The Working Life
July 20-22, 2006

The 2006 Symposium explored the working life as a subject of amateur and non-commercial film, paying special attention to moving images that offered a new historical, cultural, and critical understanding of work since the late 19th century. By examining moving images of the working life made by amateurs and for noncommercial purposes, this Symposium examined the details, diversity, and perspectives on work that often escape recognition in mainstream media representations.

Read the 2006 Symposium program (PDF, 667KB)

For more information about the 2006 Symposium and its presenters, contact Northeast Historic Film.

MOVING PICTURES:

(Clip 1: Transgressions)

I know I
am not supposed
to be writing our women
digging their greens, tres-
passing in another class,
but this ground is composed
of my people

and I am on my knees and this is a knife.

(Clip 2: All in Good Time)

   A woman in her handsewn dress
relays canners of washwater heating on the range since
it's turning out to be a good drying day. Piles
of handmade and couldn't be made clothes for seven sorted
around their new lordlike wringer from Ivan Braun's.

   Milkpail, scrubbed and scalded...
The frothy hay-seeded strainercloth clean again on the pulley line.
Yeastdough rising in a three gallon pot. Cookingdishes soaking
awaiting free hands and next boiling teakettle rinse.

   Four rhubarb pies men will vie for
at some benefit bakedbean supper crowning towels
on the linoleumtacked sideboard she's been up since five.
Only so much time before the youngest get home on the bus
their father out at four. The car's at the mill

    where would she go she never shops.
No clubs. Chauffeurs the kids after extra trips to keep it,
and him when he's had too much. Work and more work
she hollers when she's had it they hardly ever hear her laugh

   but sometimes she plays Amapola
on the piano and The Beer Barrel Polka she doesn't even
need notes and she sees to it any who want have lessons long
as they want in town with Faye MacLeod.

(Clip 3: Piano Lessons)

There’s always an old piano to be found.

Small hands that weed, haul, pitch, pick and stack
need a piano as much as a piano needs them.

A child’s thinking she no longer wants lessons
   can coincide with a father’s first traction
       and leave from the mill and news
       there’s no more money
               or rides.


(Clip 4: Making Maybaskets)

chasing kissing chasing kissing

Your mother trades her eggmoney for pleats of tissue
and crinkled crepe paper at the 5 & 10 the colors of arbutus trailing/ on the ledges...
off the Waldo-Hancock Bridge where... [writers] will someday come to work and run
come to breathe in what people imagine you girls imagine about those sailors
off those tankers and barges come to load and unload. Don’t go down town
there’s a boat in...lest you pick all Bucksport’s rare wild rose yarrow on the way to the wharf,
encounter rainforest you don’t know about emotions, become women right there on the dock emerging with foreign flowers between your souvenir breasts for the rest of your life.

(Clip 5: Incendiary)

She takes them to be consultants
when they sit beside her
on the Bangor to Boston flight
discussing “the lesson from Bucksport.”
You know, “dialoguing the situation,”
one actually says.

“So what!”
“It was only five thousand and
it was extra anyway.”
“Only a perceived loss,”
You know, “values” they say.

She strains under her seatbelt
against their sickening tone. Them.
She is a child in the frigid dark carrying
finger biting pails from the well
to the cows, trip after slippery
mitten soaking trip; because
a barge is in and has to be loaded and
it is her father’s “value” to work
all the overtime he can get
to make ends meet and
the ends don’t. Meet.

“I hesitate to call it sabotage,”
“but we expected morale
to be improved by now.”
“Problem is,”“they’re reminded
of the cut every week on payday.”
“The solution to that is to pay them
once a month,” one says.
One smiles and says.

When the pilot announces
changed landing plans,
(out of his hands, he says)
they jostle him through their
textbook talk. Wouldn’t want him
working for them, they say.
“Must be a union man,” they say.

“Asses!” she wants to answer,
her smoldering anger threatening
to take them down.
And don’t they think it possible
that union people ever travel
twenty miles upriver, or fly anywhere,
or don’t they care how disgusting
their “dialogue” is in a laboring state
or don’t they care
or don’t they care or don’t they care?

(Clip 6: Another Long)

Comes back a dark
before the 4 o’clock
shift lets out. Comes back
the deep freeze
safe to slaughter in, safe
to hook the summer’s beef
critter from a north porch
rafter in, to hang lean
suspended months
in crystal state for children
to whittle chips from
to fry after county basketball
games in town while friends
sip Coke at Pop Hill’s.
For a wife’s hands chapped
from outside work
or work inside in a house
cold in as out
for a wife’s chapped hands
to carve stars from
ragged slices of the-sky’s-
the-limit to fry in that rugged
castiron pan that is his entire
universe raised on salt pork
and biscuits the tenathem
swearin’ his family’ll never
go to bed hungry, for a wife’s
chapped hands to have on the table
by the time P.D. comes through that door
from unloading hundredpound
bags of tapioca for test-coating paper
from that day’s #2-machine’s run.
Rigger. Before his pie.

These are the days of men dying in blizzards walking home from work at the mill.
These are the days of accidents in the woods.
These are the days of nothing but working to keep warm.
These are the days of children and old people going up in awful sorrowful smoke.
These are the days of tomorrow’s flaming lips

(Last Clip: Hush with me...)

before we punch out. I know you’re tired from your work
and so am I, and we should be out raking in the fields. But we will most likely
never crew again, so here’s where the heart comes in.
I’m telling you, you could hear it in their sighs if they could realize
what you do, and that you are here amongst them right now hashing it over,
how to show the truth for the visible--and invisible--workers of the world,
for which, there is no end.

With the exception of the third and last clips, these poems and fragments of poems can be found in their entirety and contexts in Ranzoni’s collections from Puckerbrush Press, CLAIMING (1995) and SETTLING (2000), available through any bookstore. Signed copies may be ordered directly from her at pranzoni@aol.com.

Patricia Smith Ranzoni was born in 1940 upriver in Lincoln, Maine, to a young Canadian-American wood-cutter and farm girl. For work at the papermill when her father returned from W.W.II, her family located to Bucksport where she grew up and where she now writes from one of the subsistence farms of her youth which her husband and children helped keep in the family. She worked her way through graduate degrees at U. M. in education but has had no instruction in poetry, being deeply folk-schooled in the traditions of her people. Her poetry has been published across the country and abroad; has been used in Colby College’s “Many Maines” course; drawn from by U. M. departments of English and history; and is being acquired by (U.M.) Fogler Library’s Special Collections and other archives of Maine history, class and women’s studies.