'Til Tomorrow

Chilson will be back on the streets of Wrentham tomorrow. He promises. He delivers. For all those years, folks knew he'd produce. After the parade, the funeral, the voting day, you just knew he'd pack it in, 'till tomorrow. Ever 'Til Tomorrow

What is so darned attractive about Chilson is his dependability. A rare enough commodity in these days of celerity, bustle and drugs.

The fellow took the time. Did the job. No-one can fault him. He remembers and records his history.

He becomes a giant. One that merits eternal praise. I can only praise him.

My essay is in three parts. First, I feel his greatest contribution is his inclusivity. Everything is important. He covers it all indiscriminately. Who knows what might be useful to those appreciating his work in the zero year, 2000?

Second is his deep love. It comes out all over. I shall deal with that. His movies cover the daily life, the pace, and style of the people who live in the town. He shows us costume, gesture, buildings, nature. Beneath the obvious, the facts of daily life, one sees shining through, the quality of being I call purity, the feeling that these people live very special and wonderful lives.

I am reminded of Walker Evans, the photographer, speaking on the poor tenant farmers in his and Agee's book, "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men." In this important study the photographer sees "not the poverty but the purity ...." The study looks at the lives of three families in rural Alabama during our long Depression. The people and the homes give off a special feel to the writer, Agee, and the photographer, Evans. The same feeling I get when I look at the movies of Chilson and the places he chooses to focus on. There is a quiet, a sense of timelessness, a feeling of holiness.

I have just read Belinda Rathbone's excellent biography of Walker Evans, in which she alludes to the style of photographic research, in the '30s and '40s, that grasped and challenged Evans. I think some of that style of work influenced Chilson as well. The reverence for the object of study and the desire to get it all down, for those of us to follow. In a curious way, perhaps, they knew others, like them, would come along and join their team, to tell it like it is, for the ages.

Purity is hard to define, as a characteristic of persons and groups of townspeople, say, but it is important to try. These folks of a few decades back, led a slower life than ours and one better suited to the clock of nature. Their overall quality of life, as seen in the movies of Stanley Chilson, has an aspect of majesty to it that is apparent to me and I hope to other viewers. In his case it is not a purity derived from poverty, as is the case in Walker Evans' photos, but a purity derived from the closeness the subjects had to one another and to the natural surroundings of their small world. His love for these people comes out strongly in his portrayal of their lives. This love is evidenced in his depiction of his subjects as pure, innocent, guileless, kind, fine people.

Third, Chilson is responsible. He achieves, in his role as chronicler, as a visual historian. Along with this responsible miem, we find evidence of his peculiar, or should I say, idiosyncratic nature. His specialness. For instance, his penchant for people coming down stairs. He is a joyous type, loves ceremony, looks for a laugh; a positive sort of person who, if he went to one of those modern think tank sessions , would be characterized as having a positive mental attitude, a PMA. He is gonna tell a story, come what may, and he manages to do just that, with little fuss or seeming effort. He just goes about and does his job.

With that introduction I should speak now on his inclusive urge, the first of his traits I detect. It was common in the earlier decades. One finds it in Evans, as he took pictures of his America in the time period Chilson , also , was working. Walker Evans filmed poor people, subway riders, Cuban citizens in all sorts of daily activities.

The photographer wants to capture what is going to be lost. I must emphasize here how important it is for my listener on the tv to understand what I am suggesting here. He consciously is aware that the present he films will go by the board and that that passage will be a tragedy; one we will never get over. The witness, in this case, Evans or Chilson, knows that we, who are following, will need to know about this vanished America, so we can get on with the business of the 21'st century intelligently and carefully. This lost model of the '30s and '40s life is documented, so we may learn from it, and not repeat the errors we seem bent on making all the time. It is tragic that we lost that bucolic, slow and wonderful form of existence. What would we give to have it back today? We have the ability to dream up ways to replicate the style and quality of the life then . What we lack is the courage to try to return to the innocence and purity of the earlier time that Chilson, among other artists, portrays. We lost what we know now was a fine way of life. Perhaps, I am suggesting , Chilson , Evans, and other photographers of the time, knew they were witnesses at a sad event, one that told of a camelot we would one day seek to understand and even imitate.

The observer, the photographer, is a vehicle , a humble one, for the salvation of our nation. If he or she doesn't save it all, the pictures of the past, it will be a loss for our whole culture.

So Evans saves everything around him. Wherever he goes. Matchcovers, old signs, letters, pictures, string. He assembles collages with the detrita of his contemporary existence. Chilson does the same with his efforts at photography. He is encyclopoedic. In a way like the Lynds', the couple who wrote a book on Middletown, a typical American town, that was beginning to undergo the vast changes that befell our nation. The urge in the country was to do a complete analysis of a subject, so the wholeness could be appreciated the more in the years to follow. This togetherness of place is what we no longer have and need to get back. In the sociology of the Lynds' or the photography of Evans or Chilson, we see the whole picture and that is valuable to have. By so documenting the communities of the past, they were able to leave us models to emulate. These older forms of life are now gone and that fact is rued by our more eminent and thoughtful intellectuals today.

In a way Chilson is acting out his desperation. His sadness, that a way of life was changing before his very eyes. I think that, but cannot prove it in my looking at his hours of movies. I don't know whether the changes he saw made him sad, but I feel it somehow. He stays cheerful, while other photographers of the same period in America explore the underside of life here, the poverty and grime, illness and unemployment. It is necessary to remember that the times Chilson and others of his artistic bent lived through, were hard on the average citizen, what with the dislocations the depression fostered and the hardships faced by most who were not wealthy. Certainly the people in Chilson's work seem to me to be average or typical, or what I imagine passed for the everyday variety, good old American persons of the time. They weren't Rockefellers or Vanderbilts. Nor were they destitute. They were average, if there is really any such thing. They were denizens of a place, a small place, where a typical American life took place and Chilson chose to describe their lives in a positive way. His spin, to use some modern jargon, was upbeat. Charming, really, and yet, serious, at the same time.

We don't see hardship or poverty in Chilson's work. We have a cheerful, cohesive people, just doing their lives. That is what he sees around him, average people living the usual American lives of the time. That is what he reports. He is not political in the sense that he is a muckraker. Perhaps he is political, though , at some level, in that the world he portrays is cheerful and saccarine. His political statement appears below the surface as the opposite of some critic's stance. While the ones bemoaning the fate of capitalism expose the underbelly of our society, Chilson calmly tells the world everything is alright in small town USA and not to worry. I guess his politics is one of extolling the status quo. So in that sense he is , of course, political, and a conservative, at that.

It is the duty of the photographer, according to Walker Evans, to work toward a particular end. The best work has to have the ability to decribe the "extraordinary visual reality" of the time. Rathbone, the biographer, says that was on the mind of Evans, to get down on film the daily magic , the transitory depth of that time's daily life. Rathbone goes on to say that "the single most intriguing challenge to the photographer," is " how to capture the essence of a moment." And here she quotes the great Walker Evans. What is involved in the photographic enterprise is " swift chance, disarray, wonder."

All three traits are liberally interspersed in the work of Chilson. He shows what depth lies in the everyday lives of average persons. He shows us what a moment in time looks like in his Wrentham. His motion pictures become art. Art is but consciousness made tangible. Chilson does some fine art. His vision is powerful, as well as complete. He cares to say something with his images. What is that? Well, I leave that to the viewer. I guess the sense of what is art and what is not, is at the last analysis , subjective. I just get out of control when I see a thing that is special. Chilson is special. He just is. I can't explain it really, but he is. I play with his images by stilling his movies, his images that move. This process of freezing allows me the time to enjoy people and scenes of life at my leisure. I become in control of a fleeting image, in order better, to appreciate it. When I still Chilson, I see another dimension of his great movies. It gives me a further opportunity to tell the viewer of my work how interesting and great an artist the man really is. In the stilling, one continues to see the beauty and power of his creation, his movies.

Artifice is involved. You look at a picture of an old car or a person descending stairs and you get dragged into a dialogue.... with the picture. It happens involuntarily. The picture is like a drug, a margareta on a hot day, a shower in mid-July, like today when I sit and sweat before this infernal computer screen. Chilson knows how to engage the watcher. He just does. I don't know how he does it or why, really. I wonder sometimes who is this fellow. Why does he carry on this arcane show? I am reminded of two words in the old Greek, Skias Onar. Shadow dream. This is what his work is. I go into a dream of his making and get lost in it. In much the same way I get lost in Evans' pictures or Frank Stella's paintings of birds and flowers. Seems the case that that is what great art tends to do to us fortunate viewers. The stuff transports us. It becomes our US Air, our crack cocaine. Forgive me for the drug references, but I am reading about the famous Chambers brothers and their assault on Detroit in the '80s with a corporate drug organization of staggering effectiveness. I was wondering what this crack draw was like, that it could control a whole city with its power. Well, a piece of art does it to me every time. Like a drug. I go back and back to a poem, I won't bother you with which one it is, or a piece of prose, or a photo or a movie or a tv show or a garden in town, and I say, "Oh, my goodness." The object of my love or praise just overwhelms me. I call that art. Chilson is in the category of art for me. He is .

You look on one of his movie sequences, focus on a principal, one of the people in the movie and say, "what did you say?" I mean, you hear them talking to you, communicating as if they were in the room with you. As you would hear a painting by El Greco talk to you or a wonderful painting by N.C. Wyeth talk to you. I hope I have conveyed my message to you on why Chilson is so important. His inclusivity and believability give a coherence that will be useful to the ones that will follow and pick up on his vision. By being so large and varied an oevre, a work, his fims can be dipped into at so many different points. As one makes an effort to tell the times and appreciate the quality of the life humans led.

A great artist like Walker Evans again comes to mind when Rathbone , the biographer says, "he found he cared less about the present than about discerning what the present would someday look like as the past."

Imagine. Someone thoughtful enough to care about what the progeny would think, what the ones to follow like me would make of accurate, full treatments of American life in the '40s, the '30', the '50s.

Walker films the mundane. He wants to get it all in pictures. He is a bit promiscuous, one thinks. Does he really need all this? We get the picture. Only we don't, really. We definitely need his full view to get a picture that is accurate. We need what he films. We need the silences we perceive in his work. We need Evans' humor. We require his sense of decay, of a whole way of life. He gives us his vision, his feelings. His photos are shadow paintings of his feeling. They are not fotos. They are feelings. Feelings of the '30s and '40s, that will inform us in the zero year, 2000, of how it was . How it really was. Not a glowy, glossy life, a Life Magazine or Fortune Magazine. No, no. Not Hollywood, not some political party's view, not the view of a foto in a magazine ad for some product that could improve you and your family's life. No, no.

Evans gave a serious view of life in the '30s or in 1940 or 1950. He ever resists commercialization. He never worked well for money.

The same of brother Chilson. He labors in the mine of love with the rest of us. Money seems secondary. He covered his beat because it was there, he found it interesting and knew it would have some kind of value to some who followed, some day along the line. To make money off of it does not seem central to Mr. Chilson, or so I believe. I don't know whether he thought his work was art. I suppose that wouldn't really matter, but I wonder, is all. I believe he felt obligated to do what he did. Like Evans. Not for money or fame.

Chilson is not in the category of Walker Evans, as far as brilliance and range are concerned. I don't mean to imply that. They both, however, do the same thing. They engage in a comprehensiveness, an inclusivity, to the benefit of the ones to follow.... like me. Evans has a world-wide fame and acceptance he deserves. Chilson's art is a local one, of a more modest nature. It is the kind of work-pattern they have in common that I allude to here. They both saw the whole picture of a scene and tried to capture it. I believe they both did so.

And I am no Walt Whitman either. I write these words to save a few pieces of string for the ones to follow us; that they know how it was in the difficult year, 1995. I would like to mention Whitman on the matter at hand. He, too, cared to get it all down, plain and unadorned , in his poems. I quote Rathbone's book again. She says of Whitman the following; he aimed to achieve a "perfectly, transparent plate-glassy style, artless, with no ornaments." Rathbone argues that the style Whitman employed of just getting it down plain, was also the one employed by Evans. I get her drift.

That's about how I feel toward Chilson, as I summarize the first section of my piece , on inclusiveness. Chilson does a lot of filming. He is to be commended for his persistence, and for his perspicacity, both.

So often we have turned to Norman Rockwell or Currier and Ives to goose us into a mythic, silly past. I fall for it every time. I adore Rockwell, but I am smart enough , barely, to move to a brighter light and thus I locate the illustrations of N.C. Wyeth. The paintings, sketches and the like I retreat to see in the Needham Public Library. He is a child of Needham.

Wyeth's view of the earlier times, as it appears in kids' books and magazine ads, makes me cry. His paintings are so moving to me. I find it actually painful to visit with them. They are such works art and I feel so inadequate when I view them.

Well, Chilson is in a category of truth with me that rivals the level of truth I find in Wyeth, whom I judge a master-artist-illustrator. When you can lose sleep over a thing, it must mean it has your attention. Chilson's images move me a great deal.

He gets my attention more I would say than Rockwell or a well-known photographer like Margaret Bourke-White, who did pictures for Life. Good pictures, they were. She worked the same time as Walker Evans or Stanley Chilson did. Chilson seems special to me. He is better than an artist who cares to capture a surface truth. He goes below the surface reality to some essence that moves my emotions. In the way N.C. Wyeth affect me. In the way, Evans' work affect me.

Forgive me for relying so on Walker Evans. He is doing a review of six books on photography for a magazine. It is 1931. In his article he says something that seems to me to characterize the work of Mr. Chilson.

"There is a difference between a quaint evocation of the past and an open window looking straight down a stack of decades."

Enough, let us turn to love. Chilson's love.

One aspect of love is to treat things, photos, movies, as something that is sacred. Give me some time to explain the way Chilson goes about his work. Walker Evans went to the tenant farmers' homes and recorded the rooms, the furnishings, the bed, the wall. Rathbone says, "everything in the Burroughs' house was sacred."

If you look at Chilson's work carefully, you see the same thing. A child is no less important than the adult with it. A car filmed against a memorial listing the names of the dead, complements and fills in the solemnity of the scene. People who come down stairs are definite, purposeful; never desecrating the environment by heaving on the ground a wrapping from a candy bar or a spent cigarette pack. His actors are full, clean humans who float into our lives, on their own cloud, emitting sparks of specialness. Life is tidy in Chilson's mythic universe. Everything fits. Love rules. The love he feels moves through his actors and actresses and comes on us as a pleasurable, noble light.

His is a photography of loved ones. It seems it always is, with the great ones. With photographers and movie makers and other visualists whom we may call artists. I don't know who to compare him with. Look at Barry Levenson's, "Homicide on the Streets," on Friday nights on the tv for an amatory treatment of one's human subjects. The photographs of Paris at the turn of the century by Atget. The still figures of El Greco, the figures filmed by Evans. The recent movie,"Bridges of Madison County, " by Clint Eastwood, where the deep love he portrays overwhelms us.

Love, love, love.

There is nothing else.

There is no contrivance in such work as depicts love in a reasonable fashion. The great photography has an unspoken dictum to it, seldom mouthed. One has to be careful when seeing and recording something. So as not to hurt it, not to change it. Evans again. He says. "I never touch a thing."

He does not arrange the reality he will film. That would spoil it. He does not go to the dresser to move the comb a tad so it will photograph better or straighten a picture on the seedy wall.

Others do. Society photographers, portraitists, advertising photographers, shoot the perfect pizza, so Domino's can sell more of the stuff.

Chilson does not aggregate his subjects, like a fashion photographer or someone taking pictures of the third grade class at the Agassiz school in Jamaica Plain where I grew up. He captures their flow, not his own. It is as if there is an exterior reality he seeks to blend with his own idiosyncratic, inner reality. Together , the "out" and the "in" become art in Chilson's work. As is the case with any decent, authentic artist.

Chilson loves and he also gets carried off in his love. He disappears in his work. I must explain. Most people live. Mundane lives of poison ivy, traffic jams, being overweight, bored, something. The artist escapes all this. One time, Seferi, the great, Greek poet, saw a couple in his tourist country who had an aura to them. They were not bored, harried , tired or discouraged. They had a special exuberance, a kind of joy, that moved Seferi. He thought it unusual. He said of them they had "escaped from the nets of the world." The artist does that as a matter of course. Seferi did it all the time, although I doubt he'd admit it. The artist-lover disappears in his work. In her work-world.

Chilson's lost and found , both, in his work. He is it and it is he. One sees that from observing his film work. It is an act of transendance where the author pulls a disappearing act. Pretty slick, too. We see all sides of his love. He loves ceremony... his love of stairs and ritual around stairs. His love of locomotion as seen in cars, trains, persons, animals. His love for costume. The dress of his peers. All love. All Chilson hiding in pieces of his films. Invisible but there, nonetheless.

Chilson does what he does well. Largely anonymously. With grace.

He enjoins us to live, to love.

I will end this section on love with three quotes. The first is from Odyseas Elytis who gives us,

"We are all in our future. Let's go!

Music! Horses! Lights!"

That seems pretty plain to me. We need, like Chilson, to go forward confidently, with joy, to document our loved ones and our places of love. Our neighbors and the community we jointly inhabit.

Second, I quote the master, Seferi, that man and of course , woman , too, "should enjoy the great gift of life , this profusion of light." How lovely. How nicely Seferi states the need for brightness, for intelligence, for the light of day.

And last, I give you another master, one born in Boston, September 3, 1856. One who came to dominate Chicago with his skyscrapers, inspired as they were by nature. He covered them with flowers and leaves and vines and natural symbols. His ornament featured birds and other fine creatures he had seen growing up on his grandparents' farm in South Reading. The architect, Louis Sullivan , strides on long foot, into the drawing room to address a draftsman under his tutelage and control. I can hear him intone...

"Bring it alive, man!

Make it live."

The point is love conquers all. The Greeks, Elyty, Seferi, have their place to ogle at. Sullivan , his love of ornament that reflects nature. He incorporates nature into his structures to make them into organic, growing, and finally grown thing. He got to love nature as a child and it became his thing to cloak steel and stone in god's offerings in order to complement and complete what is god's and man's both. The huge structure became for Sullivan a glorious , joint statement, one that joined the supernatural with the mundane to exalt life and the marriage between the here and the there, earth and the heavens.

Chilson's love is Wrentham. He just sort of loves the place and it show. I can see Chilson now exhorting us with Elytian or Sullivanian phrases to go forward with the art of our lives. As he was doing so much of his life. Onward and forward with joy and resolve. With bravery and a tad of foolhardiness. So I see Chilson moving us in his own way.

Third and last, I wish to make a few comments on Chilson's strong sense of responsibility. He has that belief that if he doesn't do his work, he will have somehow failed. The feeling is strong in me when I tell of the Greek-American experience in Boston. It is a thing I have to do. I am called to it as an obligation. In Greek the word is katheikon. It is ever on the lips of Elyty and Seferi, too. Obligation. That is where I get it from. Chilson has it too. At least I think he does. He expresses his own specialness as a human being by exercising his feeling of responsibility to his community. He and the place go down a merry path together into the sunset. It is art he is doing, mainly because it is a deeply felt act he is committing. Not just the love he feels, nor just the desire to be inclusive, but it is art because he is acting responsibly to tell a tale that only he can tell in the way it is being told

I did a movie appreciation of the marvelous, Nancy Savoca, whose films depict life in Italian-America. I said of her what I feel toward Stanley Chilson. It concerns genius.

"Genius is when you can feel a thing and tell it somehow, against such odds."

Imagine Savoca making a Hollywood-type movie and having it come out as well as "True Love, " or her other two films," Household Saints", or" Dogfight."

Imagine this peculiar fellow, Chilson, going around, lugging all that photographic baggage, taking movies about his neighbors. Why? For what end? What drove him? I don't know.

I do know he feels something that I get from his work. That's where genius kicks in for me. His moving paintings, his movies, bring to life a life that once thrived. A common life, but one which was lovely.

It is lovely today, too, thanks to Chilson.