William Greaves is one of the most respected
independents in the film and television production field. In
addition, he is considered the dean of independent African-American
filmmakers and through the years has helped to launch the careers of
many young Black filmmakers. He has produced more than 200
documentary films, eight of which have won more than 70 international
film festival awards, an Emmy Award and four Emmy nominations.

Greaves was inducted into the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame in 1980;
he won an Emmy for his work as executive producer of the classic
public affairs TV series Black Journal and a Special Lifetime
Achievement Award from the Association of Independent Video and
Filmmakers in 1986. Among other honors, he's been the subject
of a special homage from the first Black American Independent Film
Festival in Paris.

When an African-American artist in almost any field is honored,
the tendency is to recognize his or her efforts separate from
the mainstream. In Greaves' case, nothing could be
further from the truth. He has been acclaimed as "a
thoroughly original, multi-faceted American artist" and has
enjoyed success across the full spectrum of the entertainment
arts as a producer, director, writer, editor, cameraman, actor,
dancer, drama teacher and songwriter. For example, Greaves has
been a longtime member of the Actors Studio in New York, which
honored him in 1980 with its first Dusa Award, alongside such
well-known alumni as Robert DeNiro, Jane Fonda, Marlon Brando,
Sally Field, Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman and Ellen Burstyn.

As one of the young filmmakers who came up under his mentorship,
I can look at the life and works of Greaves as a means to
understanding the artistic and social development of American cinema
as well as race relations in America. Born and raised in Harlem by
Caribbean parents, he was exposed to African culture and
history through the many Black cultural centers that existed
during that time of segregation. Through his love of social
dancing, he performed in professional dance groups, then acted with
the American Negro Theatre, appearing in such landmark
productions as Garden of Time and Henri Christophe,
as well as in Broadway productions like A Young American,Lost in the Stars and Finian's Rainbow. He went
on to act in the first wave of movies in the late 1940s made for
Black audiences, including A Miracle in Harlem and Souls of
Sin.

But despite a promising career as a featured actor in the hit
movie Lost Boundaries, with Mel Ferrer and Canada Lee, and
full membership in the Actors Studio, Greaves considered most of
the roles offered him to be racially insulting. He was slated to
appear in the Broadway revival of Twentieth Century,
starring Gloria Swanson and Jose Ferrer, but when he learned that he
would be playing a stereotypical bumbling porter, he quit on the
spot.

Greaves decided to get behind the camera, where he could control
what appeared on the screen. He studied film production under
Hans Richter at the Film Institute at the City College of New
York. However, discrimination again raised its ugly head. He
worked as an apprentice with the documentarian Louis de
Rochemont, but, faced with the almost impenetrable wall of
racism in the motion picture industry, Greaves left the US in 1952 to
study and work in Canada.

This decision to leave was based on several realities that
confronted Greaves. His strategy was to learn filmmaking from
the ground up because his goal was not just to produce and
direct films, but to change the stereotyped representation of
African-Americansand, in the process, change the
representation of Whites as well. As Greaves saw it, this could
be done directly through documentary films or indirectly through
feature films. Documentaries offered him, he felt, a more realistic
opportunity to achieve his goals. He was particularly drawn to
the ideas of film pioneer John Grierson, who set up Canada's
National Film Board, and his writings about the documentary and
its use as a social force.

Greaves
applied for a grant to study in Canada, but despite letters of
endorsement from de Rochemont, Elia Kazan, Reuben Mammoulian and
Don Mulholland of the National Film Board, he was turned down.
So he started as an apprentice editor at the National Film Board
and during his eight-year stay there he moved through various
jobsassistant editor, sound editor, location manager,
chief editor, writer and director. He also taught acting at studios
he formed in Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa. A good example
of Greaves' NFB documentary work is Emergency Ward(1959), which he directed and edited. It documents the events of
a Saturday night at a Montreal hospital emergency room.
Greaves humanizes his subjectspatients, doctors and
orderliesand combines the tripod set-up approach used in
the feature films of that time with the hand-held camera style that
came to characterize the cinema vrit
documentaries of the 1960s.

The constant stream of documentary work in Canada provided Greaves
with the experience he wanted and needed. His decision to go
into documentary, he says, was a happy one because it
demands intellectual growth, technical craftsmanship, a
hard-nosed respect for research and a sensitivity to human
behavior. It was in Canada where he also met and married his
wife and filmmaking partner, Louise Archambault. When the racial
climate in the US began to heat up in the early 1960s, he felt
prepared to return home and mount a new offensive. The
opportunity came when a United Nations agency asked him to directCleared for Takeoff, a film about a transglobal flight by
a major airliner; Greaves moved back to New York to take the job.

Greaves'
love of African culture and his film training in Canada enabled him
to take advantage of opportunities that were opening. He formed
his company, William Greaves Productions, in 1964 and began to make
films for the US Information Agency, which, because of the impact of
the Civil Rights movement, was producing films about the
changing racial struggle in the country. For one of his earliest
works for the agency, The First World Festival of Negro Arts,
Greaves documented the historic gathering in Senegal in 1966 of
artists and intellectuals like Duke Ellington, Langston Hughes
and Katherine Dunham. For the next decade in Africa, this film was
the most popular USIA production.

Greaves followed this film with another breakthrough
documentaryStill A Brother: Inside the Negro Middle
Class, which, though completed in 1967, did not air on public
television until April 1968, three weeks after the assassination of
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Extremely controversial for its
time, and still interesting today, the film examines a segment of the
Black community for its views on assimilation by "good Negroes"
and the rise of Black militancy.

William Greaves has always maintained his crusade to create
non-stereotypical Black images in the American media, but where he
made the most impact was arguably his position as executive producer
of the public television series Black Journal. The Civil
Rights movement, based on principles of nonviolence and petitions to
the larger society for justice, was beginning to run its course
as the marches, violent resistance and government inaction
thwarted activists. Thus, planned and spontaneous rebellions,
generally sparked by a symbolic incident, but also caused by a
long list of unjust conditions, erupted in cities with large
Black populations, like Detroit, Newark and the Watts section
of Los Angeles. A specific complaint coming out of those uprisings
was the lack of a Black presence in the electronic media and the
negative distortion that took place when Blacks were
represented.

It was out of these conditions that the Black Journal series
was created in April 1968, following King's assassination. The
idea for the series was enthusiastically approved as an overdue
response to both the Kerner Commission Report on US race relations,
which called for the media to "expand and intensify coverage of
the Negro community," and to the growing mood for
self-determination in Black communities around the country. With
Greaves and former Chicago radio news reporter Lou House as
co-hosts, the series went into active production in May, had its
premiere broadcast in June, and earned both critical acclaim and an
unprecedented (for public television) viewer response.

The first show's segments consisted of an interview from an
Oakland prison with Huey Newton on the future of the Black
Panthers, a report on the Poor People's Campaign in
Washington, DC, a satirical skit about the use of Blacks in
advertisements, an essay on the view of the future by graduating
Black college seniors, a profile of a Harlem-based manufacturer
of African style clothing, a portrait of a Black jockey, and coverage
of an address by Coretta Scott King at Harvard University.

Despite the success of the series, questions of assignments and
editorial points of view became points of dispute among the
staff. The issue came to a head when 11 Black members of
the production staff demanded that the White executive producer
be replaced by a Black one, citing the National Educational
Television (the precursor to PBS) press statement that Black
Journal was produced "by, for and about Black people."
Greaves became the new executive producer and set that tone of
being the sole electronic representative of the "Civil
Rights movement on the air." Because there were extremely
few freelance technicians of color due to the difficulty of
finding work regularly, Greaves established The Black JournalFilm Workshop to fill this void. Another important change
that occurred was staff editor Madeline Anderson's
promotion to public television's first Black woman
producer.

While serving as executive producer, Greaves continued to
operate his own production company, but he realized that he had
to make a choicebecome a full-time television executive
or retain his independence as a filmmaker. In 1970, he leftBlack Journal and proceeded to produce and direct a
variety of films. Some of them were sponsored by government
agencies, including Voices of La Raza for the
Equal Opportunity Commission, On Merit for the Civil
Service Commission and Where Dreams Come True for NASA.

Many
of Greaves' films explore the lives of extraordinary
African-Americans, famous and forgotten. Prominent among
them are Booker T. Washington: The Life and Legacy (1983),Frederick Douglass: An American Life (1984), Ida B. Wells:
A Passion for Justice (1989) and his most recent film,Ralph Bunche: An American Odyssey (2001), about the legendary
United Nations Under Secretary General and Nobel Peace Prize
Laureate. Greaves also produced and directed the cinema vrit
fight movie, Ali, The Fighter (1973), featuring Muhammad
Ali and Joe Frazier. In addition to the production of
documentaries, television programs and features, Greaves' company
distributes its own library of films on video and DVD
to universities, libraries, schools and cultural institutions
throughout the US.

Currently, Greaves is completing Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take Two,
the second of an originally planned series of five avant-garde
films, all shot in 1968. A sequel to Take TwoTake
2 was filmed in November in New York's
Central Park, using the same actors from the 1968 shoot. Take
Two and Take 2 1/2, which Greaves is co-producing with Steven
Soderbergh and Steve Buscemi, will both be ready for theatrical
release in 2005.

Greaves has
weathered the storms of racism and film industry changes without
losing his vitality, optimism and courtesy. His body of work has
been pivotal in shaping Black filmmaking, while embracing many styles
of world cinema, often before they became prominent. He has been a
strong force against racism, but many of his films have
addressed topics other than the African-American experience,
proving that cultural authenticity does not mean being restrictive.
William Greaves reflects his worldand our worldthrough
his films.

WILLIAM GREAVES
SELECT FILMOGRAPHY

Emergency Ward(1959)

Wealth of a Nation(1964)

The First World
Festival of Negro Arts (1966)

Symbiobiopsychotaxiplasm:
Take One (1968)

Still a Brother:
Inside the Negro Middle Class (1968)

Black Journal(1968-70)

Voice of La Raza(1972)

Ali, The Fighter(1973)

From These Roots(1974)

Where Dreams Come
True (1979)

Booker T.
Washington: Life and Legacy (1983)

Frederick Douglass:
An American Life (1984)

Ida B. Wells: A
Passion for Justice (1989)

Ralph Bunch: An
American Odyssey (2001)

Symbiobiopsychotaxiplasm:
Take Two (2005)

Career Achievement Awards

1985. Pare Lorentz
1986. Fred W. Friendly
1987. Richard Leacock
1988. David L. Wolper
1989. Jacques Yves
      Cousteau
1990. Frederick Wiseman
1991. Bill Moyers
1992. Walter Cronkite
1993. Robert Drew
1994. Albert Maysles
1995. Marcel Ophuls
1996. Ted Turner
1997. Henry Hampton
1998. Sheila Nevins
1999. Michael Apted
2000. Charles Guggenheim
2001. Jean Rouche
2002. Ken Burns
2003. Sir David
      Attenborough