Voice From The Edge: Celebrating the work of John Sayles on the occasion of his seventieth birthday (September 28th 2020)
There’s a captivating abundance to John Sayles’s work and in looking back at the span of his filmography, and the political position that many of his films as writer/director typically commit to, I’m always reminded of the phrase of American poet Walt Whitman who described himself as “one of the roughs”. That recognition of being part of the mass of ordinary people is key to the Sayles moviemaking sensibility.
Sayles, typically working in collaboration with Maggie Renzi his partner and producer, is a major American filmmaker; as significant to modern American cinema as his more ‘famous’ contemporaries. Certainly, Sayles’s body-of-work places him as a major precursor to the American independent cinema wave of the early 1990s that now sees Tarantino, Linklater, Rodriguez as filmmaking ‘establishment’ figures.
Across five decades, Sayles’s work vividly reminds us how a filmmaking voice can fuse a specific political stand with engaging craft and whilst his writer-director credits emphasise films in what we might call the realist mode, his writing-only credits show him making significant contributions to the pleasures of all-out genre movies: Battle Beyond the Stars, Alligator, The Howling, The Challenge, The Spiderwick Chronicles. It’s right to note, though, that whilst an often overtly political filmmaker, who started out as a novelist and short story writer and then parlayed that facility with words into screenwriting, Sayles has found opportunities to infuse even his most personal and idiosyncratic work with genre-specifics: Brother From Another Planet (it’s the other cult sf film of 1984) and Limbo (1999) immediately come to mind.
If you needed a dynamic example of how movies can give a voice and image to the idea that the personal is political and the political is personal, John Sayles’s work would, I think, meet that need. His films keenly dramatize the ways in which politics is inextricably part of our daily lives and that we make the mistake of thinking and saying “I don’t do politics” at our peril.
Sayles’s movies emphasise the importance of place to characters’ experiences, particularly when those characters are making a life for themselves in some kind of margin to the ‘mainstream’; they are often powerless characters. A John Sayles film can vividly evoke a sense of the Irish coastline in The Secret of Roan Inish; of the Louisiana bayou in Passion Fish; of the Philippines in Amigo. His landmark film Matewan is deeply rooted in the coalmining communities of West Virginia.
Taking its name from a town in Mingo County in West Virginia in 1920, Matewan dramatizes what happened there when mine-company bosses acted to stop the spread of unionising; amongst other manoeuvres, enforcing a kind of military rule. That sounds very much like a potential scenario for a clear-cut, good guys / bad guys genre bust up for sure, but the film invests all of that with nuance. Lensed by Haskell Wexler, himself longtime politically active, the film’s colour images carry something monochromatic about them.
There’s a particular scene in Matewan, and it works somewhat as a ‘companion’ piece to the kitchen debate scene in Ken Loach’s Spanish Civil War film Land and Freedom, whichfocuses on a young miner named Joe, portrayed by Chris Cooper, compelled to encourage his racist colleagues to recognise that they are all equal as workers and that they shouldinvite the black miner, named Few Clothes (portrayed by James Earl Jones) into their inchoate union. Of the visual arrangement of groups of characters in the film, Sayles has reflected that “That’s allegorical grouping and I started doing more of that about the time of Matewan…You can do it in a fairly mechanical way but I think it does add up.”
In its running time of just under four minutes, the scene pulls together ideas around racism, work, pay, power and democracy. Talk about the micro reflecting the macro. “You want to be treated like men ?” Joe asks. “Well you ain’t men to that coal company; you’re equipment. They’ll use you until you wear or break down and they don’t care what colour it is or where it comes from.” Of Few Clothes, Joe then says to the gathering of his grumbling, racist co-workers: “You think this man is your enemy ? This is a worker. Any man who kicks this man out ain’t a union.”
Throughout the scene, Cooper’s character is framed with the group behind him and of the scene’s visual design Sayles notes in his book Thinking in Pictures that “In the night meetings in C.E.’s restaurant we wanted the feeling that the only light was from the oil lamps set low on the tables and floor so light wouldn’t leak out through the shaded windows - a close, clandestine feeling.”
Matewan’s call for collective action in a culture that so espouses the individual’s experience carries a particular power and Sayles’s emphasis on stories about the relationship between those with power and those without it, is distinctive and endlessly pertinent. Of Sayles’s resonance, perhaps it was American historian Studs Terkel who put it best saying that “John Sayles is in a class by himself. No filmmaker or novelist touches him in the art of creating the community as hero.”