‘PIECING’ TOGETHER LIFE OF MORRISON
Nobel winner Toni resisted ‘white gaze’
In the beginning of the new documentary, “Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am,” the Nobel Prize-winner talks candidly about how she spent her entire writing life “trying to make sure that the white gaze” wasn’t dominant in her storytelling.
Early in her career, the unapologetically black author of African-American-focused novels such as 1970’s “The Bluest Eye,” 1973’s “Sula,” and 1987’s “Beloved” was harshly criticized by elite literary critics for not writing about white people in her best-selling books.
The irony of the two-hour film — featuring interviews from media magnate Oprah Winfrey, activist Angela Davis, author Walter Mosley, poet Sonia Sanchez, Columbia University African studies Chairwoman Farah Jasmine Griffin, and cultural critic Hilton Als — is that its director is acclaimed photographer and documentarian Timothy Greenfield-Sanders — who is, indeed, white.
“You know, I was very conscious of [that],” Greenfield-Sanders told the Daily News. “Certainly, Toni’s trust in me was a big thing. It was important, and I surrounded myself with people who could speak back to me, and we were a team.”
The film opens in select theaters in New York and Los Angeles this weekend.
A sought-after photographer known for capturing world leaders and major cultural figures, GreenfieldSanders is the producer and director of 13 documentaries, including PBS’ “Lou Reed: Rock and Roll Heart,” and the groundbreaking HBO films “The Black List,” “The Latino List,” “The Out List” and “About Face: Supermodels Then and Now.”
During a 1981 assignment to shoot the cover of SoHo News, a now-defunct downtown, hipster magazine of the era, he became fast friends with Morrison, now 88.
“Toni walked into my studio in the East Village 38 years ago. She was smoking a pipe and she was, I remember, a very confident person, you know?” he recalled. “We became friends from that moment, and over the years I became her photographer doing [book cover] jackets and things like that.”
“Toni is the inspiration for the whole ‘List’ series,” he added. “‘The Black List’ was started in my kitchen with a conversation with Toni about black divas and opera, and it worked into ‘The Black List.’ ”
“Pieces” traces the Lorain, Ohio, native’s early childhood, through her days as a “loose” college student who baked “the best carrot cake” at Howard University and her days juggling single motherhood with a book editor role at Random House in the 1960s.
While there, she worked on seminal memoirs by Muhammad Ali, Angela Davis, Huey P. Newton and Bill Cosby and the groundbreaking archival tome of African-American life, “The Black Book,” in 1974
Morrison, whose first novel was “The Bluest Eye,” went on to publish 10 other bestselling and highly acclaimed works of fiction, including “Song of Solomon” — the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. “Beloved” earned her a Pulitzer Prize in 1988 and a decade later was adapted for a film directed by Jonathan Demme that starred Winfrey.
In 1993, Morrison became the first black woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature — earning a cash award of $825,000. Greenfield-Sanders scored rights to use exclusive footage from the Stockholm ceremony, and also culled unseen family photos and rare reel footage of Morrison at work, shopping and out in the streets during the 1970s and 1980s.
Filmgoers will get an upclose and personal view of the prolific author and retired Princeton professor— who is known to be intensely private — like never before.
“I hope the film brings a new audience to her work, and I think that she’s the Shakespeare of our time,” Greenfield-Sanders said.
“She really brought black women into a space and as one of the people in the film said, ‘If you don’t understand the history of black women in America, you don’t understand the history of America.’ I thought that was such a poignant statement, and Toni’s work really gives us that understanding.”