Federal Writers' Project - Film

Film

A National Endowment for the Humanities-funded documentary about the Federal Writers' Project, entitled Soul of a People: Writing America's Story premiered on the Smithsonian Channel in September 2009. The film includes interviews with notable American authors Studs Terkel, Stetson Kennedy, and popular American historian Douglas Brinkley. The companion book was published by Wiley & Sons as Soul of a People: The WPA Writers' Project Uncovers Depression America.

Unchained Memories are the stories of former slaves interviewed during the 1930s as part of the Federal Writers' Project. This HBO film interpretation directed by Ed Bell and Thomas Lennon is a compilation of slave narratives, narrated by actors, emulating the original conversation with the interviewer. The slave narratives may be the most accurate in terms of the everyday activities of the enslaved, serving as personal memoirs of more than two thousand former slaves. The documentary depicts the emotions of the slaves and what they endured. The "Master" had the opportunity to sell, trade, rape, or kill the enslaved, for retribution should one slave not obey.

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Famous quotes containing the word film:

    Film music should have the same relationship to the film drama that somebody’s piano playing in my living room has to the book I am reading.
    Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971)

    Lay not that flattering unction to your soul,
    That not your trespass but my madness speaks;
    It will but skin and film the ulcerous place,
    Whilst rank corruption, mining all within,
    Infects unseen.
    William Shakespeare (1564–1616)

    Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls.
    Ingmar Bergman (b. 1918)