St. Clair Bourne

St. Clair C. Bourne (February 16, 1943 – December 15, 2007) was an American award-winning documentary filmmaker, who focused on African-American social issues and themes. His work showed a marked preference toward films that deal with issues about changing cultural and political trends.

In his 36-year career, he made more than 40 films, either producing or directing or doing both. Among his subjects were the singer, actor and activist Paul Robeson; the poet, novelist and playwright Langston Hughes; the photojournalist and filmmaker Gordon Parks; the poet and activist Amiri Baraka; and basketball player Earl 'The Goat' Manigault.

He described himself as a "cultural guerrilla fighter," someone who is opposed to the capitalist system but must figure out how to live and survive. His work has been shown worldwide and he was honored with a retrospective of his work in Brazil.

Noted film scholar Clyde Taylor has said of him: Through his work, Bourne has formulated an alternative platform of discursive authority that contests the ground and limits of "minority programming."

St. Clair C. Bourne was born on February 16, 1943, in Harlem, New York City, New York. His father was a journalist by profession. 

When he was two, the family moved to Brooklyn. He went to Xavier High School in New York City. After finishing high school, he enrolled at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University in Washington DC, aiming for a career in the Foreign Service Diplomatic Corps. In his junior year, he participated in the civil rights movement and was arrested at a sit-in in Arlington, Virginia, in 1963. Consequently, he dropped out of Georgetown University. 

Bourne saw the Peace Corps as an alternative to the frustration he felt, and he joined in 1964. In 1965, the Peace Corps sent Bourne to Peru, where he helped publish a Spanish newspaper, El Comeno, in Comas, a settlement adjacent to Lima. The November 1965 issue of Ebony magazine featured an article about Bourne's efforts in Comas. His experiences in Lima left vivid images in his mind about the relationship of media to social change. As a result, he was drawn to producing documentaries that involved politics and culture, and how they affected the African American population.

After leaving the Peace Corps, Bourne attended Syracuse University, New York, on a work-study scholarship program. He graduated in 1967 with a dual bachelor's degree in Journalism and Political Science, while also teaching Peace Corps trainees. Following his undergraduate studies, he began studying filmmaking at Columbia University Graduate School of the Arts in New York. However, in 1968, he was arrested and expelled after joining in the takeover of a university building to protest the Vietnam War.

Bourne got his start in filmmaking while attending Columbia University. His film instructor, Arthur Baron, recommended him to the famed documentary filmmaker William Greaves, who, at the time, was executive- producing Black Journal—an American public affairs television program on National Educational Television (NET, a direct predecessor to the modern-day PBS), which covered issues concerning African-American communities. Greaves organized a training program around a team of young Black filmmakers and as part of the program, Bourne served as Associate Producer on the first episode of the first season of the series. The episode featured many noted African American figures such as Coretta Scott King, Huey P. Newton, and Godfrey Cambridge. Five months later, he was promoted to a full producer and spent the next three years making films for Black Journal series. 

During his time with the series, Bourne produced about twelve pieces and described the work as slightly innovative television journalism. A few of the notable episodes include The South Black Student Movement; Malcolm. X Liberation University; Souls Sounds and Money; Paul Robeson; Sickle Cell Anemia; Afro-Dance; and The Nation of Common Sense. He considers his time working on the series as a major time in his life.

Bourne left Black Journal in 1971 and formed his own production company named Chamba. Four of his colleagues from Black Journal series also joined him and Chamba became a collective, working on a variety of advocacy-oriented projects. In 1971, he produced two documentaries: Statues Hardly Ever Smile and Something to Build On.

In 1974, Bourne produced a narrative documentary on the religious experiences of African-Americans, titled Let the Church Say Amen! The documentary describes the travels of a young Black student, who is preparing to be a minister, through the southern United States. Filmed in Atlanta, Georgia, the Mississippi delta countryside, and the city of Chicago, it shows the Black church from an inside point of view and how it affects everyday Black life in both urban and rural America. The film was an immediate success, winning festival screenings, prizes, critical and popular acclaim. It was also the first Black-produced film to be shown at the prestigious "New American Filmmakers" series at the Whitney Museum of Art in New York City.

In 1975, Bourne moved to Los Angeles, California, after he was invited as a Guest Lecturer in the UCLA Film Department. At the same time, he was named the North American Film Coordinator for the upcoming Festival of African Arts and Culture (FESTAC) in Lagos, Nigeria and thus traveled frequently between classes. While in Los Angeles, he made three more documentaries for KCET-TV (the local PBS station) and became a member of the Los Angeles Film Exposition (FILMEX) selection committee and worked with the American Film Institute's Independent Filmmaker Program as a judge. He was also signed by producer Norman Lear to develop and produce Bourne's first feature film—a project which was never completed because the screenplay was considered too

radical.

In 1980, he returned to New York and signed to produce and direct for CBS Big City Blues—a musical documentary covering the contemporary Blues music scene in Chicago. The documentary featured such acclaimed blues musicians as Jim Brewer, Son Seals, Queen Sylvia Embry, and Billy Branch.

In 1981, he produced a major segment of an NBC white paper special "America: Black and White." The film won the Best Documentary Award at Monte-Carlo Television Festival. He then produced In Motion: Amiri Baraka—a 58-minute documentary tracking the life of poet/activist Amiri Baraka. Towards the end of the filming for the Baraka documentary, he was told about a group of five African-American activists who were going to Belfast, Northern Ireland, on a fact-finding trip. The topic interested him and he subsequently produced and directed "The Black and the Green." While working on the documentary he found that many Catholics in Northern Ireland had been influenced by the civil rights movement. 

Next, in 1989, he released his next work, Making "Do the Right Thing", a behind-the-scenes documentary of Spike Lee's comedy Do the Right Thing. The film was a departure from his usual documentary subject matter. It was his first work on a mainstream popular subject, whereas he described his prior films as being about culturally correct political people. This film was unique because it had a theatrical release in fifty-two cities as well as exhibitions in festivals all over the world, including the Munich Film Festival, Hawaii Film Festival, Amiens (France) Film Festival, Turino (Italy) Film Festival, and Blacklight (Chicago) Festival. It has also won several awards. 

In 1996, he produced Rebound: The Legend of Earl 'The Goat' Manigault—a dramatization of the life of basketball legend Earl 'The Goat' Manigault (played by Don Cheadle), with a lot of factual based occurrences. Other notables stars of the film include James Earl Jones, Clarence Williams III, and Forest Whitaker.

Other works

As an educator/consultant, some of the groups and organizations Bourne has worked for include Cornell University, UCLA, World Black African 34 Reel Black Talk Festival of Arts and Culture in Nigeria, American Film Institute, Rockefeller Foundation, Los Angeles Film Exposition, New York State Council on the Arts, and the Film Fund.

• In 1988, a retrospective of his films was shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
• He was a member of the Omega Psi Phi and Alpha Phi Omega Fraternities.
• The finding aid to the St. Clair Bourne Collection can be found at the Black Film Center/Archive at Indiana University, Bloomington, IN.
• Excellence in Broadcasting, John Russworm Citation for Black Journal in 1970.

Selected awards

• 1970: Emmy award, Staff producer for Black Journal
• 1973: Bronze award at International Film and TV Festival, New York City for Let the Church Say
• 1981: Best Documentary award for America: Black and White at Monte Carlo Film Festival, Nymphe d'Or
• 1981: Big City Blues — Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame, First Prize, Music
• 1984: First prize at Global Village Documentary Festival for In Motion: Amiri Baraka
• 1988: First Prize Overall at Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame for Langston Hughes: The Dream Keeper
• 1988: First prize at San Francisco International Film Festival for Langston Hughes: The Dream Keeper
• 1990: Inducted into Gallery of Greats (a Miller Brewing Company calendar of the greats)

On awards:

I try not to get involved in awards; I try to develop the work. Someone else can market the work.

On politics (1995):

Because of the swing to the right politically and its effect on funding, I cannot continue to make a living doing documentaries. Spike Lee has taken the audience to the big screen. People look for truth now in features, where once they looked at documentaries. I'm working on a feature. Besides this feature in development, I'm continuing to produce documentaries. I'm developing a documentary on pan-Africanism, with the funds coming from the actor Wesley Snipes. He called me up one day and said he was familiar with my work and wanted to produce this documentary.

Bourne died of pulmonary embolisms following brain surgery on December 15, 2007, in Brooklyn, New York. He was 64.