2007.12.18: December 18, 2007: Headlines: COS - Peru: Obituaries: Film: African American Issues: New York Times: Obituary for Peru RPCV St. Clair Bourne, a documentary filmmaker who recorded American black culture

Peace Corps Online: Directory: Peru: Peace Corps Peru: Peace Corps Peru: Newest Stories: 2007.12.18: December 18, 2007: Headlines: COS - Peru: Obituaries: Film: African American Issues: New York Times: Obituary for Peru RPCV St. Clair Bourne, a documentary filmmaker who recorded American black culture

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Obituary for Peru RPCV St. Clair Bourne, a documentary filmmaker who recorded American black culture

Obituary for Peru RPCV St. Clair Bourne, a documentary filmmaker who recorded American black culture

In the early 1960s, Mr. Bourne joined the Peace Corps and went to Peru, where he started a newspaper in a poverty-ridden settlement outside of Lima. He graduated from Syracuse in 1967 with a bachelor’s degree in journalism and political science. He then began studying filmmaking at Columbia University. But in 1968, he was arrested and expelled after joining in the takeover of a university building to protest the Vietnam War.

Obituary for Peru RPCV St. Clair Bourne, a documentary filmmaker who recorded American black culture

St.Clair Bourne, Filmmaker, Dies at 64

By DENNIS HEVESI

Published: December 18, 2007

St.Clair Bourne, a documentary filmmaker who recorded American black culture, produced portraits of eminent African-Americans and, in one stark film, drew a parallel between the civil rights movement and the “troubles” in Northern Ireland, died on Saturday in Manhattan. He was 64 and lived in Brooklyn.

The cause was a pulmonary embolism, said Judith Bourne, his sister and only immediate family member.

In a 36-year career in which he made more than 40 films, either producing or directing or doing both, Mr. Bourne’s works were seen on public television, commercial networks and at film festivals around the country. Among his subjects were the singer, actor and activist Paul Robeson; the poet, novelist and playwright Langston Hughes; the photojournalist and filmmaker Gordon Parks; and the poet and activist Amiri Baraka.

In 1989, Mr. Bourne produced and directed “Making ‘Do the Right Thing,’” a theatrical release about the Spike Lee film shot in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. In his review in The New York Times, the film critic Vincent Canby wrote, “It says something about the effectiveness of Mr. Bourne’s documentary that watching a murder scene as it is being shot is almost as harrowing as watching the scene in the finished film.”

“Paul Robeson: Here I Stand,” Mr. Bourne’s two-part series in 1999 for “American Masters” on PBS, showed that despite the public perception of its subject as a victimized, worn figure, he was clear and steadfast in his old age, asserting that progress toward racial equality was worth everything he had faced.

It was a conviction shared by Mr. Bourne. Ayuko Babu, director of the Pan African Film & Arts Festival, held annually in Los Angeles and Atlanta, said yesterday that Mr. Bourne had been shaped by the civil rights movement. “Because the African slave trade spread all over the planet,” Mr. Babu said, “for us to understand ourselves, we had to have an artist like St.Clair look at all our tragedy, all our beauty, and show that back to ourselves. By doing that, he gave other cultures a way of better understanding us.”

Mr. Bourne’s sister said Mr. Bourne had been particularly proud of his 1996 documentary, “John Henrik Clarke: A Great and Mighty Walk,” about the son of an Alabama sharecropper, born in 1915, who became an author, poet, historian, professor and a leader of the Pan-Africanist movement.

In 1983, Mr. Bourne produced and directed “The Black and the Green,” in which a group of American civil rights activists traveled to Northern Ireland and found that many Catholics there had been influenced by the civil rights movement. As The Washington Post reported then, “In the Belfast ghetto, the delegation members are strangers in a familiar land of crushed tenements, graffiti-stained walls and heavily armed law officers.”

The movie, Mr. Bourne told The Post, “ends up seeming pro-Irish Republican Army in the same sense that a film about Selma in the ’60s might have ended up seeming pro-black, but then I’m a filmmaker from the ’60s. I try to be humanistically political.”

Born in Harlem on Feb. 16, 1943, Mr. Bourne was the son of St.Clair T. and Gwendolyn Samuel Bourne. When he was 2, the family moved to Brooklyn. His father was a reporter and editor with The Amsterdam News and his mother was a nurse and medical social worker.

In the early 1960s, Mr. Bourne joined the Peace Corps and went to Peru, where he started a newspaper in a poverty-ridden settlement outside of Lima. He graduated from Syracuse in 1967 with a bachelor’s degree in journalism and political science. He then began studying filmmaking at Columbia University. But in 1968, he was arrested and expelled after joining in the takeover of a university building to protest the Vietnam War.

Still, a professor recommended him for a job as an assistant producer on “Black Journal,” the first black public affairs series on PBS. In 1971, Mr. Bourne started his own production company, now called Chamba Mediaworks.

Mr. Bourne’s marriages, to Sylvia Azure Walton and to Linda Miller, ended in divorce.

In an interview last year with Black Camera, a journal published by the Black Film Center/Archive at Indiana University, Mr. Bourne said he had tried to combine activism with journalism.

“Most of mainstream and public television in the late ’60s, and even during the ’70s,” he said, “was from the point of view of an outsider looking at a subculture — white people looking at black people. We said we identify with and are a part of the subjects we are filming.”




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