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Aside from being an accomplished documentary filmmaker (and Guggenheim, Rockefeller, NEA and AFI Fellowship award recipient), Third Ward TX director Andrew Garrison is also an associate professor at the University of Texas, and the founder of East Austin Stories, an ongoing student documentary program that focuses on East Austin neighborhoods.
We recently had a chance to talk to Andrew about Third Ward, East Austin Stories and South by Southwest.
Tell us a little bit about the film and what it’s about.
Well, it’s about an inner-city neighborhood in Houston that had gone into decline since the 60s. It had been left for dead—abandoned, basically, by the city of Houston—and a group of seven African-American artists decided that they wanted to do some art that would draw attention to the issues there. But they got their awakening when they asked people, “what do you need?” and the people in the neighborhood said, “what we need is this placed cleaned up. We need the junkies out of here”. So the artists decided to take that on as their art.
One of the first things they did was to take two blocks of housing—shotgun houses that had been abandoned for thirty years, used as shooting galleries and for prostitution—they boarded them up and painted on the boards, over the windows and doors, and made a “drive by” exhibition. And then they actually bought those houses with an NEA grant, which is kind of remarkable. The bought twenty-two houses on two blocks, and they started to rehab them. They made eight houses into exhibition spaces for artists to show work for six months at a time. They had international art stars and locals—all kinds of different artists.
Another issue was that there were a lot of single mothers going to college who had no place to stay, so they dedicated another eight houses to single mothers. Six of them are residencies where single mothers can stay for up to two years rent-free, and the others are meeting houses and so on.
And as they kept doing art, it brought more people into the neighborhood and pushed the junkies away, and the neighborhood once again became a safe and lively place to be. They started an after-school program for kids; they had a summer program and a cultural center. But all of that, while making it a better place, brought the attention of developers. And so now they’ve got this great neighborhood, but the market force of gentrification might just scatter everyone. And so their new challenge is, “what do we do about that?”
How did the idea for the film come about?
Well, one of my producing partners, Nancy Bless (who’s now the director of Texas Folklife) was an arts writer at the time. She had written a couple of articles about project row houses, and she said to me, “Andy, this is a really amazing thing. You should do a documentary about it.” And so we went down [to Houston], and I brought my Mini-DV camera, and I was knocked out. It was really remarkable. We spent a weekend just shooting interviews and meeting people. And I thought, “Yeah, we can do this, even if we don’t have any money. Because I’ve got a camera, and I’ve got a sound kit, and tape is cheap”. So I thought, let’s dig in and see what we can do.
Do you think that what happened in the Third Ward is an exceptional circumstance? Can it be duplicated in other places?
Well, I think it’s unique. But I think it can be adapted. There are some very smart, very capable who decided to do this, and part of what makes them so smart is that they didn’t just come in and say, “here’s the template, and this is how it’s got to get done”. Because they’re artists, they had a very creative response to things as they came up. It’s an art effort, but it’s also an organizing effort, and it just transcends things that I’ve seen as far as political organizing or even artistic efforts.
Artistic efforts often get ghettoized as things that are only about art and aesthetics and pleasure. And artists are flaky, and they wear berets, and they’re not people who can deal with on-the-ground kind of stuff. But these guys decided to creatively respond to the world, and that became their art. It’s remarkable to me. But I do think that people are smart enough to do this is other places, and I think it builds on a kind of natural creativity that we all possess.
How old is East Austin Stories? Did one project inspire the other?
I guess they’re about the same age. We started working on East Austin Stories in 2000. They didn’t really [have to do with each other], but they do in that the kind of documentary work that I’ve done has always been connected to communities and actual, physical places.
I worked for years at a place called Appalshop, which is kind of an unusual place in rural eastern Kentucky in the mountains. It was originally a job program for mountain kids, and they basically figured out really quickly that they weren’t going to be moving to Hollywood and getting jobs, so they sort of shifted it from a narrative training ground to a place where people were making documentaries about who was around them in the culture. And I lived and worked there for twelve years. So that, and other things have done, have always kind of pointed to work done directly with people representing themselves. So that was just interesting to me.
The other thing with East Austin Stories was that, as a teacher, my students didn’t have an authentic audience. You know, you show your films at the end of the semester in Studio 4B on campus, and the only people who come are your mother and dad and maybe some of your friends. So getting people who want to make documentaries off of campus and getting them to interact with the communities around them. East Austin has a lot of different kinds of communities and a lot of different kinds of people, so just going out there and meeting people, and kind of performing a service in that your collecting a story and giving it back.
Having lived in and made documentaries in other places, is there something about Austin that makes it particularly comfortable for documentary filmmakers? There seems to be a good number of documentary filmmakers here. Not that it’s a bad thing by any stretch…
It’s funny, isn’t it? Well, first of all, we live here because we like it. I mean, that’s why you’re here, isn’t it? We love Austin.
I actually don’t think that Austin has more documentary filmmakers. It’s a city of a million people plus, and compared to other cities of that size that have a university, there’s probably not that many more.
But I think that maybe [it seems that way] because of the prominence of filmmaking in general—because of the attention that it gets here. When people think of Austin, they think, “yeah, there is a lot of music there, and there are filmmakers there”, and so I think the glory rubs off on us a little bit, and people notice us more than they might in, say, Cincinnati or something (laughs).
Having a festival like SXSW Film here doesn’t hurt either, I’m sure. Is it still exciting for you showing your films at festivals?
Oh, totally. Because South by Southwest doesn’t just let you in because you live here. So it’s great to be accepted. I was very concerned that they were not going to accept my film, so I’m very pleased that they did.
You know—the Austin Film Society, South by Southwest, the Austin Gay and Lesbian Film Festival… we have a lot of attention to film here, and partly that’s because of the work that the University has done, but it’s also partly because we have these talented people who’ve stayed here and continue to work here.
Do you think that teaching film [at UT] would keep you happy if you couldn’t be out there making films?
No (laughs). I really love teaching, but it’s always a balance, because it takes a lot of energy and commitment to do the job right, and it’s tough. I’m certainly not complaining that my job’s so terrible or anything, but I haven’t figured out the balance between teaching and making films and also having a life.
Before I got into teaching at the University, the balance was like, “how do you have a family? How do you have relationships and still be a filmmaker?” There is a lot of commitment with freelancing and traveling and all of that. But now, it’s split three ways, and I still haven’t figured it all out.
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