Jack Ofield

Basketmaker

Filmmaker Jack Ofield writes "Elizabeth Proper lived all of her life in the Taconic Hills of eastern New York State. She harvested her own white oak to make her baskets. She was in her 'forties when I filmed her in 1972 and had a six-year-old daughter. There had been a community of basket makers in the region, but she was the only one left." Jack: “We lived near Hudson, NY and one day I saw these beautiful split white oak baskets in a store window and learned who made them. Elizabeth Proper lived nearby. I called upon her four or five times to ask about filming, but she said no through a crack in the door. Finally, she said yes, ‘just to get rid of you."

Smithy

People like Delbert Smith, the blacksmith (so named in the tradition of the smithy going back centuries) inherited their skills from fathers, grandfathers and great grandfathers. He was 84 when I filmed him in 1970, making his birth date 1886. His forebears stretched back to before the Revolution. His blacksmith forge and tools were in the barn behind his house, where they had been for at least three generations. As he notes in the film nobody got paid for their work until the dairy farmers got their money for milk. But in that interlocking world neighbors helped neighbors. There was nothing bucolic or sentimental about this; it was habit and tradition. Not until it's gone do we realize the massive nature of the loss.

Life‘s Narrow Space

Queena Stovall of Lynchburg, VA died in 1980, age 92. She was an authentic, self-taught American folk painter who took the everyday life she knew in rural Virginia and rendered it in paint with insight and sophistication. In this sole film portrait of the artist, her work becomes more complex upon closer inspection as we see that not only are the lives of southern whites depicted with skill and affection, but those of neighboring blacks are portrayed with equal fidelity. She saw life in realistic terms; for example, Christmas wasn\'t cherubs and chubby-cheeked Santas, it was hog-killing on a cold winter\'s day. Her grandmother gave her the nickname “Queena” based on a child’s attempt to pronounce Serena. She married Jonathan Breckenridge “Brack” Stovall in 1908; they had five sons and four daughters. The Stovalls lived at various times in Lynchburg and nearby Elon.

With These Hands

A documentary about American craftspeople featuring Clayton Bailey, J.B. Blunk, Otellie Loloma, Harry Nohr, Paul Soldner, James Tanner, Toshiko Takaezu, Peter Voulkos, and Dorian Zachai.