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BY DANTE FUOCO

In print | Published April 29, 2010

_As an undergraduate at Cornell University, next year’s Lang Visiting Professor for Issues of Social Change Louis Massiah immersed himself in the study of the sciences — physics, cosmology, astronomy. Today, however, Massiah is an award-winning independent filmmaker who has made documentaries focused on politics and history.

“My initial idea in going to graduate school was to see if I could develop visual languages to look at ideas in science,” Massiah said. But as he had always been interested in narratives and drama, Massiah said that he soon realized “the ability to present history [and] ideas visually has enormous power.”

Massiah has directed and produced a number of documentaries, such as “W.E.B. Du Bois – A Biography in Four Voices,” which looks into the life of the eponymous figure. His work, which has appeared on television and at film festivals, has been nominated for the Emmys and received awards from, among other places, the Global Village Documentary Film Festival and Columbia-DuPont. He is also is a recipient of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, nicknamed “The Genius Grant,” for his filmmaking. In addition to his own work, Massiah founded the Scribe Center, a media arts center in Philadelphia that supports local filmmaking.

Massiah will be teaching “Documentary and Non-Fiction Filmmaking from African and the African Diaspora” in the fall and a production course in the spring that might involve working with “Haytian Stories,” a current project of his that focuses on U.S.-Haiti relations.

Massiah sat down with News Editor Dante Fuoco ’12 to talk about his ideas on teaching, his passion for filmmaking and some of the community outreach that his work has allowed. _

Dante Fuoco: _In looking to next year, what excites you about Swarthmore? _

Louis Massiah: Swarthmore’s this combination of a very strong, rigorous academic environment, but it’s also a campus and institution that has this clear social, political sense of itself and its students, and faculty and staff.

Certainly … a place like the Lang Center is an example in the flesh of that — the ability to sort of combine academia with its relationship to society and really looking at how our work can in very conscious ways affect in a positive way how society functions. So I’m excited about that.

Part of it is the challenge. … A lot of times [with] teaching, when you’re working with film … you’re trying to do two things. You’re trying to make sure that people acquire skills that are usable, that they can build on and keep with them.

But as a filmmaker and as an artist, you also hope and really want students to create something that’s meaningful. … And sometimes the nature of academia doesn’t allow for honoring the work in that kind of way. So the challenge is to make sure that students learn, but that they really honor their work and really see their work as having longevity and utility.

DF: _How did you get interested in filmmaking, especially documentaries that focus on historical and political issues? _

LM: Oftentimes a number of forces suggest a way to go. … My undergraduate education really was largely focused on the physical sciences — physics and astronomy, and I was really interested in cosmology — and I had begun working as a science writer at a public TV station in New York, and became more interested in how media, how film — how video, specifically — could be used as a way of sharing and exploring ideas in science.

… While I was [in graduate school], as it turned out, it was a program that was very strongly based in narrative cinéma vérité documentary form, which really has nothing to do with science but really is about watching how drama unfolds by just observing human interactions over a period of time, and then, from that, sort of extrapolating the drama, sort of creating narrative arc out of that.

… Then sort of understanding the political power of media became really clear. I’ve had the experience of maybe having many friends from another country, and having read a lot about some place abroad. So I am getting a lot of secondary information about that place, and I really think I have understanding of [the place].

And then when I actually go to the place, I realize … what I’m seeing is quite similar to what my friends had told me about. But that’s not what really what was in my head. What was in my head where these television images or these movie images of that place, and I realized how much stronger sometimes those visual images are than either the book knowledge or even friends, people you love, telling you about a place.

So it became really clear to me that media in a lot of ways, or visual media, becomes reality. … I’ve always been interested in storytelling, always been interested in narrative forms and drama, which, at its best, I think that documentary makes good use of narrative arc.

DF: In terms of when you’re talking about the power of an image, is that something that you think sets something like filmmaking apart from other forms of creative expression?

LM: Yeah, in some ways. Although certainly there are a number forms where the vision is really important. I mean, dance — one doesn’t necessarily think of dance as being primarily a visual form, but seeing a dancer dance is highly visual. Paintings, film, photography. There are a number of visual forms.

DF: On a slightly different note, what was the impetus for founding the Scribe Video Center in Philadelphia? Why is that something that’s important to you?

LM: Like documentary filmmaking, there were a number of things that kind of pointed to it. … I went to graduate school in Boston and had been living in New York and both of those places had media arts centers — that is, places where people could come together, have access to equipment, and learning. And Philadelphia didn’t.

I’m from Philadelphia, and had moved back here to work after graduate school. That was one of the reasons. … The whole idea of the name Scribe was to really … use media as a way to look at complex ideas and contemporary concerns, and the video became the contemporary medium that we encode these ideas and share them. So, a place where community scholars and university scholars could have access to media and use it.

DF: _I read about the project that you directed, “The Precious Places Community History Project.” … You do your own documentaries, but this seems like it brings together entire communities. What dimension do you think that that adds? What have you learned from that? _

LM: When I make my own films it’s easier to see the kind of creative shaping, but sometimes when you’re working in an institution your creativity takes different kinds of forms. Scribe is a small institution, but it’s an institution.

So “The Precious Places Community History Project” … is not actually my work — it’s what’s being produced by community groups working with filmmakers from Scribe and humanities scholars. But the shaping of the series I think of as being my own, the shaping of the idea and the development of the methodologies.

… Philadelphia is not necessarily a place that if you’re from one neighborhood you necessarily feel like you have permission to go to another neighborhood. You may work in one place and you may live in one place, and there may be a central shopping area, but if you want to go to another residential area and you decide that you just want to take a bus … you don’t really have permission. … One of the things that I gain personally is — and this is extraordinarily selfish reason to do a community history project — is it gives you permission to go into every single neighborhood in the city because you’re helping people create something that’s meaningful to them.

And you’re there doing work, not as a tourist. You’re there to bring skills and to help people create something that is useful to them, not something that you’re doing for yourself — something for them.

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