Bess Lomax Hawes
2021Pizza Pizza Daddy-O
Bess Lomax Hawes
“The footage included in this film was taken in December of 1967 on the playground of a school in a Los Angeles black ghetto. The players are a dozen fourth grade girls (9 to 10 years old) whose well-developed repertoire had been earlier brought to my attention by a sympathetic teacher… The actual film was taken in a playground area which had been reserved for us for the morning so as to minimize the number of spectators. We used two 16mm cameras, one in fixed position and one hand-held; sound was recorded via an overhead boom mic. The children had had the location of the mic pointed out to them and for the entire morning they centered themselves without direction under the mic with almost professional aplomb. All action in the film was undirected, for it turned out that the children needed no direction. They had come to play, and play is what they did, whether the cameras were loaded or not.” - BLH
Pizza Pizza Daddy-O
Say Old Man Can You Play the Fiddle
Bess Lomax Hawes
Bess Lomax Hawes’s final film is a portrait of Earl Collins, one of the premier Southern fiddlers of his generation. Shot in a modest living room in Downey, California, the work features Collins performing several numbers along with his son, relating the history of his career, and showing off his family’s heirloom hand-carved fiddle.
Say Old Man Can You Play the Fiddle
