Interview with Colson Whitehead | VPRO Documentary
13Interview with American novelist Colson Whitehead, writer of The Underground Railroad (2016) and The Nickel Boys (2019).
Due to copyright limitations we don’t show the clips mentioned, but instead we describe them below.
00:00 Downtown 81
Downtown 81 is a 2000 American film based on material that was shot in 1980-1981. The film was directed by Edo Bertoglio and stars artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. It is a rare real-life snapshot of post-punk era Manhattan. We see the main character walking the streets of New York after he is released from hospital. We hear his thoughts, talking about the city. Basquiat has made his way downtown, where we see him walking the streets carrying a big painting. The streets look dilapidated here, with boarded-up buildings. Basquiat’s voice over goes: If you want to see something ugly, you never have too far to go. But if you want to find something beautiful, well, that's not too hard either. In this town, anything is possible. You have to think big just to survive. It can be a jungle. It can be a paradise too. And sometimes you can't tell the difference.
14:33 Dawn of the Dead
Dawn of the Dead is a 1978 zombie horror film by George A. Romero. In the film, the United States is devastated by an epidemic that reanimates recently-dead human beings as flesh-eating zombies. A few survivors of the outbreak barricade themselves inside a shopping mall amid the frenzied panic outside. We first see them cleaning up zombies, then roaming the mall - like kids in a candy store. Then we see them watching the zombies throw themselves against the closed glass doors, trying to get in. The clip ends with this dialogue:
Stephen: They're after us. They know we're still in here.
Peter: They're after the place. They don't know why, they just remember. Remember that they want to be in here.
Francine: What the hell are they?
Peter: They're us, that's all, when there's no more room in hell.
Stephen: What?
Peter: Something my granddad used to tell us. You know Macumba? Voodoo. My granddad was a priest in Trinidad. He used to tell us, "When there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth."
24:54 Newsnight
The clip is from a 1999 Newsnight interview with David Bowie. The interviewer is Jeremy Paxman. Bowie had just released his 22nd album, Hours. In the clip we hear Bowie talk about reinventing himself, the changing personas and styles in his work. There also seems to be some confusion about how to pronounce ‘Bowie’ (after Paxman mispronounces the artist’s name).
33:46 Rififi
Rififi is a 1955 French crime film by Jules Dassin, about a near-perfect jewelry heist gone awry.
The scene from which Colson Whitehead chose a clip is nearly 30 minutes long, and happens almost in complete silence. We see some of the beginning and middle of the scene: the robbers carefully chiseling through a cement ceiling from an upstairs flat on a Sunday night. They take their shoes off so as to not make any noise, they bring a sock to put over the hammer to lessen the sound, they use an umbrella to catch the falling debris. Everything has been meticulously planned.
41:54 The Twilight Zone - Time Enough at Last
Henry Bemis is a bank teller and avid bookworm who by accident becomes the sole survivor of the apocalypse. In the clip Bemis wanders around the ruins of the public library. Investigating, he finds that the books are still intact, all the books he could ever hope for! His despair gone, Bemis contently sorts the books. He looks forward to reading for years to come. Just as he bends down to pick up the first book, he stumbles, and loses his glasses. In shock, he picks up the broken remains of the glasses - without which he is virtually blind - and bursts into tears, surrounded by books he now can never read. All there’s left is time.
52:49 The Underground Railroad
The Underground Railroad is an American streaming television series directed by Barry Jenkins, based on the 2016 novel of the same name by Colson Whitehead.
The Underground Railroad is a fictional story of people attempting an escape from slavery in the southern United States in the 1800s utilizing a key plot element that employs the literary style of magic realism, or science fiction. In reality, "The Underground Railroad" was a network of abolitionists, hidden routes, and safe houses that helped enslaved African-Americans escape to freedom in the early to mid-1800s. In the novel and the series, it is an actual railroad complete with engineers, conductors, tracks, and tunnels. Cora (Thuso Mbedu), an enslaved woman from Georgia, joins newcomer Caesar (Aaron Pierre) to ride the subterranean train to freedom. We see a clip taken from the end of the series, in which Cora meets Caesar again in a dream. He holds her as they slowly dance, comforting each other. “How long is this going to last?” Cora asks. “As long as you need,” Caesar replies.
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