This is a handful of pictures from a film we made on Jack
Johnson, the first African American heavyweight champion
called "Unforgettable Blackness, the Rise and Fall
Of Jack Johnson."
We peppered the available footage,
which which we were lucky to have,
with these still images in a way that I think
is pretty compelling.
Normally, I'd be sitting with the editor at the editing
machine going through a bin, a sort of digital bin
of all the available photographs from the Jefferies fight.
And it might be divided into pre-fight preparation,
post-fight reaction and then all of these fight footages.
But for this purpose, to put out some of the more compelling
images and talk about the way we do it-- this can give you
a little bit of a sense of how we were integrating still
photographs into an event that took place on July 4, 1910
in which there's tons of footage.
Boxing was the pay per view of that day as it is in our day
now.
So we had the luxury of having almost every part of the fight
covered by footage, which was terrific.
But again, keeping with our idea of the power of a single image
to convey the most complex information
and to arrest that information and permit
us to do a deep dive, you can see
the kind of range of things we can
do to utilize these photographs in the midst of the dynamism
that is the fight footage.
So you know, here's the arrival of people in Reno, Nevada.
It's the fight of the century.
It's between Jim Jefferies, the white--
great white hope, the greatest of all white hopes
who has come out of retirement, everyone is sure,
to defeat the African American heavyweight champion who's
there by accident.
He should have never won.
It's not his place.
And this is a battle between the races.
And so you've got some long establishing
shots in a few places that we might use.
I'm particularly fond of this one.
You can see a photographer's booth shaded from the sun.
You've got the sense of people with bald heads
soon to be bright red, hats around, and then the action.
And what you could do is then cut
to this shot which would be another angle, not
a complete reverse angle, but a way
of moving in and getting the details of the hustle
and bustle as the two camps arrive at ringside
and do their, you know, bench jockeying and their insults
and all of that sort of stuff.
And so that's how we would use that.
NARRATOR: It's just people pouring into the stadium.
It's filling up.
It's just the excitement just keeps building and building
and building.
Once you get into the fight, you obviously
have a couple here that are related
that present a kind of cinematic opportunity.
We can extrapolate a lot of that and find
drama that may or may not actually be there.
This is Jefferies corner.
This is Johnson's corner, Jack Johnson's corner.
And they're sort of taunting each other.
And we intercut with that.
NARRATOR: When he stripped and his mighty body could
be seen covered with mats of hair,
all the primordial adjectives ever applied to him
received their vindication.
The Man of Iron, the Grizzly Giant, was grim and serious.
The man of summer temperament smiled and smiled.
The most important image for me in all of these sequences--
and this represents a fraction of the still photographs that
we had at our disposal for this particular fight,
let alone all the other fights.
This is one of my favorite photographs in the whole film
because of what it tells in the foreground, the middle ground,
and the background.
The one thing the newsreel is not going to do
is give you any closeups.
There was something intimate as if we, the viewer,
were suddenly down at ringside.
We had the best seats in the house
and we're now witnessing the imminent defeat
of Jim Jefferies that wasn't supposed to be that way.
As you pan him up, you see his knees are bruised.
There's blood splattered from the blood that's
flowing from his face.
And he's obscured and the attitude of it is of defeat.
And
So you don't really have to say anything.
The picture is doing all the work for you.
And the fact that you've got this ref with his rear end
to you also in a some way, as much
as that is sort of distancing, it actually
has an intimacy that brings you closer to the photograph.
And then we cut wide and I think a dramatic thing--
the referee sort of parses this division.
But you can see just the physical confidence
of Jack Johnson.
Now, some of this stuff is possible to see in the footage.
But our ability to take a still image and arrest that moment
allows us to focus and concentrate
to begin to do the kind of respiration, the breathing
in and out that we want in a scene.
If it was just the footage, the footage, the footage,
something would happen.
Something would be lost.
Attention would be squandered.
And we felt that attention had to be paid--
to borrow from Arthur Miller in "Death of a Salesman"--
to certain moments, the drama of of their clutch
and coming together, the taunting beforehand
as the scene is being set, even the establishing shots that
tell us where we are, and finally the end
the Cleveland leader saying Jim Jeffries
suffers a sting of defeat.
It's not Jack Johnson's triumphant.
NARRATOR: But Johnson's sharp, accurate punches
were taking a devastating toll.
By the end of the 14th round, Jefferies' nose was broken.
His eyes were swollen nearly shut.
His face and shoulders and thighs
were splattered with his own blood.
And he was desperately weary.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
This is a really important artifact.
This is our archival board, our original archival board.
And what we would do before the digital
age when you could download a photograph
or take it off the internet or scan something and put it
in your system--
we went and filmed by hand with a 16 meter
motion picture camera the various archives.
And then I would move a camera with a prime lens-- that's
not a zoom lens.
It's a fixed lens.
I would move it up and move it back
on the tripod to get closer, to get a medium shot,
to get a wide shot, to get an extreme close up.
And then we might order a copy print
as we did in the case of this remarkable photograph also
of Jack Johnson.
Because we found in this--
we called the film "Unforgivable Blackness."
And it was a phrase that the great black scholar
and activist W.E.B. Du Bois said,
that boxing is in great, great disfavor
and the cause is Jack Johnson.
But Jack Johnson hasn't done anything
that other boxers and other sportsmen and even
other senators have done, that is sleep with other women,
sleep with white women, marry white women,
sort of live the free life that he
thought he was entitled to do.
And he said, so it's not really boxing.
It all comes down to his "Unforgivable Blackness."
And as he is giving this quote, we
are zooming in to this extraordinary physique
of this amazing human being.
Before the zoom starts, we have a picture
and we understand some context.
We're on a porch of a house.
It's where he's training.
He's got his suspenders down.
There's something really, definitely human.
But the more you look at it, the more
you're first forced to focus on what's going on.
And by the time you get in, all of that has kind of fallen away
and the words unforgivable blackness and the kind of pace
that the W.E.B. Du Bois quote has and then the way
in which all of this begins to abstract
into muscle but by the end just sort of shading,
and there is light and dark here,
that's what we're talking about.
And so one looks for the opportunity
to have these images, this image,
in the service of something bigger
than just the illustration of here's Jack Johnson.
It becomes something iconic.
It becomes transcendent.
It is an equivalent to the power of the first person
quote we're hearing, that it all comes down, then
to his unforgettable blackness.
NARRATOR: Of course, some pretend
to object to Mr. Johnson's character.
But we have yet to hear, in the case, of white America
that marital troubles have disqualified
prizefighters or ball ballplayers or even statesmen.
It comes down then, after all, to this unforgivable blackness.
W.E.B. Du Bois.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
And you're kind of left without any resource.
And that's what you hope, at times.
Art enables, but it also ought to disable you
at the same time, at least disable
the normal synaptical connections that we make
and the kind of conventional wisdom
that permits us to get through our day about stuff like that.
Oh yes, isn't that sad, another black person killed by a cop,
you know?
And we're just saying, no, this is--
you can't do this.
We're going to rub this in your face a little bit.
It is a bit presumptuous for me, a white person,
to be doing this.
But I am concerned about the health of my country.
And I know that it's original sin, as historians like to say,
is race and that we are obligated
not to sit there and permit these things to happen but
to say something and do something.
And rather than get involved in the sort of impossible combat
of the current moment, it's better
to realize that these past moments rhyme perfectly
with what's going on right now.