Third World Newsreel staffers document their 2023 international retrospective of Billops-Hatch films, A String of Pearls, while also offering primary source accounts of the artistic process, atmosphere, and vision of Camille Billops and James Hatch through the eyes of their collaborators. Contributors include Ada Gay Griffin, Louis Massiah, and Dion Hatch.

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Clementine Narcisse created the series trailer for the Camille Billops and James Hatch retrospective, A String of Pearls. Courtesy of Third World Newsreel.

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Clementine Narcisse created the series trailer for the Camille Billops and James Hatch retrospective, A String of Pearls. Courtesy of Third World Newsreel.

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Since 1968, Third World Newsreel (TWN) has advanced movement storytelling and media arts for cultural and social justice. We champion the self-representation of historically marginalized communities, including Black, Indigenous, Latine, Asian, Pacific Islander, African, Middle Eastern, Mixed/Multiracial, People with Disabilities, and LGBTQIA+ individuals through diverse genres and forms of media, such as documentary, experimental, and fiction. Our aim is to facilitate their efforts to create, engage, and amplify their stories, propelling audiences to action.

Our comprehensive support includes hands-on training, fiscal sponsorship, educational distribution, and preservation, all designed to advance cultural justice and societal change. From documentary and experimental to narratives, we are committed to shaping a media landscape where diversity and intersectionality are not merely represented but are central to social transformation.

We are longtime TWN staffers, and we curated and collected excerpts of talks and interviews for this special issue with and by various people who worked with Camille and James on their films, or on the exhibition of their films. Some selections were written by current or past TWN staff members, while others are transcribed from remarks offered at Third World Newsreel’s “Tribute to Camille Billops and James V. Hatch: 50 Years of Breaking the Rules and Building the Arts” celebration in 2018. Together, these texts offer readers powerful primary source documentation of Billops and Hatch in action as well as their wide circle of collaborators. Within the larger special issue, the compilation provides essential temporal context, extending from the early days of Billops and Hatch to their unfinished film and their son Dion’s vision for preservation and their continuing legacy. As a collectively authored piece it speaks to the symbiosis and social space that characterized Billops and Hatch’s decades of collaboration. The texts have been lightly edited for clarity.

Ada Gay Griffin (filmmaker/ development consultant, was distribution director in the 1980s and then executive director of Third World Newsreel from 1989 to 1998)1

It seems like I’ve always known Camille, because she was a multidisciplinary artist who got around, who was in very many different communities that intersected and continue to intersect in New York City. She was part of the visual art scene, the printmaking scene that centered on Bob Blackburn’s printmaking workshop, she was a filmmaker and a film aficionado. I think I met Camille soon after the release of Mississippi Triangle (1984).2 I remember because the first conversation I had with Camille was about that film and how much she appreciated it and understood exactly where the filmmakers were coming from. Camille was curious and also had some knowledge about that history (of Chinese in the Delta). It was in that conversation that I found out she was a filmmaker and artist and that she knew a lot about Black art as well. That was the other circle that I knew her from: the circle of Black artists, her contemporaries in New York City (people my parents’ age) like Betty Blayton-Taylor, Faith Ringgold, Ann Tanksley.

She always wore colorful tunics, blouses, and jackets, and loose-fitting capri-length “slacks” (a Camille sort of word) adorned with jewelry gathered from traveling the world to places like India and North Africa. She wore cornrows radiating from a central part and gathered into two braids that framed her warm and welcoming mustachioed face highlighted by large eyes rimmed by thick black eyeliner and mascara.

Figure 1.

Promotional material for the String of Pearls theatrical exhibition in Washington, DC, and Chicago, July 7, 2023. Courtesy of Third World Newsreel.

Figure 1.

Promotional material for the String of Pearls theatrical exhibition in Washington, DC, and Chicago, July 7, 2023. Courtesy of Third World Newsreel.

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Camille financed their films with savings, and selling her own art work, forming a nonprofit organization named the Hatch-Billops Collection, which regularly released artists’ writings in a collection titled Artist and Influence. When money got tight, Camille would threaten to sell a painting she owned by Harlem Renaissance artist Palmer Hayden.

Camille was pragmatic about living in a world where she had something to say and wanted to get it out. With a unique and special perspective, [she was] very brave. Making a film about the daughter she gave up (Finding Christa), kind of breaking the tropes that come out of the Black community about how we are loyal to each other and being related in all kinds of ways that don’t stand up to scrutiny. “Don’t ask too many questions when you’re speaking about people’s family members.” Camille was very young when she gave up her daughter and, ironically, the daughter found her. The film is called Finding Christa, but it’s really about Christa finding Camille. And that’s OK.

I remember arguing with her about who was going to edit her next film, whether they were the same editors I was interested in.3 She recommended Holly Fisher to me but she wanted to work with Holly too, so there was a little bit of competition on crews.4

Camille first brought the film Suzanne, Suzanne to Third World Newsreel. She came up to me and said, “Y’all are Third World, right? Well, I’m Third World!” We would put her film in the catalog and pointed her to as many festivals as we could. She did a lot of the marketing materials herself. At that time, initially, we were distributing the films for rental and sale as 16 mm prints. We would handle the transactions, and she would get us prints from the lab. And while we hoped Camille would bring us her other films, it was not expected. But she did bring her other films to us. And we knew whatever films she chose to bring us, we would support and promote them.

She got along very well with the people at Third World Newsreel. She understood us, she trusted us. We weren’t just mercantilists, shop owners. We were also involved in the cultural impact of moving image media, the legacy of storytelling, and building a community of culturally conscious people. She liked that we were Third World as opposed to just Black, she saw herself as part of an international community of color. She got our world view in terms of art. We were immersed in the world of art, social justice art-making, and that’s what connected people like her and other Black artists to Third World Newsreel.

Michelle Materre (renowned film producer/distributor/programmer/New School professor [Michelle passed in 2022])5

I think once you met either Camille herself or her work, you became enamored with both. And I sort of came to her work initially as a transplant to New York. I mean, once you get to the New York film scene her name immediately comes up. And then I can’t remember who actually first brought me to the loft in SoHo, but I remember having this amazing feeling of anticipation and excitement, because I was going to the loft. And once you got to the loft, you were amazed, overwhelmed, and immediately accepted into Camille and Jim’s world. And that’s who they were. They always accepted anybody who came through there because if you came through there, you knew about them from someone else. And if you happened to come during martini hour, which was anytime between like four-ish in the afternoon till eight to ten at night, you definitely were partaking with them in some martinis. But those two were just an amazing couple and so talented. And the work was, it’s all one, like all of the arts converged.

I think that they (Camille and Jim) lived their work. Their work was their lives, and it was all one. There was not any separation. And so they didn’t wake up in the morning and say, “Oh, no, we’re not gonna do it that way.” They just did it, and this was part of who they were. Camille filmed her family endlessly. I mean, they were used to her being in their faces with the camera. But the fact that all of them allowed, allowed us to see that, that kind of dysfunction in their family, which none of us—I mean, everybody’s always trying to put that stuff behind closed doors. They were accustomed to that. And I don’t think they felt it was painful at the time. I think they probably felt it was pretty cathartic at the time, actually. And so, and again, it was them being used to Camille being there in their faces, like nonstop.

I continue to talk about Camille as though she’s still here, because I think that’s how much influence she has on me. I always considered her to be one of my mentors and would reach out to her, and she would reach out to me for advice on some things some people just wouldn’t understand. But because of her background as a Black woman dealing in this world for so long, and she would usually have the answer, or at least she would know which questions that you should be thinking about. And that was the key, I think. I think that was the key. And I think that comes out in her work, too.

Paula Heredia (award winning filmmaker and editor of Finding Christa)6

My connection with Camille came through Larry Garvin, my partner, who had worked with Jim Hatch. They had produced a number of theater pieces in a very avant-garde way, and Camille was part of this, producing theater in lofts, on Thirteenth, Fourteenth Street, and Broadway before they actually bought the loft where they lived in the rest of the time. So I knew them through the arts. Camille was a fine artist in many different mediums besides being a filmmaker, and many of her talents come from that. We were friends before I worked on the film, and when she approached me to edit the film, I was like, “Oh, well, either we’re going to end really well, or we’re going to end really badly.” She was a very strong woman, and you didn’t even know how things were going to go, but it went really well, and here I am.

It was a perfect match. My background is in fine arts as well, and I came to film later, with little regard for the formality of the form, a healthy disregard for the form, I would say, and they had no regard for the form at all. They were artists who were using multiple mediums, and Finding Christa, it combines all that, combines a little of performance, a little of theater, and a little of writing and a structure that is, is structured like a book. Influences of Jim as a writer, as a theater person, are very much stamped into the film. And there was this quality that also reminds me of Peter Schumann from the Bread & Puppet Theater. They were doing art with whatever you have in your hands, and film. They were not doing video. These are the times where people were shooting film, acetate. Every foot of film was really costly. You were not shooting twenty hours and seeing what you had there and then decide that you should use five minutes. And Camille and Jim were always very careful about how much they were shooting, how many takes something would have. They didn’t want to spend too much money in development of the film or anything, or transcribing scenes, for nothing. So we were sculpting something in the way she would do her own art. It’s like, ah, do we need a piece of paper? Let’s get a piece of paper. Do we need a piece of clay? Let’s get a piece of clay. “So what do we need to tell the story?” The telling of the story was much more important than the form itself. And I was in heaven. I mean, for me, it was just like, that’s why, as afraid as I was of her personality, when we got into what was the creative process, we were totally connected. The three of us were really connected. So the process was very enjoyable throughout.

I think that, yes, they worked with many people and they involved many people in their work, but I think that that richness of talent that they surrounded themselves with, it was for something that I think is key to their legacy, which is how many people they helped, they supported their work, how many people they helped to develop in their own art. So when they came to do these crazy projects, everybody was there to help them. The pay was very little, but everybody was willing to do anything that they say because they probably had already touched their lives, especially artistically, and had been generous enough that people would come back and say, “Whatever you want, here we are.”

If she had been, or if they had been, concerned about following certain rules and maybe making it prettier, because, the production values could be better. And I go back to that first scene [in Finding Christa] because I wish that the acting in the first scene was better. I mean if you’re a filmmaker who is trying to follow certain rules, you say, well, you want to have a good acting moment, you want to have good lighting. There are certain things that you will think about. They were not concerned about that. They were concerned about what she needed to say and how much it was going to cost and how long it would take. Who was gonna do it, who was going to shoot it. That’s, “OK, shoot, one take, fine.” Oh, someone else would’ve thought, “Well, maybe the acting could be better. Maybe the lighting would be better. Maybe I just need to move them a little farther this way so that it’s not a flat scene.” They didn’t care. They knew what they wanted to say. And they had a device, and they had a camera, and they had a friend who did this, and the other friend took the picture. And that’s the scene. Do it.

Regarding the story of Finding Christa: Let’s remember the period, too. We’re talking about the late 1950s. And we’re talking about an African American woman who was herself different. Yes, she represents a lot of her generation and a lot of people, a lot of women. But Camille was unique, and being unique at the time must have been weird, weird inside her. It’s like, “What I’m supposed to be feeling is this, and I don’t. I’m supposed to be wanting this, and I don’t.” She had long conversations with herself about who she was and what she wanted to do, and not that she didn’t try things. I mean, even keeping Christa for four years was trying to belong, trying to do what she was supposed to do. I mean, you see in the film, that baby shower. I mean, that baby shower was totally not Camille, but there she was trying to be the woman that others want her to be, but she already knew who she was, and she spends the rest of her life being very blunt about, “I am not that person, and this is who I am.” And she came out in times when that was not supposed to be happening, both racially, as a woman, and also as the woman of the time. So I think that Finding Christa is a very good example of how she decides to write her own story and be blunt about what nobody really wants to hear from her. And you see it in the interviews, people are very uncomfortable. And she just goes after, “This is who I am.” And the way the whole film is conceptualized and written and all the scenes where she has a script, an improvised script, but a script, like the first scene that we saw in the trailer, they’re badly acted. But the important thing about that is that that’s what she wants to say, and she says it. “I had a daughter, and here’s my daughter, and this is the story that I’m gonna tell you.” And she tells the story in her own way.

I go back to the fact that intention was more important than anything. So that’s how the creative process happened. We had all these elements, and then what was the intention? And everything had an intention in their mind, more than a thought behind a structure or a thought behind a form or being consistent about, “Oh, this is a documentary, and we should, be intercutting people talking,” or that’s why everything can be cooked together. So for example, there was an intention to highlight Christa’s performing career. This was a way that Camille was paying Christa to let her be part of this. It was a little exchange. So the intention was Christa needs to sing because she was going to use this film to advance her own singing career. So therefore, the intention is: this scene has to be in.

Figure 2.

Still from Finding Christa. Pictured here are Christa and Camille. Courtesy of Third World Newsreel.

Figure 2.

Still from Finding Christa. Pictured here are Christa and Camille. Courtesy of Third World Newsreel.

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Camille and Christa were not collaborating. This was not a collaboration. This was, “I need you to do this and because you need to be in the film, but it’s my film. I’m not even going to tell you how I’m going to use it.” And Christa had her own requests about, “I want to be a singer, and I need you, if I’m gonna be part of your film, I need to be showcased in a way.” So they collaborated on that, but it was not a collaboration of being part of the film or even seeing the film as a work in progress or anything. No, she did her thing. She came back for the screening at the end.

I don’t see it as exploitation. I think that it certainly was a complex search for both of them, from both of their parts to find common ground and find what it meant to be a daughter, what meant to be a found mother who didn’t wanna be a mother. But, something, obviously Camille felt the need to respond to that letter [that Christa sent in searching for Camille] and to, meet Christa, so there was something very clearly from their part to, a clear search for that. But they were complex people, and I think that probably Camille was more complex than Christa. I think Christa was a much more straightforward girl, but Camille wasn’t, and so it was not an easy relationship between them, and that’s why I think that it took years even for that film to be able to happen. And the relationship later after that was also, ups and downs. But so when they, I would imagine this in conversations, I was not part of that conversation when they came to terms and Camille convinced her to be part of it. She was happy that that story would come out. Christa was happy about it, but there was this negotiation. So, “What am I gonna get out of this?” Or, “I want this,” and maybe it’s not what I’m gonna get out of it, but I’m sure as a daughter, she’s asking for things. And this is a genuine way for Camille, saying, “Well, I want my daughter to have a singing career. I want to support that, so this story, this singing moment in the film is my way to give it to her.” And, was it enough? Did Christa feel that it was enough? Probably, I don’t know, probably not. But that’s the complexity of the relationship.

Question about if there were clips of the film left out that you feel should’ve been left in: There was very, very, very, very little. This is what I say about the way Camille and her team worked. There was no waste. One take. There was the home movies that you see in the film. There was very little. It feels that there’s a lot of it, but even that, we probably used, the last frame, maybe one frame is out. I mean, there was just very little material. And the process was, in comparison with many other films that I’ve done where I have a thousand hours of footage, and the challenge is how you make a thousand hours into a coherent hour or two. But in her case, it was more about the process. How do you make a film that is very much about the concepts and the stories with very little, I mean, it was very little. So there’s not much “outs” in that film at all.

George C. Wolfe (playwright, director, filmmaker)7

I moved to New York in 1979. Now New York 1979 was very different from New York 2018. It was an insane place. There was a woman named Josie Dodson, who I was very close to, who was Camille’s half sister. I was moving, probably, every other week in New York City so Josie was sending me some money for Christmas. She sent it to Jim and Camille, because she didn’t know where to find me. I walked into the loft so I could get my money—my Christmas present—and I saw those books and I saw all that art and Jim and Camille must have seen the pathetic look in my face because she said, “can you type?” and I went “yes.” She said, “do you need a job?” I said “yes” and they hired me. And I would type. I would mix glazes. I would babysit for that annoying cat Shango who would come over and smack you in your face when it wanted some crunchies. It became my home. I could not and would not have survived the first five years of my life here were it not for Jim and Camille. And Camille, I would ride with her and go places, and she would be like this tour guide, and I would be looking around and she would go “No, no. If you going to survive New York, you can’t see everything, you’ve got to choose what to see.” Then another time she told me this story, and I will clean up the language a little bit. She said, “there was this man walking down 14th street and he saw this naked woman. He went over to try to grab and feel on her.” She said, “he saw sexual possibilities when what he should have seen was madness and it was just to say ‘look and see.’ Assume nothing about this city.” Assume nothing.

And also one of the things that was extraordinary about them was the rigor, the rigor, of doing that art. I had this sense of that but being in the presence of watching Jim work every day, all day on a project, watching Camille do her work over and over do you understand? Clearly art was not a pronouncement. It was a verb. Art was something you work at all the time. They created for me in this extraordinary way, a profound understanding of the responsibility of an artist, the rigor of being an artist, the demand of being an artist. Because it wasn’t something that I imagined. It was something I saw every single day that I showed up to go to work there. One time I showed up, I had no money whatsoever. I had maybe a subway token. And I stopped there, I think, to pick up something, and Jim—I don’t know, again, they could read me—he opened up his wallet and put 20 dollars in my hand. He said, “‘take this’ I don’t need it!” He said “take it” and it was just these moments of care and decency and warmth and grace and heart. And Camille was also “and now we’re making films” and “now I’m going to do something else.” “I am my own definition of artist and sometimes I’m going to tell stories this way and another time I’m going to tell stories that way but I do not claim or acknowledge any boundaries on what I can and cannot do.”

And you read theory about what art should be but it’s another kind of thing to be in the presence of two authentic artists and it’s this idea of their entire being; their souls, their hearts, their skin, their outlook on life was all connected to the stories that they told and the stories that they believe and the lives that they live. They live as artists, they are artists. It was how I learned how to survive New York, it was how I learned how to work, it is how I learned how to tell stories, it is how I learned every single thing from the five years when they welcomed me warmly, generously, unconditionally, totally into their home. I remember when my play The Colored Museum happened and it was…I could live, and I had money and I could relax, and she went “Now,” she said, “that’s nothing compared to what you have to do next. And nothing compared to what you have to do after that.” And I looked at her and she went [makes a face]. And it was then that I realized that Josie Dodson, my dear, dear friend, was an extraordinary human being because she knew I could not have survived New York had I not met them, and her sending the money there was her delivering me to people who would protect me and guide me and lead me and teach me every single thing that I know and I can honestly say unconditionally I would not be here, I would not be the functioning human being that I am were it not for the time that I spent with them.

Dorothy Thigpen (filmmaker, entrepreneur, former executive director at Third World Newsreel from 1998 to 2014)8

I enjoyed working with Camille, but I was also a little bit intimidated by her [laughs]. I met Camille when I first moved to New York and started working with Women Make Movies, so I knew Camille to be a “character, an interesting character.” I was working in fiscal sponsorship and workshops there [WMM] at the time, so I would meet her when she did a workshop for us. I also remember seeing her walk up and down Broadway as the office I was working in was near her loft at that time. I would see her with her hat, makeup and stuff and just think “what an interesting woman.”

When I came to Third World Newsreel, she already was distributing with us. She would bring in a certain amount of [DVD] copies of her films for distribution, but only a few at a time. We didn’t keep copies of her films in the office, so when we got a few orders, she would bring DVDs in for us. I didn’t have a role on any of her shoots, but she did invite me to the studio and to be part of her Artist and Influence series. I was really flattered that she asked me. Her films had an impact on me because I really hadn’t seen that perspective, and I’m always really impressed with the way she was able to tell a story about personal experiences with her family. It made a big impression because I remember feeling that I haven’t seen an independent film like this before or a story like this before.

Louis Massiah (filmmaker, founder and executive director of Scribe Video Center, Philadelphia)9

I guess I really first met Camille and Jim through their films rather than in person. And I have to say I really was afraid of Camille to be quite honest, I mean before meeting her, because it seemed like this was a personage of extraordinary power that I didn’t know if I could really handle it. And then I found her to be one of the most generous, open people, but also did not bite her tongue about what she felt and also was really tremendously supportive.

Figure 3.

Camille Billops and Billops’s nephew, Keith Erskine, in Take Your Bags. Courtesy of Third World Newsreel.

Figure 3.

Camille Billops and Billops’s nephew, Keith Erskine, in Take Your Bags. Courtesy of Third World Newsreel.

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I just want to give a story about Take Your Bags. That film came about as a result of the 1998 National Black Arts Festival in Atlanta that was curated by Dwight Andrews, the wonderful composer who was the music director for most of the August Wilson plays. He also teaches at Emory. So Dwight was the artistic director and asked me to be the film programmer for the festival. And I really wanted to find some way to see if Camille could be part of the festival. And then I realized that one thing that is seldom asked of filmmakers is to create new work. Oftentimes when there is a film festival, you want to show your work but what I think is even more precious is to create new work. So the idea was we asked four filmmakers: Camille, Reginald Hudlin, Leslie Harris, and Charles Burnett, to create four films on the subject of “Homage” and gave them a little bit of money. It was not a lot at all. And that’s really how Take Your Bags came about.

But I just think for me and so many other filmmakers, the Hatch-Billops Collection really became this home, a place where we shot our work, where you got fed and feted with martinis. I don’t drink a lot but there I do. But anyway they’re just extraordinary people. Jim, Camille, greetings! Stay strong and thank you for all you’ve done.

Al Santana (filmmaker/painter/cinematographer, worked with Camille on Mama and Papa Lala)10

I always thought her films were innovative, different, and she dealt with subject matter that was somewhat tough to deal with. I think she got some criticism for a film about her daughter, Finding Christa.

But you can’t criticize people for basically living their lives, and I think that is what she did. She basically documented her experience, and that is what it was. But I always thought her films were just different, not the usual documentary fare, and they weren’t really documentaries. Some of them were just experimental and I thought she took chances and was challenging the status quo in terms of the kinds of films she was doing.

My experience working with her was interesting. We worked together on her last film, which I do not think was completed, but she was insistent on shooting 16 mm film at a time when video was really sort of taking over in terms of just the whole economics of it and everything else. And one of the issues there was the budget. And Jim was asking me all the time “are you sure we can do this on film or can we do it on video?” And I would tell him we could do it on video and then transfer to film later on if that is what she wanted to do to have a film, a 16 mm film.

But she was insistent on shooting on 16 mm film. And her vision for the film was very expansive. Sometimes we would shoot long, long scenes, because in terms of editing, you can’t recut a scene if it’s not there. You can’t cut what’s not there so she would shoot long, long scenes of very ethereal kinds of images [such as] clothing blowing in the wind and that kind of thing. And her budget couldn’t stand it, so I think we just ran out of money pretty quickly.

She was old school. That is what she worked on before and that is what she wanted to work on and I think the idea—I mean the beauty—there’s a beauty in 16 mm that I think she really enjoyed looking at, so I think that was part of it, but I think she saw a value in it above video. But she was always challenging, so I enjoyed working with it because she always challenged me to think and do something a little bit differently.

Jim was very supportive. Trying to get to Jim was a little bit tough because he was sort of like on the side. He wasn’t so much engaged until it came time to tell the stories and then he and Camille would engage in very long storytelling sessions on film, which also affected the budget. But he was very supportive of her and very supportive of the film process and that’s the way I kind of saw him.

There are a lot of funny stories. At four o’clock every day they had a session. They would have what is the drink that they drank? I think it was martinis. They were going to make martinis. I’m not a drinker like that. So, they said, “would you like to have a martini? At four o’clock we are going to have a martini,” so I said, “OK I’ll have a martini,” but I had no idea about the strength of this martini! I drank the martini and I went downstairs to get my car to go home and I sat in my car for an hour and a half because I could not drive and that’s when I realized, if these people are doing this every day at four o’clock it’s amazing to me. I don’t know how they do it! Then, of course, there were Camille’s jokes, which I can’t even tell those jokes because they were X-rated so I’ll just stop there but she told a lot of off-color jokes.

Roselly Torres (TWN distribution and marketing director)

Filmmaker Camille Billops used to call Third World Newsreel’s offices periodically. In each one of our long telephone conversations, she would remind me that Third World Newsreel was her sole film distributor and that she had no intention of signing with other distributors. She supported what we were doing and believed that her film works matched TWN’s mission to promote the work of filmmakers of color and social justice films. TWN’s mission also aligned with her journal publication Artist and Influence, which featured hundreds of interviews with artists and cultural workers of color. With their annual journal, which was their catalog of oral histories, Camille and her partner James Hatch wanted to promote the work of other artists and filmmakers unafraid to include social justice issues in their artworks. For Camille, TWN was more than a film distributor, it was part of a network of collaborators fighting against racism in the art world.

During those phone calls, Camille would also update me on her seventh and final film, an autobiographical documentary about her relationship with James. She planned to fund the film with a mix of grants and by selling her art, which was a strategy that had worked for her in the past. I remember the day Camille called our offices to announce that the filmmaking duo could not afford to pay for the expensive postproduction process and were giving up. Shockingly, their last project would remain unfinished because they could not find full financial support for their film.

When Camille and James passed away, the TWN team knew we had to celebrate their legacy by showcasing their six finished films in theaters nationwide. The film series release was postponed several times because of the pandemic, yet by the end of 2023 we had digitized five of the films, we had access to the restored version of Suzanne, Suzanne, received support from the Ford Foundation, joined forces with film booker Malkah Manouel, and exhibited the film in more than twenty-five independent art houses. Now that Camille and James’s films have been featured in theaters, and this journal has gathered new scholarship about them, maybe there is hope that their last film project will be completed.

JT Takagi (filmmaker/sound recordist, and current executive director of Third World Newsreel)

I’ve been connected to Hatch-Billops in various ways, most recently as the director of the organization that handles their films, Third World Newsreel. As an educational distributor, TWN has handled the Hatch-Billops films for several decades now, and it was in the hope of honoring Camille and Jim and refocusing attention on their work that we embarked on a pilot theatrical run in 2023, a first for us and a first for their collection of six films. TWN and others always knew that their work was unique and deserved great attention, but making their films more accessible to audiences has been difficult. This has been the effort and challenge of TWN throughout its existence: getting programmers, curators, schools, libraries, and their audiences to see the work of diverse filmmakers as necessary viewing. In the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement especially, there have been greater opportunities. We were recently able to secure some support from the Ford Foundation to do a pilot theatrical run of the Hatch-Billops films, and we managed to get over twenty-five theaters on board, both in the US and overseas.

Another barrier, though, was Camille’s protectiveness of their films. For a good number of years she didn’t want them to be digitized and only distributed them on DVD, and even then, would only give us DVDs when orders came in. Until she couldn’t physically do it any longer, she would go herself to the lab, order and pick up the DVDs she wanted, and drop by the TWN offices, in her broad-brimmed hat and elaborate outfits, calling out her sentimental insult, “Hello heifers!” and give us DVDs along with the latest gossip/complaints about filmmakers and artists. But at the same time, it was due to her protectiveness, and her excellent archiving, that we were eventually able to make high-level transfers of her films. She and Jim kept their prints in pristine condition at their loft (in a literal bank vault) and also at the UCLA archives, where the couple had sent prints and elements for storage way back when. This made it possible for the group IndieCollect to restore the Hatch-Billops’s first film, Suzanne, Suzanne (1982) in 4K digital, which had been placed in the National Film Registry in 2016. Once restored, the film repremiered at MoMA and was also part of the TWN theatrical run.

This archiving, both the intent and actions, made it possible for the Hatch-Billops Collection to exist and become an important repository for not only their film work, but Camille’s artworks, sculptures, and prints and Jim’s theatrical materials. In addition, the collection is an archive of their library of books, including their interview series Artist and Influence and the work of their artist friends. If you can imagine, this full-floor loft on Broadway and Prince Street (a now crazily priced area) housed not only art, a library of books and ephemera, but two full-sized kilns, and drawers and drawers of prints of not only Camille’s work but many other artists/friends. She would buy and sell for other artists and display work on the vast walls of their huge loft, which was a salon for gatherings and lots of film shoots as well.11

The loft itself is a wonder. The couple and a host of other artist/filmmaker types, including Jonas Mekas, bought their floors back in the 1970s when the building was cheap, in disrepair, and the neighborhood feared due to drug use and danger. Camille would rub it in all the time, telling us that if TWN had been smart enough in those days to buy like her, we’d have a nice big office. When we would tell her that the TWN folks then didn’t have the money, she would just sniff.

But their lives in that loft, and their art and activism, as Camille was also part of artists groups that protested museums’ disregard of women and Black artists, also gave them a platform to promote Black artists’ work, and feature creatives of color and their allies through their Artist and Influence series, which they recorded, first on tape and then on video, at their loft, publishing the interviews in volumes each year. I think everyone from TWN was featured at some point, actually.

Apart from TWN, though, I was also a sound recordist on three of their films, Finding Christa, Take Your Bags, and their last, unfinished film, Mama and Papa Lala. So I spent time in their loft where we did a great deal of filming for these projects. One thing about their films (and their son and cinematographer Dion talks more about this) is that they were on the one hand, meticulously planned and on the other, somewhat improvised. Having a specific idea for a scene, finding maybe it could not be done as originally planned then quickly coming up with a solution, and then when a crew member said “it can’t be done,” doing it anyway. I at one point told her that her loft had too much wooden flooring and windows to be suitably quiet for filming, and she asked what would make it less problematic. I told her putting sound blankets (a fancy name for moving blankets) all around would help, as well as hanging them over the windows. So she then calls me a few days later to announce she had bought (on sale) twenty of these huge blankets. Which we then coated the loft with, which made it, in fact, not so bad a sound situation. In terms of working with her, the scenes shot were often strange by standard film measures, but the ideas were always compelling, and I found both Jim and her relatively easy to work with. Any yelling on the set wasn’t aimed at me, so I was fine with that. And while she had very little money, everyone wants to work on what we believe will be a good, fascinating film, and of course, that’s what their films were. Plus she would also give us art prints. Oh, and I ended up with a lot of sound blankets afterward. I drew the line at the 4 p.m. martinis though.

Malkah Manouel (distribution coordinator, US—MUBI, theatrical booker for the 2023 A String of Pearls exhibition)12

On January 26, 2022, over two years prior to my writing this, I went to see Camille Billops and James Hatch’s newly restored Suzanne, Suzanne, which was screening as part of MoMA’s annual series highlighting the latest film restorations from around the world. JT Takagi from Third World Newsreel was invited to discuss the film, and after hearing about Third World Newsreel’s ethos, I immediately made a mental note to reach out to them in hopes of collaborating.

I had wanted to expand my work in freelance theatrical distribution as my position at Dedza Films, a young distribution company that focused on short films by people of color, had just ended a few months earlier due to an unfortunate lack of funding. Third World Newsreel seemed like the kind of place I could continue doing the work I loved at Dedza. We were working to share films by people of color with the audiences they were intended to be seen by, prioritizing the nourishment of our own communities rather than commercializing our stories and capitalizing on “diversity” quotas.

At the time of the screening, this idea was of course just a dream for me. Suzanne, Suzanne broadened my understanding of what was possible in a documentary. Camille’s artistry in telling stories so brutal and honest, with such grace and fluency, was something I would be immensely honored to share with those I hoped would be just as moved as I continue to be by her work. And so, with that, I took this dream with me upon leaving the theater.

Time slipped past me shortly thereafter, and I finally emailed Third World Newsreel in March. I messaged Roselly Torres, their director of distribution, and asked if they would be interested in working with a freelance theatrical booker. I hadn’t even mentioned my idea to work on Camille’s films at that time, but to my surprise and delight, Roselly eagerly responded that they were actually thinking of distributing Camille’s entire filmography as a retrospective. I, of course, immediately agreed.

In the autumn of 2022, we got the good news that TWN received a grant to cover the funds for this project, and we began working together. The films deserved the prestige of an international premiere, and luckily the programmers at the International Film Festival Rotterdam thought so as well. The films screened in Rotterdam in January of 2023, after which the retrospective opened at BAM in Brooklyn in February and we began a tour across the United States, ending with the UCLA Archives in October. The retrospective also played festivals and cinemas in the United Kingdom over the summer, and we had thirty venues screen the films all around the world over the course of the year.

Figure 4.

After screening at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in January of 2023, the A String of Pearls retrospective opened at Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) in the United States. Courtesy of Third World Newsreel.

Figure 4.

After screening at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in January of 2023, the A String of Pearls retrospective opened at Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) in the United States. Courtesy of Third World Newsreel.

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Before the theatrical run began, I hired three fellow freelancers to help us get the word out. Clementine Narcisse, a filmmaker and editor, created our series trailer; Xan Black, a graphic designer, created our series poster and promotional assets; and publicist Allison Lambdin handled press for the series. This included our announcement of the theatrical release along with our trailer placement in the trades, mentions in publications like the New Yorker, and coverage of the films themselves, including Melissa Anderson’s review for 4Columns.

I’m proud to say that this was a dream team made up of female and nonbinary talent, all under the age of twenty-five, and it was a blessing to work with such passionate collaborators. In the same vein, so many people I encountered as the theatrical tour went on, for example, exhibitors, programmers, writers, audience members, were all equally passionate about bringing more attention to the films. We received support from friends, fans, and organizations who helped spread the word of our screenings in their respective cities, writers who volunteered to cover the films in their local newspapers and film publications, programmers who took it upon themselves to find venues to screen the films in their countries, and the list goes on. I feel lucky to look back on this project now, and if I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t change a thing.

Dion Hatch (visual effects supervisor and cinematographer; James’s son and Camille’s stepson, and their lead cinematographer and title and effects person on all their films except Take Your Bags)13

My interest in filming started with my father’s Filmo, a spring wind 16 mm camera, made by Bell and Howell. Dad had filmed with it multiple times, especially during those years we were in Cairo. At twelve years old I was fascinated by the whirling noises it made, the small hundred-foot metal spools, the leather strap that held your hand around the viewfinder. I would wind it up and pretend I was filming the people on the street. In the 1970s on Eleventh Street, when I started living with Dad and Camille, he’d put it in my hands and say “go out and film something of importance. Doctor Shockley is giving some racist talk about genetics at NYU, and you’ve got to get over there and record it.” So, off I went with camera in hand, but unfortunately, they wouldn’t let me in since I didn’t have any press papers. I returned empty-handed, so Dad and Camille immediately made me a press badge. I was now reporting for Hatch-Billops Media. Back out I went but the event was stopped due to student protests, and I missed the opportunity. But I learned something: with a camera always act like you belong there, documenting social injustice requires determination; no shying away. I think at that time that’s what my father and Camille wanted to impress on me.

In 1976 we went to an American Centennial Celebration in Iowa. We took a whole bunch or roles of Ektachrome film and the Filmo and we photographed a small town doing tractor pulls and competing in pie eating contests. Why? That’s where Dad grew up. He wanted to visit his parents and to catch a bit of Iowa, the flavor of a small midwestern town. Camille came along. She went to Iowa several times. Obviously, her first visits to Dad’s hometown weren’t easy for her. I don’t think there was a single Black person around, at least not in Oelwein where Jim’s parents lived. When she would go there, you know how Camille would dress, really fine, all her different styles, her jewelry, she definitely stood out. I remember Dad said they went into a bar in downtown Oelwein and there was some tension with the locals when they walked in. Then one guy at the bar goes “Uh it’s OK, she’s Jamaican” and everybody nodded their heads and got friendly. So, Camille was there during the filming of the celebration, and she created some title signs to use for transitions in editing [because] we didn’t have sound recording. I don’t know where that footage is now. I think dad wanted to tie it into a later film we did of his parents. One which is still in boxes at their home, the Hatch-Billops Collection in New York City.

After graduation at CCNY, I went back to California, I got a job working in the title department of an optical house called Modern Film Effects. I was still working there when Camille decided, “hey let’s go out to California, I’m going to do a film on Suzanne.” They asked me to do the filming and bring my friends to help out. They’d pull in everybody. Family and friends. That’s how you get a production done. It’s with people you like and trust and you don’t spend a lot of money because they didn’t have a lot of money. I think they were very surprised at how much things cost over the entire process because for everybody it was a learning process. “You mean, OK that’s a negative and then we’ve got to make a print from the negative, OK, and then we’re going to use a work print and then we’ve got to splice that all together and do an edit?” Yes, it was a learning experience for all of us, especially how much postproduction would cost.

We were a very small crew, I was hauling the camera and sound equipment, setting up the lights, loading the film and shooting. As far as cameras, I used the CP16 (Cinema Products 16 mm) for Suzanne, Suzanne, after that all the other films were shot on the Arri 16BL and the Arri SR3 cameras.

Jim and Camille had a working relationship that was symbiotic. Camille was always the visualist. What she visually wanted to see and, what was most important to her, was her family from her point of view. We were going to visit her family and explore how her family viewed her before she left with Jim to Egypt. Camille was always in this kind of relationship with her relatives. And for her it was often difficult, but she needed to do it, document her journey.

Filming each day was always different, there was nothing scripted. It was jump in, figure out the best space, set up the lights, get the camera up, and then Camille starts asking questions of her relatives and none of us except to some degree my father knew what was going to be asked. Jim did, because he worked with Camille the night before figuring out what would elicit the best reaction wanted on camera.

Filming on Suzanne, Suzanne was done in the Los Angeles area at multiple locations. Early in the morning and in the evening we’d go out and film around the day’s location for cutaways in editing. I was just doing a quick review of Suzanne, Suzanne and A String of Pearls. In A String of Pearls there are a lot of cuts that we shot during the production of Suzanne, Suzanne. You can tell because it goes right to the black and white and then back to color and that wasn’t a stylistic choice at first, it was the choices of Camille and the editor.

Camille was a photographer, so she was always taking pictures, and her favorite 35 mm film stocks were black and white. I think she always thought you could capture more of a reality in people in that medium than you could in color. When Kodachrome came in she loved that too, with the vivid colors, more surreal than Ektachrome. Her use of color in film is especially noticeable in The KKK Boutique Ain’t Just for Rednecks, but in the beginning, it was really more her own experience with Tri-X (B&W film stock) and Double X in still photography that made her want to stay in that medium. She knew what it would look like and how much you could manipulate the look in printing.

Because I worked at various optical houses I could do the title work. For me, that was getting more involved in the post process. In the film Finding Christa, I rephotographed a lot of the old 8 mm family footage and still photographs. I would shoot the family photos on a 16 mm animation stand and then combine that footage into the movie on an optical camera.

I think a shift in Camille’s approach to filmmaking came in Finding Christa, where she begins to add dream-like scenes of her dancing as a child or playing fortune cards with Christa. This leads to the making The KKK Boutique Ain’t Just for Rednecks, a fantasy exploring racism. It was also a change to using actual actors and actors need to know what, where and when so planning in preproduction became essential. In her studio, Camille built small sets out of foam core, and made small cutout characters to visualize what she had in mind. Dad worked with the actors, rehearsing lines and songs and the poetry he had written.

In the small sets of foam core, Camille would move her characters, and she’d take still photographs of them in the sets and create storyboards. Each miniature set was one circle in hell, an idea from Dante’s Inferno, and each circle presents a question about racism; it’s the Fashion show, or Pick a Baby and others, each plays with our inner thoughts about race. The tagline for the film was The KKK Boutique Ain’t Just for Rednecks. Yes, not just rednecks, Camille would say we’re all racist to some degree and she was exploring it, jumping in feet first. In “Pick a Baby,” contestants have to choose the color of the baby they would like to keep. Camille asks us, if you’re given a choice who do you pick? It’s bizarre, it’s creative, and a different approach to a serious problem.

Ultimately, The KKK Boutique Ain’t Just for Rednecks was the most enjoyable because we were all working so close together. Judy Blum [artist Judy Blum Reddy] and Rico Anderson created fantastic costumes and props and built the sets with artist Jack White to match Camille’s miniatures. We were shooting on the fourth floor [an empty floor in the building below the Hatch-Billops loft on the seventh floor]. Shaun Wheeler was the camera operator, and his wife, June Delphia, was the assistant camera. She also took on some AD [assistant director] responsibilities like stopping people from drinking too much upstairs so when they got down to the fourth floor they didn’t fall asleep. Meanwhile, on the fourth floor we would set up all of the things Judy and Camille created for the scene and then we would call down just the actors and friends the scene required. Dad and Camille would rehearse with them and then we’d film.

So The KKK Boutique Ain’t Just for Rednecks was probably the most work intensive, and there were a couple of very long nights. It wasn’t like a documentary. They were now staging scenes and giving actors and nonactors lines, and Camille created songs and Dad created poetry for the characters. They were rehearsing, trying it out making it work, putting it together in a background of smoky fog and painted surreal backgrounds. All the sets were small so we had to keep the shots tight so you didn’t see any drop-off in the background. They were probably a maximum of twelve feet and maybe ten feet or less in depth. And we’d put in all the costumes and that’s the set for the fashion show. I ran around the city and found some disco floor lights for the runway. We’d set camera to cover the short space and enough light to get the depth we needed. Yes, the film The KKK Boutique Ain’t Just for Rednecks was a favorite of mine with of course Finding Christa and Suzanne, Suzanne.

That last scene of Suzanne, Suzanne, where Suzanne confronts her mother Billie, we shot in California. Mel Helstien, a close friend of Jim and Camille, was a puppet master. At UCLA he had a small space for his puppet theater, and we shot the end of the film there. Dad was asking the questions to Suzanne and Billie, working on getting a sincere dialogue between them. Camille was watching intently next to me. I remember specifically that moment. You see I was new in the business, I didn’t understand when you have something really good you just keep on shooting and when Billie broke out crying and Suzanne starting crying too, which is obviously the pivotal moment of film, I looked toward Dad to know if I should shut down the camera. Do we stop filming because this is such an personal moment? I remember looking to him and gestures to keep rolling, but we were running out of film. I literally could hear it. I looked at the gauge [and I saw there was] less than fifty feet left, then Suzanne and Billie hugged and I heard the film run out. They finished the scene and gave each other a big hug and we got it…quite a miracle.

Working with Jim and Camille was collaborative. They’d say OK tomorrow we are going to go here, so bring the camera and then I would say “OK so I could put the camera here” and they’d say “yeah that would be a good place to do it.” In the film A String of Pearls we shot a lot of the scenes at the Hansen Dam in Los Angeles. The dam is very close to where I was living. I used to walk there every day and I thought that’s a cool background, especially on a wide-angle lens; it would be a great location as well as a daisy field near the dam. That’s the scene where Camille’s cutting Jim’s hair surrounded by wild daisies. It’s interesting that Camille chose to use the daisy scene in The KKK Boutique Ain’t Just for Rednecks. She often would use outtakes from previous films and add them to the current project. Like in Suzanne, Suzanne, the song in the film was created by Christa and sung by Christa and Camille. This was added in 1982 many years after the film was finished. The harmony of their voices was perfect over the opening credits.

Figure 5.

Jim and Camille in a daisy field near Hansen Dam in Los Angeles, as seen in The KKK Boutique Ain’t Just Rednecks. Courtesy of Third World Newsreel.

Figure 5.

Jim and Camille in a daisy field near Hansen Dam in Los Angeles, as seen in The KKK Boutique Ain’t Just Rednecks. Courtesy of Third World Newsreel.

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I think it was during our shoot at Plutz’s [Camille’s childhood friend] home in Finding Christa: we are in Plutz’s backyard when Camille suddenly says “camera on me.” We were setting up to interview her friend, but she says “just on me,” and she sits down on the camera box and as I swing the camera around I mention there’ll be film equipment in the shot. Camille doesn’t care, “just start shooting me” she says, “I’m going to talk.” And then she starts talking about giving up Christa and what all her relatives thought about it and how none of them really wanted to take her child. It’s an honest moment. She’d been filming everyone else and listening to their opinions; it was a moment for her to speak her truth.

Of course, Jim and Camille understood that bringing in camera, lights, and a crew changed the way people react to situations so they worked very hard to trying to get her relatives to relax and just when they got used to the camera, Camille would throw in a zinger like “what did you think about me when I gave up Christa?” “Uh well, we uh…” Mr. Dotson replies, “uh uh well I didn’t know anything about it.”

She also had a way of getting people to open up. In Suzanne, Suzanne, her nephew Michael and her have a conversation in his small bathroom as he waxes his very large mustache about him becoming the patriarch of the family. In A String of Pearls little Michael says some outrageous stuff about he’ll be getting the house when his dad dies while his father is standing next to him. You could tell there were times she disapproves of some of the things they are saying but she never avoided the confrontation. It was necessary to ask the hard questions. Overall, I don’t think anybody was really uncomfortable. Mr. Dotson covered his ass really well, that is true, but everybody else is pretty open. Suzanne was very open about her drug addiction and what happened and why she thinks she wanted to really connect with her dad despite his abuse of her and her mother Billie.

Camille and Jim were the ying and the yang. Each of them had a strength and together is what made them a fantastic couple and good filmmakers. I was working in Hollywood at the time they were looking to start Suzanne, Suzanne and I was prejudiced with a lot of nonsense about how films should be made, i.e., you have to have a script with plenty of action and appeal to a large audience. It was good they pulled me out at a young age and got me started working with them. Yes, documentaries have so many forms. You can be in the Amazon chasing some butterfly by yourself, or you can be with Camille and Jim, speaking with family, talking about racism, and trying to make a difference to the norm.

At the end of their lives Jim and Camille wanted to work on a project titled Mama and Papa Lala. That was going to be supposedly their last film. It was never finished but that didn’t really matter. For them, as with many artists, the process of creating is all that matters. We are doing something now; we are pursuing something creative. Finishing it is putting it in a box and then what do we do? We need to be constantly changing and evolving. Jim and Camille knew and breathed it. It’s not like we’re going to sit around and say we’re done now. We have to keep it going and so Mama and Papa Lala is basically that, a work in progress.

I spent lots of hours talking to Camille about shooting digital and the reasons for that and what it meant especially in postproduction getting things done more efficiently in editing with music and effects to final mastering but she would not listen. No matter how I tried to convince her, she wanted to shoot on film. She had her friends at DuArt [labs] and she would say to me “yeah but once it’s on a CD then what happens when the CD player breaks? What’s the next thing and the next?” I mentioned hard drives and making backups. “No, no, no, it has to be preserved and it has to be on film and that is the only way it can be preserved.” I have a lot of respect for that and a lot of well-known directors agree with her.14

It’s important for me to mention that the Hatch-Billops Collection at their home at 491 [Broadway] on the seventh floor is a very special place. Jim and Camille didn’t just make really good films they also created a whole historical archive of Black artists. Their collection encompassed over 25,000 materials. Many of those are housed at the Rose Library at Emory University. There are over 1,400 interviews and thirty published volumes of Artist and Influence, which contain about roughly 200 of those interviews. Many of the interviews still need to be transferred and transcribed to make them available. The interviews need to be made accessible to anyone who wants to hear them. It will be a momentous task to get the entire collection digitized and made available. But that is my plan, that is my mission, that is what I have to do. There is no better outcome than to make sure that their name and legacy prevails and no better place for that than at 491 Broadway.

1.

Ada Gay Griffin email message to JT Takagi, May 15, 2024.

2.

Mississippi Triangle (1984) is a feature-length TWN documentary codirected by Christine Choy, Allan Siegel, and Worth Long that examined the relations of Chinese, Black, and white communities in the Mississippi Delta. Each director filmed separately in those communities. It is currently being preserved by TWN with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation, NY Women in Film and Television, and others.

3.

Ada was working on her film at the same time as Camille was working on Finding Christa.

4.

Holly would later work on A Litany for Survival: The Life and Work of Audre Lorde, Ada Gay Griffin, 1995.

5.

ThirdWorldNewsreel, “TWN Evening Seminars: Finding Christa by Camille Billops and James V. Hatch,” YouTube, October 29, 2020. www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLUs4hjOiXc.

6.

ThirdWorldNewsreel, “TWN Evening Seminars.”

7.

Transcribed with George C. Wolfe’s permission, from his talk, included in “Tribute to Camille and Jim.” New York Public Library Performing Arts Theater, New York, New York, October 15, 2018. https://vimeo.com/296743726.

8.

Transcription of Zoom meeting between Dorothy Thigpen and JT Takagi, January 16, 2024.

9.

Louis Massiah, “Tribute to Camille and Jim,” New York Public Library Performing Arts Theater, New York, New York, October 15, 2018. https://vimeo.com/296743726.

10.

Transcription of Zoom meeting between Al Santana and JT Takagi, January 11, 2024. Mama and Papa Lala refers to Camille and Jim’s last, unfinished film.

11.

See the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University for some of their collection.

12.

Malkah Manouel email message to Roselly Torres, January 29, 2024.

13.

Transcription of Zoom meeting between Dion Hatch and JT Takagi, March 3, 2024.

14.

Camille was correct, the longest preservation media we have to date is film still.