinema and photography department; and the provost's office. The students, who were simultaneously enrolled in Patricia R. Zimmermann's Nonfiction Film Theory class, were required to write, film, and produce the documentary with local community members.

The result of these collaborative efforts, connecting theory with practice, was Passing It On: The Southside Story, an 18-minute community activist documentary. Condensed from more than 30 hours of footage that included interviews with three generations as well as archival photographs, the film is an oral and visual history of the predominantly African American Southside neighborhood from the time of the Underground Railroad through the civil rights movement and up to the present. The documentary makers hope their efforts will bring attention to the area, documenting its historical and social significance to the greater Ithaca community and sparking interest in reviving and restoring the neighborhood.

The idea of creating a community activist documentary emerged after OMA invited award-winning filmmaker Louis Massiah (right) to be its 2002 distinguished artist in residence. At first Massiah declined the invitation, because, he said, he was not interested in "being" anything --- instead, he was interested in doing something that would engage the community. OMA and Zimmermann contacted people at Southside Community Center, and together they came up with the idea for this documentary. Under the supervision of Tarr, principal photography began in February and coincided with Massiah's three-day residency. Massiah, one of the leading documentary filmmaking voices in the United States, pioneered the community visions activist documentary, in which professional filmmakers collaborate with and train community members to make media presentations that address specific needs of that community group. Massiah founded the Scribe Video Center in Philadelphia to continue this effort.

"Massiah's own work and commitment to community activism provided much inspiration," says Tarr, adding that even long after he left campus, Massiah remained involved. "He was our adviser and cheerleader."

Tarr embraced the project from the beginning. It fulfilled, he says, the important criteria for a successful service-learning project: it had ideological and financial support from institutional constituents --- OMA and CRE --- as well as community support.

"Much of the project's acceptance in the community," he says, "is due to inroads the OMA helped make into the community." Tarr, OMA director Roger Richardson, and OMA assistant director for the Ithaca Achievement Program David Speller met with the Southside Community Center's board of directors, and OMA sponsored a few coffee hours after church services on Sundays to further cultivate community participation.

At first, Tarr reports, community members were skeptical and unwilling to open their lives up to the students; he and his students were surprised to see how many resisted the opportunity to tell their stories. But by the conclusion of the filmmaking process, as many as 50 community members were involved.

The effort required the crew to put in a staggering number of hours. "We all neglected our friends and family," Tarr says, "but we made a new family." On May 10, the evening of the film's premiere, that comradeship was evident to all. More than 150 people attended the screening, and they all stayed to watch the film credits!