Zora Neale Hurston and the Beaufort, South Carolina Church Footage

The Recovery of Sound and Film

 

by Arlene Balkansky

 

            In 1940, in Beaufort, South Carolina, the Commandment Keeper Church was a small African-American sanctified or holiness church with approximately 16 members.  That spring, Zora Neale Hurston and anthropologist Jane Belo began studying aspects of this church, with particular emphasis on documenting the trances congregants experienced during the services.  To do this, they sought to create an ethnographic field collection by recording the church services utilizing three different formats: film, sound, and written text.  While Belo originated the project and provided much of its funding, and Belo and Hurston worked together on organizing the project, the major fieldwork at the church was to be accomplished in mid-May by Hurston, along with Norman Chalfin, Lou Brandt, and Bob Lawrence.  Chalfin was a graduate student at Columbia University who worked in the Teachers’ College guidance lab and specialized in sound-on-disc recording.  Belo and Margaret Mead recruited Chalfin to the project.  Chalfin in turn recruited Brandt and Lawrence.  Before the three men set out for Beaufort, they visited Mead and her husband, Gregory Bateson, and were shown a variety of field footage, including film that Bateson and probably Belo had shot of Balinese dancers in trance.  According to Norman Chalfin, “We were expected to try to film and record similar material at the church in Beaufort.”[1] 

 

            Hurston, as the onsite project director, and the crew of Chalfin, Brandt, and Lawrence managed to film and record sound for services held at the Commandment Keeper Church on Saturday, May 18^th and Sunday, May19^th, including prayers, songs, brief sermons, and trances.  Years later, Chalfin wrote a three page summary of the project recounting some of the technical problems inside the church:

 

There was no electric power.  Illumination was from kerosene lamps . . . I required electric power for my sound recorder.  This led to [a] search for cables and a power outlet.  The nearest one was in a farm house about 600 feet away.  I don’t remember how we managed it but we scrounged together enough wire to make a connection for the recorder and film lights.[2]

 

            Chalfin briefly described their experiences, including technical problems, in a letter to Jane Belo written immediately following the fieldwork. The letter also congratulated Belo on her marriage to Columbia University professor and author Frank Tannenbaum.  Their marriage seems to be the reason for Belo’s absence during the fieldwork.  Chalfin wrote:

 

We’ve been shooting, shooting and shooting – We[’ve] been begging and wheedling – and bluffing to get current – But we’ve got records – that much we know.  It’s a good thing records can be played back

immediately . . .

 

Not all that we planned worked out – We don’t have any synchronization because our motor lay down on us before we started – so we were hand cranking all the four hundred foot rolls and using the spring on the 100 foots . . .

 

Had we attempted to synchronize the sound the flexibility of jumping from place to place would have been impaired . . .

 

We find that after having gone through it once that there are a number of things we’d have liked to do that our equipment did not permit . . .

 

Without Zora most of it would have been impossible . . .[3]

 

            We know from Chalfin’s letter that no sound synchronization was accomplished during the project.  That is why, when we discuss trying to match the sound to the film, we are not restoring material that was ever recorded as a unified element.  The three formats: film, sound, and text were separate elements.  When we see glimpses of two or three of these elements linked together, we can see how their value increases.

 

In a moment I would like to show a brief silent excerpt from the field footage that has not been matched to any sound as yet.  This excerpt is from the Sunday night service.  Another part of the field collection, the written text can serve to illuminate this footage.  The main written text in this field collection is a 37-page manuscript written by Hurston.

 

            [A few minutes of silent footage was shown while the written text was quoted as given below.[4]]  

 

            She described the Commandment Keeper Church and its members specifically, with such statements as:

 

In this church they have two guitars, three symbols [sic], two tambourines, one pair of rattle goers, and two washboards.[5]

 

            Hurston then wrote about the woman described as the prophet:

 

During the ceremonies, Julia Jones goes first into ecstacy [sic] then into a trance, after which she sometimes utters prophecies aloud to the whole congregation.  Other times she kneels by various members and whispers prophecies in their ears.  Her eyes are half closed and her movements are like a sleep walker.[6]

 

            Much of the manuscript describes congregants’ visions in trance, generally reported in their own words.  As Julia Jones said: 

 

Looks like to me I seen a high place.  It seemed like it circled round and round the world and kept going higher.[7]

 

            In support of both these specific descriptions and reaching beyond them is the poetic imagery that suffuses Hurston’s manuscript:

 

The unanimous prayer is one in which every member of the church prays at the same time but prays his own prayer aloud, which consists of exotic sentences, liquefied by intermittent chanting so that the words are partly submerged in the flowing rising and falling chant.  The form of prayer is like the limbs of a tree, glimpsed now and then through the smothered leaves.  It is a thing of wondrous beauty, drenched in harmony and rhythm.[8]

 

            Next we can hear a separate brief segment of sound that also exemplifies this imagery.

 

            [The silent film clip continued while a brief segment of sound was played—not synchronized.[9]]

 

            Now for the archival part of the story, how were the film and the sound located?

 

As Kristy Andersen stated, she narrowed my search for material at the Library of Congress by suggesting items to examine in order to locate footage from the project.  We could, therefore, focus on certain items within the Margaret Mead/South Pacific Ethnographic Archives Collection, specifically that portion of the collection that Mead had been given following the death in 1968 of her friend Jane Belo.  Among the silent films associated with Belo that I examined along with my colleague Antoinette O’Bryant, were four that had been listed as unidentified in the inventory with references to their film container labels:  “Reel 1: Saturday afternoon, opening session,” “Sunday night,” “Outside,” and “May 1941.”   These four proved to be the May 1940 Beaufort church footage.  The excerpt you have just seen was part of a film roll labeled “Sunday night.”  A victory.

 

However, there was this nagging issue of the sound: there was correspondence discussing sound, but where was the sound itself?  A further examination of the Mead Collection yielded no sound material related to the church footage, whether as film sound tracks or sound recordings in other formats.  Not only was there correspondence from Norman Chalfin during the 1940 project, but there were also letters from him in the 1970s.  According to this correspondence, by the 1970s, Chalfin was a patent attorney for the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, CA.  As it turned out, I was able to contact Norman Chalfin more than 50 years after the Beaufort project.  In 1995, he was still listed with a Pasadena phone number.  When I called, he answered the phone and confirmed that he had worked with Zora Neale Hurston on the Beaufort project.  He also stated that he had a small amount of footage and some sound recordings related to the project. 

 

In May 1996, Norman Chalfin and his wife, Ethel, donated silent film footage, including the additional materials Chalfin had made to preserve the film.  Chalfin had acquired this footage from the widow of one of the project’s cinematographers, Lou Brandt.  Brandt had gone on to become a theatrical and film producer.  He had moved to the Los Angeles area and he and Chalfin remained friends.  After Brandt’s death in 1971, Chalfin found the small reel of about 200 ft. of footage from the Beaufort project in Brandt’s home.  He suspected the footage was outtakes, but still felt it was important to preserve it.  In 1989, he had a duplicate negative and two prints made.

 

That donation gave us a little more film, but still no sound.  Chalfin knew he had some sound recordings from the church project in his collection of over 150 discs from the 1940s.  These discs included many he had made while a recording engineer and founder of his own recording and transcription service.  He hoped to sort through the discs and organize them before donating them.  However, during this time, he spoke about other places that might have sound recordings from the project and these leads brought the first sound recordings into our collection.  In late 1996, Joyce Aschenbrenner, anthropologist and author of the recently published Katherine Dunham: Dancing A Life and other major works on Dunham, was happy to donate an audiocassette that Chalfin had made for her in 1975 when she was considering doing research on Hurston.  The cassette contained just over one hour of recordings from the project and included material from the Beaufort church, from the Mount Bethel Congregation in Yamacraw, Savannah, Georgia, and also a few secular songs.  Unfortunately, the cassette’s technical quality was low.   Also in 1996, we located a 10-minute disc that had been deposited by Jane Belo at the Indiana University Archives of Traditional Music and we were able to purchase a copy of that.

 

            Very shortly after, in February 1997, Norman and Ethel Chalfin donated two sound discs from the project: both were pressings made in 1940 from the original 16 in. discs.  These pressings were made in an effort to promote the use of the recordings in the Theatre Guild production of Tennessee Williams first play, Battle of Angels.

 

            In September 1997, Patrick Loughney, Head of our Moving Image Section, visited the Chalfins and surveyed the collection.  Unable to locate any labeled discs related to the church project, Chalfin felt that some of a small number of unidentified acetate transcription discs were likely to be recordings from the project.  Over the next few years, Chalfin’s deteriorating health did not allow him to organize the collection and locate the church project material himself, as he had hoped.  Four years later, the Chalfins agreed to donate the full collection of discs.  Patrick Loughney visited a second time.  He took the discs to Chace Productions where Bob Heiber and the staff there provided working space and supplies for Pat’s initial inspection and packing of the discs.

 

            The 161 discs arrived in the Library of Congress in February 2002.  As expected, none of the discs carried any notation about the church project or anyone related to it.  Patrick Loughney and I found 17 discs without labels.  Bradley Reeves, from the Library’s Preservation Office, inventoried the remaining 144 discs by examining their labels, which were often hand-written notations.  In April, I listened to excerpts from the 17 unidentified recordings with Larry Appelbaum, supervisor and senior studio engineer in our recording lab.  The third recording turned out to have 38 minutes of sound from the Beaufort church services.  The next recording, also from the Beaufort church, was about the same length.  In the course of listening to portions of the unidentified recordings, another four minutes of sound from the church project turned up, as well as some significant recordings of New York City jazz and blues jam sessions from the early 1940s.

 

Once studio engineer Peter Alyea completed the work of making preservation copies of the Beaufort church project discs, the work of trying to marry at least a portion of the sound to the silent footage began.  Even though we knew the footage had never been synchronized, we hoped to find material that could be matched.  Ken Weissman, the Head of our Motion Picture Conservation Center, began the difficult process of trying to match the sound with the footage.  Ken will speak about his work with this material and will show a brief work-in-progress that he was able to put together using his home computer on evenings and weekends.  We want to emphasize that we are at the beginning of this process and what we will be showing is a rough sample.[10]  I also want to take this opportunity to thank Ken and everyone who has contributed to this project.

 

All film and sound excerpts are used with the permission of the Zora Neale Hurston Trust.

 

The presentation was given September 26, 2002 at the symposium Orphans III: Listening to Orphan Films.

 

This final paper was sent to the Orphan Film Symposium, December 20, 2002.