How I Became a Teller of Sometimes Inconvenient Truth
Stan Hirson
Yes, these are drums. Haitian drums. Actually, voudou drums. Haitian voudou drums that I brought back from Port au Prince in 1952 when I was 14. The designs on the drums are of the various loa, the spirits of the voudou pantheon. I knew their names and images by heart: Damballah, Papa Legba, Erzulie Freda, Agway ‘Woyo…
Sometimes, when I walk by these drums, now in our living room in Pine Plains, NY, I see the swaying dancers, feel the throbbing drums, smell the clarin, the smoke and sweat thick as a texture. I hear the chant of the houngan inviting Damballah to take possession of one of the congregants as he calls out, “Damballah, Damballah, koté ou ye?”
The ceremonies started around midnight on Saturday into Sunday morning. My parents would have me nap until around 11 PM and then let me go off — alone — in one of the peoples’ camionnettes for the half-hour coast down the mountain from Petionville where we lived. I would tell the driver I wanted to go to Telegraph Sans Fil, one of the poorest sections of Port au Prince, where he would drop me off to be guided by the compass of throbbing drums in the night,
Eventually dawn arrived and with it the Twentieth Century and Western Hemisphere. I would find a camionnette to take me back up the mountain, this time with the engine running, exhausted but fulfilled, while the others trudged to Sunday mass and prayed to the same spirits but with different names and images.
During the following week, I would go back down to Telegraphe Sans Fil and search out the houngan whose hounfor I had visited. I was curious. He was curious, too, but he had the answers. I only had my father’s Argus C3 35mm rangefinder camera,
This might be the strangest part of this story. Haitians did not want their pictures taken.
A photograph was a ouanga, the voudou doll that held part of the subject’s soul captive and thus subject to manipulation. So here’s an American kid going around expecting to get pictures of a voudou priest? We are on the verge of weird here.
The houngan must have sensed that the young American seemed genuinely interested in learning about his religion and sincerely curious to the point that he spoke creole and was using the camera as an aid to his learning. The priest willingly drew the designs of the loa in the ground just the way he did during the ceremonies, dipping his hands in a bowl of corn meal and letting the white powder sift through his fingers like a brush and onto the dirt floor.
So I was not TAKING photographs; He was GIVING them to me as part of his answers.
I was learning the cornerstone of what would eventually be my career, taught by a voudou priest in the slums of Port au Prince. Through detours as a surgical technician at the Lahey Clinic, a researcher in the Neurochemical Research Laboratory at Harvard Medical School, experiences in professional theatre, training in Vienna, I finally found my life’s calling at WGBH in Boston as a documentary filmmaker. A documentary, as I define it, is the exploration of reality with the intent to convey it to others. I was recognized for being able to “get” at the truth — If Stan shot it, it happened.
And it all started in voodoo temples in the slums of Port au Prince. And I have the drums to prove it.
One of many photos of the disorder and chaos now raging in Haiti. It is dangerous for anyone to walk those same streets that the 14-year-old American explored in the middle of the night some 70 years ago.
How and why did that dream paradise become a nightmare of Hell? Trying to answer that question became my quest.
While Haiti was churning through dictators, I was trying to unravel the dilemmas of group life at UCLA’s Graduate School of Management, The Washington School of Psychiatry, The Tavistock Institute in London, and the Doctoral Program in Clinical Psychology at Columbia. Fancy places, but basically embellishing skills learned in voodoo temples in Haitian slums
I did not have to go back to Haiti to find civil unrest. In 1963, I covered Civil Rights in the USA.
I was working for WGBH in Boston in 1963, the year of the March on Washington, filming voter registration efforts in Greenwood, Mississippi. Just a year later, about 70 miles away, the three civil rights workers – Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner – were murdered with the alleged collusion of the local police. Jim Forman, Field Secretary of SNCC, is seen in the background watching on.
I had been a lot safer in Telegraf Sans Fil with the voudou priests.
Here is a story told by Fred Barzyk, the director from WGBH, about his trip to Atlanta to meet me.
Education and Work Experience
Stan started his professional career as a documentary filmmaker in the production studios of WGBH-TV in Boston in 1962. Among his early credits — much to the amusement of family and friends — was being floor manager on Julia Child’s first shows of The French Chef. He soon after moved out of the television studio and into documentary film when he covered the civil rights movement in the South for National Educational Television in the summer of 1963 and made film portraits of James Baldwin, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
Stan joined the Maysles Brothers as Associate and was involved in the films such as The Beatles in America, Salesman, Gimme Shelter, Grey Gardens, and numerous television documentaries.
As a result of his films about the workplace, he was awarded a Ford Foundation fellowship to the Graduate School of Management at UCLA at the Center for Quality of Working Life and left his film career to practice organizational consultation. He trained in group relations behavior at the Washington School of Psychiatry and was awarded a fellowship at London’s Tavistock Institute of Human Relations. In addition to consulting he taught group and organizational dynamics in the Doctoral Program in Clinical Psychology at Teachers College of Columbia University.
Stan’s long relationship with the Bell System as a consultant on workplace issues and strategic planning gave him opportunities and resources to develop the use of film to effect organizational change as well as to understand and document it.
He currently lives and works in the Hudson Valley, where he has consolidated careers to make documentary videos for the internet.