A Thunderous Quiet: The Life and Films of Billy Woodberry

Giovanni Vimercati profiles the L.A. Rebellion filmmaker on the occasion of his latest film, the documentary “Mário.”

By Giovanni VimercatiNovember 21, 2024

• Film

• Politics

• Education

• Cultural Studies

We must constantly encourage ourselves and each other to attempt the heretical actions that our dreams imply and so many of our old ideas disparage.
— Audre Lorde, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” (1977)

DIRECTOR BILLY WOODBERRY’S latest film, Mário (2024), about the anti-colonial thinker and fighter Mário Pinto de Andrade, is a documentary true to its subject matter, sensibly eluding the hagiographic instincts of the film biopic. More than a retroactive commemoration or a trendy rediscovery, Mário incarnates the political need to persist in the endless struggle toward freedom for all. If the life of a revolutionary can be celebrated and packaged for market consumption, it is often because their ideas and deeds are no longer a threat to the present state of things. This is definitely not the case of Mário Pinto de Andrade, a man who heeded the call to avoid “the pitfalls of national consciousness” that Frantz Fanon warned against in The Wretched of the Earth (1961). For Fanon, in fact, it wasn’t enough to replace the colonial regime with a native ruling class—the whole system of political oppression and economic exploitation had to be radically transformed.

This is precisely what Pinto de Andrade dedicated his life to; it might also be why, among other factors, the film has yet to secure a theatrical release in North America (Grasshopper Film is the US distributor). After world-premiering earlier this year at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), Mário screened at festivals in Brazil, Iran, Cambodia, Cape Verde, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Portugal, and Spain. Woodberry’s new film will have its US premiere in Harlem, New York City, at the African Diaspora International Film Festival (November 29–December 15), where it will be screened alongside his debut feature, Bless Their Little Hearts (1983). Angelenos will have a chance to watch it at the 2025 Pan African Film & Arts Festival in Los Angeles.

When Pinto de Andrade’s native Angola gained independence from Portugal after 13 years of armed struggle, in which he played a pivotal role, he resisted the allure of power in order to continue fighting. He remained in exile in France until his death in 1990. National liberation to him was only the first step towards emancipation, not the final stage. Unafraid of contradictions, Pinto de Andrade lived through them, guided by militant curiosity to better understand things in order to change them. His was a lifelong project, carried out with the weapons of theory and poetry, that found no time or space for self-congratulatory pretension.

In more ways than one, the story of Mário resonates throughout the cinema and career of Billy Woodberry. Born and raised in Dallas, shaped by the segregated South of his childhood, Woodberry remarks on the way the establishment co-opted and diluted the impetus of the Civil Rights Movement. “There is a beautiful book written about it, The Accommodation [by Jim Schutze],” he tells me when I sit down with him in a café in Lisbon, Portugal, the city he’s been living and working in since 2018. He goes on to explain how the emancipatory push for desegregation in Dallas was essentially subsumed by real estate and community leaders through the creation of an enclave for lower middle-class Black families, Hamilton Park.

This class-conscious and materialist understanding of race relations is in every one of his films, yet never on display. Woodberry’s pensive understatement, so far removed from a familiar tenor of dogmatic fervor, gets at the root of the problem in a way that may be slower but is definitely deeper. Both in person and in his films, he favors quiet, forceful observation over sloganeering. In his early fiction films like The Pocketbook (1980), adapted from Langston Hughes’s short story “Thank You, M’am,” or Bless Their Little Hearts, Woodberry uses poetic realism not to show “things as they really are” but to unveil the material forces and social relations that make them the way they are. His late documentary work, even when centered around forgotten, extraordinary lives as in the case of Mário or And When I Die, I Won’t Stay Dead (2015), never monumentalizes its subjects, focused as he is on exposing the contextual circumstances that led to these figures’ cultural neglect.

Woodberry neither declaims nor packages what he has to say to maximize its effect; instead, he undermines the dominant discourse laterally, with dialectical composure. The political nature of his cinema is a matter of substance, not of symbols. Of the films that left a mark on his childhood memories, he reminisces about The Ten Commandments (1956), with Charlton Heston—“a very scary film,” he muses. “But then again, the Bible is very scary to begin with.” Another film that has stuck with him through the years: A Summer Place (1959), a story of rekindled love made impossible by class divisions. “Most of the films were not specifically addressed to the Black audience,” he reflects, “and even when they had a Black figure or character, they were trying to make it palatable to the white audience.”

Cinema, while Woodberry was growing up, was not something with a practical potential, or at least so he felt. It wasn’t until college, when he took a class on Cuban cinema in the Latin American Study Center at California State University, Los Angeles, that Woodberry started thinking about film as a political and professional possibility. “It was then,” he ponders, “that I understood cinema could be a tool in political struggles.”

By the time Woodberry moved to California to study in the late 1960s, first at community college and later at Cal State L.A., the Golden State was ablaze with revolts. The Chicano and Black militant movements, anti-war protests, and sun-drenched Marxism all seeped into Woodberry’s young and eager consciousness. An avid reader and college football player, he complemented his job at a lithography factory with books and friendships. “I read Marx, and then more Marx,” he states, evoking his youthful enthusiasm with an elegant touch of self-irony. “The trilogy by the British Marxist Maurice Cornforth was also very influential for me as well as the many interesting people I met and befriended, from whom I learned a great deal.”

Courses on Black history, ethnic studies, and what later came to be known as “area studies,” it should be noted, were not top-down experiments in institutional inclusivity but the direct results of student militancy. In 1968, a coalition of non-white students, collectively organized as the “Third World Liberation Front,” launched a series of strikes that resulted, a year later, in the creation of the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley (as well as the arrest of 150 students and the suspension of another 36).

Though, by his own admission, the academic environment was fairly open, he emphasizes the way his intellectual growth came from socialized knowledge beyond the walls of academia. It is around this time that film magazines like Cineaste and books by blacklisted screenwriter John Howard Lawson were added to Woodberry’s reading diet. After toying around with still photography and slideshows (still photography, incidentally, is a recurrent feature in his films even now), he applied to graduate school at UCLA in 1974, got accepted, and quit his job at the lithography factory.

In the long and productive aftermath of the 1965 Watts Uprising and following the students’ occupation of Dean Colin Young’s office, UCLA’s School of Theater, Film, and Television launched the “ethno-communications” initiative, which aimed at including non-white students and their voices in the department. Black filmmakers such as Ben Caldwell, Stormé Bright Sweet, Larry Clark, Charles Burnett, Julie Dash, Haile Gerima; Chicanos such as Luis Garza and Moctesuma Esparza; Asian Americans such as Eddie Wong; and Native Americans such as Sandra Osawa together formed the artistic and political core of what scholar Clyde Taylor later termed the L.A. Rebellion. Billy Woodberry was introduced to this milieu by the Brazilian student and would-be filmmaker Mario Vieira da Silva: “I went, I saw the community and the comradery and thought: This is interesting!”

Of his time at UCLA, Woodberry remembers the films he watched (by Ousmane Sembène, Nagisa Ōshima, Glauber Rocha, Octavio Getino, Fernando Solanas, and others), how he learned by working on other students’ projects, and also the political debates in which he participated. “At the time,” he recalls, “we felt that the image of the Black working-class [that] leftists tended to project was very different from the reality we knew.”

His graduation film, Bless Their Little Hearts—from an original screenplay by Charles Burnett (who was also the cinematographer)—is a poignant yet unsentimental look at a Black family in Watts. Woodberry’s opera prima does not superimpose the political onto the story but extrapolates it from its folds—material conditions, like the father’s unemployment, inform affective and gender dynamics in and outside the household, and their painful implications are captured by the director with realistic grace. “The film, I must say,” he points out, “went also against some of the preconceptions community leaders and intellectuals in the community had in regard to what ‘Black Art’ had to look like.”

Though it screened in Berlin at the Berlinale and New York at the New Directors/New Films festival, and was even reviewed by The New York Times, Bless Their Little Hearts never received theatrical distribution. Access to a prestigious film school, as well as critical and international acclaim, did not automatically promise a career in film. As Haile Gerima recently remarked in a PBS documentary on the L.A. Rebellion, “[W]e graduated into a desert. White kids graduated into an industry.” It would take Billy Woodberry over three decades to direct another film.

In the late 1980s, Woodberry started teaching at the California Institute of the Arts, where he taught until 2021. “To teach, for me, has been a way to remain engaged with ideas, to continue learning,” he says. At CalArts, he taught courses on the history of documentary and Third Cinema (which was later renamed “Films of the Global South”) and dug deeper into the living history of Southern California. “I lived through two or three earthquakes, the 1992 riots and all that,” he reminisces, “and we would think critically about these events, talk about it with both students and colleagues.” Thom Andersen, a faculty member at CalArts, involved Woodberry in the making of his documentary on the Hollywood blacklist, Red Hollywood (1996), for which he was the narrator. Clips from Bless Their Little Hearts were also included in Andersen’s Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003).

Teaching is also the way Woodberry got back to filmmaking after a decades-long hiatus. After his feature debut, Woodberry tried to transpose to the big screen Ernest J. Gaines’s novel In My Father’s House (1978), but the project never came to fruition. “In a way, it was liberating,” he pauses to think, “because I realized I didn’t need a big crew, didn’t need a script and all that to make films.” In the early 2000s, he started researching for a documentary about the American Beat poet Bob Kaufman and ended up completing postproduction in Portugal after having been invited to the symposium Harvard at the Gulbenkian in 2013. And When I Die, I Won’t Stay Dead, his first feature since Bless, had a simultaneous premiere in 2015 at the Viennale and Doclisboa, where it won a prize, and was later screened at the IFFR, the Harvard Film Archive, and MoMA. After over 30 years, Woodberry was a working director again.

A visit to Lisbon’s Aljube Museum of Resistance and Freedom led him to discover a photo that became the spark for the feature-length documentary Mário and the subject of the short documentary A Story from Africa (2018). As the promotional materials for the short film describe it:

Following the 1885 Berlin Conference resolution on the partition of Africa, the Portuguese army uses a talented ensign to register the effective occupation of the territory conquered in 1907 to the Cuamato people, in the south of Angola. A Story from Africa enlivens this rarely seen photographic archive through the tragic tale of Calipalula, the Cuamato nobleman essential to the unfolding of events in this Portuguese pacification campaign.

It was by researching this story that Woodberry discovered Mário Pinto de Andrade and decided to make a film about him. The new documentary, mainly composed of incredible archival material, chronicles Pinto de Andrade’s political life to reflect on the triumphs and defeats of the anti-colonial movement, which was effectively defused by subtler forms of neocolonial rule that ultimately maintained the existing system of economic exploitation and extraction while allowing nominal sovereignty. The film provides a lyrical investigation into the historical roots of something that has been at the very center of Woodberry’s cinema since day one.

Though the passage from fiction to documentary—and the long break in between, as well as the relocation from one continent to another—may imply two different chapters of his career, the artistic and political life of Billy Woodberry spans a substantial continuum. The forms of violent injustice suffered in the streets of Watts share the same political roots of those who suffered under colonial rule, a matter of historical course that his cinema has illuminated with poise. His move to Portugal seems to have inaugurated the next phase of his career, one that will hopefully reach new and wider audiences.