Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts
FAIN: GA-268573-19
International Documentary Association (Los Angeles, CA 90010-2207)
Jeffrey Wolf (Project Director: April 2019 to November 2021)
An inventive feature documentary capturing the vivid life of
Bill Traylor, who in his late 80s, living homeless on the street in the
thriving segregated black neighborhood of Montgomery, produced a body of
extraordinary art. Born into slavery in 1853 on a cotton plantation in rural
Alabama, Traylor witnessed profound social and political change during his life
spanning slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow segregation, and the Great
Migration. In his later years, Traylor poured out those memories from within,
from plantation days to contemporary scenes of a radically changing urban
culture, drawing and painting over 1,000 pieces of art from 1939-42. Using
historical and cultural context, the film is designed to bring the spirit and
mystery of Traylor’s incomparable art to life. The transcendent surprise is
while Traylor kept to himself leading an unassuming life, he was nurturing a
remarkable creative gift that would not be expressed for decades. Tap dance,
evocative period and original music, and dramatic readings are used in
surprising ways in the film, balanced with insightful perspectives from Traylor
family members and expert interviews. Traylor devised his own visual language
to record the stories of his life, translating an oral culture into something
unique, powerful, and culturally rooted. The film reflects a tumultuous time of
a forgotten world and its marginalized people, still reverberating today. A new
lynching memorial and Legacy Museum recently opened in Montgomery just blocks
from where Bill Traylor used to sit and work. Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts
explores the life of a unique American artist, a man with a remarkable and
unlikely biography. The film is a compelling human narrative that gives voice
to a man who endures a long life of extreme hardships during an era of
legalized racial indignities, to become one of America’s most prominent
artists, exhibited in museums and collections worldwide.