Press Release: NEW FROM THE WOODWARD STUDIO LTD
BRUNSWICK STEW: Georgia Named Her; Georgia Claims Her
(TRT 56 min 40 sec.)
Producer, Stan Woodward
Distributor: The Woodward Studio Ltd. at stanwoodward.com
Broadcast Date: Georgia Public Broadcasting Premiere 5PM June 26th, 2005
Stan Woodward, Southern culture and folklife documentary video artist, began his process of documenting the Southern folk heritage foodway tradition of Brunswick stew in the tobacco country of Southside Virginia in 1993. The story centered in Brunswick County, Virginia – the tobacco country in Southside Virginia. Here the Brunswick County residents have long paid homage to the legendary origins of the stew by a camp cook named Jimmy Matthews, who is reported to have cooked and named the stew in 1828 when it was served to a hunting party made up of state legislators being hosted by a local representative.
Across Brunswick County, Stan discovered a network of “stewmasters” and stew crews cooking the stew as a means of raising funds – selling the stew to the local community in order to provide services and meet special needs in the rural towns and communities.
As Stan documented these traditions and the claims to the origin of the stew by the Virginians, he learned that some years earlier the state of Georgia laid claim to the origin of the stew, prompting the Virginia legislature to pass a resolution naming Brunswick County Virginia as the place of origin of the stew. This precipitated what has become known as the “Stew Wars” between Brunswick Georgia and Brunswick County Virginia which was heated up when the Georgia legislature passed a resolution declaring Brunswick Georgia as the rightful home of Brunswick stew. In the midst of stew war cook-offs to try and settle the dispute between Virginia and Georgia, Stan set off to Georgia to gather footage about their version of the stew. Over a number of trips Stan gathered and archived a major collection of footage documenting the Georgia Brunswick stew tradition. Some of this footage was used in the feature length documentary, Brunswick Stew: A Virginia Treasure.
With help from a Georgia Arts Council grant in 2003 and sponsorship by Golden Isles Arts and Humanities Association and funding support from private and public contributors in Georgia, Stan was able to return to Georgia and produce the documentary, Brunswick Stew: Georgia Named Her; Georgia Claims Her.
“With the help of the Georgia Arts Council and the Golden Isles Arts and Humanities Association, I was able to returned to Georgia where I renewed my work with Dr. John Burrison, the internationally known folklorist at Georgia State University. John had worked with me on the Virginia Brunswick stew story, and he agreed to join me in getting the story told about the folk heritage roots of the Georgia version of the stew. I was able to use footage from The Woodward Studio Folklife Archive which I had shot in the early 1990’s and couple this with contemporary footage shot at the annual Stewbilee Festival in Brunswick, GA.
The result for audiences is a surprising and intimate look at the deep and diverse roots that Brunswick stew has in the Georgia folk culture.”
- Stan Woodward
Southern Stews: A Rare Taste of the South
Independent filmmaker Stan Woodward has used a new recipe to concoct Southern Stews: A Taste of the South, his one-hour documentary that preserves the dying art of black-pot cookery. While the standard documentary ingredients are there – regional music, on-site footage of actual stewmaking events, and the additional flavor that scholars and researchers provide with their commentary – Woodward’s unique method of blending these ingredients and his own secret ingredients make Southern Stews a production that, much like a good hearty stew, stays with us a while.
From its unconventional opening, with John Egerton, the dean of Southern food writing, thrashing through a cornfield on approach to the site of a community stew in progress, to the decidedly unacademic exploration of the etymology of burgoo, the name of a wild-game-based stew, Woodward creates an earthy, front-porch-rocker environment that draws the viewer in as a participant in the action. (Before it is done we will have been carried from burgoos to Brunswick stews, hashes, bogs, Frogmore stews and many variations in between found being cooked communally in huge pots throughout the rural South.)
Despite its deceptively down-home approach, Southern Stews gets the job done sweetly. Its band of roving scholars, refreshingly NOT sitting in front of the standard-issue documentary-set bookcase, are no less authoritative because they wear baseball caps and sneakers instead of neckties. Woodward is meticulous in seeking out the definitive expert for whatever individual aspect of a topic he wants to explore, and he uses them judiciously to add depth and perspective without overanalyzing. (The burgoo discussion concludes with a scholar at the Jamestown Colony in Virginia who takes the origins of the word back to England via the Oxford English dictionary, for example.)
The on-site footage features the conversational this-is-not-an-interview discussions between the filmmaker and his subjects that are Woodward’s signature. From the beginning of his food-film career with It's Grits, Woodward has been able to make the camera disappear, a rare ability that serves the documentarian especially well. For the most part, aside from scholars, the people in Woodward’s films are not experienced at being interviewed. His ability to draw out valid, un-self-conscious responses to questions and to take his speakers deeply into their knowledge of the subject at hand provides the aura of authenticity that makes this film so memorable and so absolutely on-target for its purpose: to capture on film what may be the last generation of stewmakers, the last moment in history when this centuries-old tradition is practiced with any regularity and as more than just a way to draw tourists.
Woodward explores this balance between tradition and tourism delicately but decidedly. For example, he contrasts community stew activities that are predominantly local events to raise funds for churches, volunteer fire departments and other worthy causes with more generic festivals that feature not just one local stew but several interpretations of it, along with judges and food critics to offer analysis of the recipes.
As the film progresses, it becomes apparent that virtually all the stewmasters (with all due respect) are old men, a fact that Woodward allows to speak for itself visually rather than by overt scripting. In one segment, a middle-age man makes a point of saying he is stewmaster-in-training and will always be until his companion, a fellow well into his 70s, is no longer able to stir the pot. He’s the younger generation, respectful, deferential – but there’s not really anyone in line behind him to pick except for a few young boys whose fathers have made it clear that the tradition is theirs to carry on, there are no young people participating in the stewmaking process.
This visual element is a powerful metaphor for what is happening to many traditions as rural areas give way to development, as the world becomes smaller by means of communication, as prepared foods edge out the old foodways. The South is Woodward’s landscape, and film is the perfect medium to document not only the changing cooking and eating habits of the region but to mark as well the changing nature of communities, where even in the smallest towns restaurant chains are replacing local eateries, where the voices of the younger residents often do not carry the cadences and pronunciations of their elders. The world is changing, as it always has done, but sometimes things get away from us before we have an opportunity to record them. Thanks to this film, Southern stewmaking will speak to future generations authentically through the record this film provides.
It is this authenticity of voice that makes Southern Stews such a rare treat. One of the pitfalls of any creative act is not allowing the work to speak for itself. The topic of food seems particulnarly vulnerable to personal interpretation; witness the number of magazine articles, newspaper columns and books currently on the market that are written in the first person. To Woodward’s credit, while the film certainly bears his creative stamp, it is not so much the filmmaker with whom we connect in this work as the stewmakers themselves.
Whatever flaws Southern Stews may have, they are sins of omission. Perhaps out of respect for the stewmasters, their ages and their generally conservative communities, Woodward has kept the humor in this film to a minimum; and there’s plenty of room for a more lighthearted touch. For example, a segment that features a stew containing “offal” (organ meats and other marginal animal parts) begs for a few more laughs at the expense of the squeamish.
This is a comfortable, relaxed film, but it is certainly a piece of scholarship. Academics and other well-credentialed scholars speak with authority in casual on-the-spot settings that create a reality-based context that grounds their observations. The other speakers, the “real” people whose communities, families, recipes and personalities are the heart of the film, tell their own story in their own words as clearly and eloquently as only they can. Their voices come through loudly, clearly, and naturally, thanks to Woodward’s skill as a filmmaker, his grace as a Southern gentlemen (which he employs to bring his subjects along graciously if relentlessly in pursuit of their stories) and his good sense to stay out of their way.
Sandra Kytle Woodward is a South Carolina-based freelance writer who is not related to Stan Woodward.
A Brunswick Stew Trilogy:
BRUNSWICK STEW: A Virginia Treasure and BRUNSWICK STEW: Origins of a Southern Folk Heritage Stew
LORD HAVE MERCY: Olgers Store
Brunswick STEW: Georgia Named Her; Georgia Claims Her
It took four years and travel throughout the South for Stan Woodward, during the late 1990’s, to unlock the story of the origins of Brunswick Stew in a small tobacco district in northwest Brunswick County, Virginia. Stories become legend through oral tradition passed down from one generation to another, when the folk of a region take part of their identity from an event or a story that distinguishes a place. Such is the case with the people who make stews - Brunswick stews - in the old fashioned way in the County of Brunswick in Southside Virginia. This is tobacco country. And tobacco has fallen on hard times. Young people are leaving the fields in droves, encouraged by their fathers to find a better way to make a living. Not a better way of life, mind you. But a better way of making a living. And that is why, when Stan Woodward ventured into the stew culture of Brunswick County and found a remarkably intact system of more than twelve stewmasters and stew crews cooking Brunswick stew somewhere in the county every weekend, he saw few young people around the pots stirring. "What is going to become of your tradition with no young people around," Stan wondered. So he began a quest to document as many of these traditions around the county as he could, given modest, but absolutely essential grants from the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities Folklife program.
Stan set out to archive as many of the stewmaster and stew crew traditions as possible in Brunswick County, while they continued to be robust. And in the process he would pull from this archival footage edited versions of the story of the origins and heritage of Virginia Brunswick stew for the people of Brunswick County. Along with BRUNSWICK STEW: A Virginia Treasure and BRUNSWICK STEW: Origins of a Southern Folk Heritage Stew, Stan created a short film from a side-trip made to Olgers Store in Sutherland, VA after someone referred him to it’s owner as being a Brunswick stew expert. This documentary is called LORD HAVE MERCY: Olgers Store (a fun and quirky spontaneous documentary shot during a continuous run of tape as raconteur, Jimmy Olgers - the "Mayor of Sutherland" and "King of Brunswick Stew" - gets on camera and doesn't get off until Stan runs out of tape.)
In the year 2004, Stan received a grant from the Georgia Arts Council to pull footage from The Woodward Studio Folk Heritage Video Archive which he gathered during his conducting field-work for the Virginia Brunswick stew story and shoot additional footage to enable the telling of the Georgia Brunswick stew folk heritage tradition and it’s origins. This resulted in BRUNSWICK STEW: Georgia Named Her; Georgia Claims Her
The result is a three-set volume of documentaries on Brunswick stew shot during this period : BRUNSWICK STEW: Origins of a Southern Folk Heritage Stew (a two hour feature length original version produced for the people of Brunswick County, VA) ; BRUNSWICK STEW: A Virginia Treasure (a one hour PBS version for broadcast in the Commonwealth of Virginia over PBS); and LORD HAVE MERCY: Olgers Store (a 36 minute spontaneous visit with Jimmy Olgers at Olgers Store); and BRUNSWICK STEW: Georgia Named Her; Georgia Claims Her. All together these documentaries paint a picture large enough in scope to see the threads of Southern Americana come together which make up the tapestry of the story of Brunswick stew and the place it has in the folk heritage of Southern culture.
A Film by Stanley Woodward
IT’S GRITS … (TRT 44 minutes)
(Digitally Re-mastered and Restored in 2005 with a
Film Preservation grant from the National Endowment for the Arts)
With all the native wit, rib tickling humor and ability to see what makes the South the South found in the literary classics of Southern writers like Mark Twain, documentary filmmaker Stan Woodward helps us discover the common thread that connects the South’s people across all social, economic, political and racial boundaries – Grits!
“Grits is us” - or, if we are to be grammatically correct, “Grits are us” - could easily be the title of this uproariously funny and at the same time insightful and poignant personal documentary.
Woodward used what, at the time, was a highly unconventional camera style and interviewing technique – called “direct cinema” - a style of hand-held, spontaneous, first-person singular storytelling where the cameraman becomes an active participant and interlocutor for the story. With Woodward using the camera to initiate the interaction with folk as he moves his query into grits and its place within the culture of the South, we travel with him through the Southern cultural landscape catching people unrehearsed with a simple, story-unfolding question – “Excuse me…Do you eat Grits?” Then, with the surprise you come to expect as you are hurtled through this artist’s journey, the same question is posed on the streets of New York, leading to a wonderful creation of a grits souffle by New York Times food writer, Craig Claiborne.
A film that started out to be a 10 minute short became a 44 minute Southern documentary classic. It was shown in its first year over 100 times by the filmmaker throughout the South. It was the keynote film for the Margaret Mead Film Festival at the Museum of Natural History in N.Y. It won top honors in all the major non-theatrical film festivals when it first appeared in 1980. It is still shown today throughout the South in Museums, public libraries, schools and universities. However, in 2002 it was discovered that the 16mm printing elements for this Southern classic had deteriorated, leading to a campaign to preserve and restore the film. Patrons of the film classic contributed funds that enabled the NEA film preservation grant and the digital restoration of IT’S GRITS.
At the time of the film’s release in 1980, it received a national screening over PBS accompanied by the following review in the New York Times by film critic, John O’Connor, as well as words of praise from food editor, Craig Claiborne:
“An engaging, sometimes hilarious celebration of one of America’s most interesting and singular (or is it plural?) foods. This is a film to be taken seriously by anyone who cares about America’s culinary heritage.”
- Craig Claiborne, Food Editor, The New York Times
“Stan Woodward’s Its GRITS is a passionate and amusing testimonial to that hardy staple of Southern cuisine often pronounced ‘gree-its’. In a tour of the country, Mr. Woodward finds many, for the most part Southerners, who believe there’s ‘nothing better than good ol’ grits,’ and a benighted few, generally Northerners, who have never heard of the specialty.
“Along the way, there are grits served with ham and eggs, grits with possum or racoon, grits with peanut butter. One man unveils a frozen ‘gritsicle’ containing peanuts. There are even kosher grits, served in a South Carolina restaurant that observes Jewish dietary laws ‘ even though it has a Mexican motif.’
“Up North, a friendly man on the street turns out to be Craig Claiborne of The New York Times. Allowing that ‘ it’s about time some of these Yankees woke up to the good things in life,’ the former resident of Sunflower Mississippi whips up a grits souffle enlivened with some cheddar cheese. Served with white wine, the humble grits achieves unexpected elegance. Mr. Woodward’s film, with music by Nat Irvin, Jr., serves its subject well.”
- Review by John J. O’Connor, The New York Times
Well, we are still enjoying IT'S GRITS! We had to stop it right after Craig Claiborne because I had to do a transcript.
When we were talking about Sean Penn, we touched on how a filmmaker may display (or not) a particular kind of intelligence in making a film, as a musician in "doing" music, or, for that matter, a baseball player in playing baseball (see George Will's comments on the intelligence of Willie Mays as a ballplayer).
Now, in documentary film, to some extent the expression of that intelligence is hostage to chance, since more is out of the filmmaker's control than if he were directing things. So some of the excellence of Grits may be serendipitous. Let's just take the cast of characters. We have a marvelous procession of people here with an almost a Felliniesque aura to them. Part of that is the luck of the draw, their uncannily warm expansiveness as they immediately warm to their grits, balanced by their sometimes acute self-consciousness before the camera, perhaps even enhanced now by the passage of time (as, for instance, the way the now out-of-fashion hair styles poses them slightly askew and forces us to see them anew).
But much of the film's excellence is a function of your creative intelligence as a filmmaker: your wonderful visual eye, the cutting, the terrific integration with the musical soundtrack, on and on. It's simply a beautifully piece of work. Mesmerized as Kathi and I were, we occasionally exchanged conspiratorial glances: I don't believe how good this is.
Kenneth McClure
