We keep telling each other the story, until we come up with something.” Billops described their process as a kind of narrative and creative relay: “Jim and I talk back and forth.
#CELEBRITY LAUNDRY PROFESSIONAL#
The films’ consistent edge of operatic zest and whimsy grew out of Hatch’s professional dedication to theater, as well as the couple’s earlier collaborations staging plays during their travels and in New York. While their work has affinities with that of such New York–based Black artists as Kathleen Collins, who similarly focused on the prismatic multitude of Black women’s ordinary lives, and William Greaves, another virtuoso of unconventional nonfiction filmmaking, its texture and methods are all its own. The experimental documentaries that they created together defy categorization, freely amalgamating confessional family portraits, keenly observed cultural and social analysis, and a striking element of theatricality. By the time they settled in New York and formally started the monumental archival work that would become the Hatch-Billops Collection-an exceptional trove of African American culture-they had already begun to accumulate a store of shared creative material.Īfter these travels, they shifted their collaborative energies toward film. They subsequently also lived and pursued various artistic projects in India, Taiwan, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, and Thailand. After Hatch’s Fulbright fellowship took them both to Egypt, she had her first solo exhibition in 1962 at Gallerie Akhenaton in Cairo. Their meeting catalyzed the beginning of Billops’s professional artistic pursuits. Born in Los Angeles, where her family had moved during the Great Migration, Billops attended Los Angeles City College and USC’s art school, while Hatch taught theater arts at UCLA. This nonjudgmental generosity is most visible in the films she codirected and coproduced with her husband and lifetime collaborator, theater historian James Hatch.īillops and Hatch’s extensive intellectual and artistic partnership began in California, where they met in 1959. Billops refused to sanitize or discipline herself and her cinematic subjects by confining them to the narrow margins of what was deemed acceptable. Even as she navigated a dazzling multitude of mediums, what remained consistent in her work was an adamant defiance of what might be called a politics of respectability. The films say it like it is, rather than how people want it to be.” Billops’s artistic signature was one of temperament rather than form she was at various turns a sculptor, printmaker, archivist, writer, cultural archeologist, teacher, ceramicist, actor, and family documentarian. In an interview with bell hooks published in 1996, Camille Billops responded to a question about the transgressive candor of her films by saying “It is probably exhibitionism on my part some people say our films have a tendency toward dirty laundry.
0 kommentar(er)
