SNCC — A Film By Danny Lyon

The film SNCC (2020) will begin streaming on November 15

 

 

DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT 

SNCC (2020) is a compellation film. It is a non-fiction account of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and its successful efforts to break the back of Jim Crow. In 1962, I was hired by James Forman, the executive director of SNCC, to make a photographic record of their struggle. I was a white boy given a ringside seat to a black uprising, one of the truly great progressive moments in American History. Now, almost sixty years later, I continue to fulfill my obligation to James Forman. I began by filming John Lewis and Julian Bond, both of whom had remained close friends over the years. Many of the photographs I had made in the early 1960s had become icons and were well known. Then I realized there were over 3000 pictures that had never been used or seen and were unknown. As a filmmaker, I am a realist. I believe in the power of the camera and recorded sound and wanted to make the movement as real as possible, to recreate the passion and courage of the generation that had changed history. I had all my negatives scanned. In 1963 I was John Lewis’s roommate in Atlanta, and when he gave his speech on Wednesday, August 28, at the March on Washington, I slept on the floor of his small hotel room. We were very close. I knew that Alan Ribback had traveled from Chicago to Atlanta to make recordings of the movement because I was often in the churches when Ribback took out his Nagra and hung his Sennheiser mikes. Rinzler died years ago, but I was able to locate his audio archive of seven-inch reels of analog tape. I had also made my own audio interviews of Lewis, Bond, and Dottie Zellner in the late 1980s.

Using all this material, all real, most done at the time of the events themselves, I spent months at the computer putting the film together. SNCC does not just tell you the “story” of the historical events as they unfolded, but the music that rang through the churches, churches often surrounded by mobs and police, draws you into the spirit of the movement. While I was filming John was stricken with a fatal disease. Knowing I would never see him again I went to stay with him in his home in the Capitol. I didn’t go there to film him, but I did, and in the remarkable closing scene, two friends, who have loved each other for over fifty years, interact as we always had; me holding a camera and John Lewis as my inspiration. The film ends with a scroll of those that gave their lives to the movement.

—Danny Lyon