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Filmmaker Tracy Heather Strain (Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart) has written, directed, and produced an engrossing documentary that spans the incredible life of Zora Neale Hurston. BGN spoke with Strain via Zoom on a Wednesday afternoon in early January 2023 about this captivating film.
What do you admire most about Hurston’s connection to her work?
After she discovered anthropology she decided that her life’s work was to collect Black Southern culture to show that it was beautiful and significant. She made it her business to gather that information together and bring it to the world, both for the general public and the world of academia.
And what did you find to be the most frustrating aspect of her character?
She was probably a challenging person. I’ve met someone who had talked to Dorothy West, a Harlem Renaissance figure who was Zora Neale’s roommate at one point, and Dorothy said Zora was both charming and difficult, and they had a really warm relationship. We don’t get into this in the film, but it sounds like she [Zora] could be a handful and probably didn’t make it easy for some people to help her. She stuck to her convictions.
The film focuses on how many of her peers at Howard and Barnard had financial support, but Hurston was on her own after her mother died when she was thirteen and she struggled to meet her basic needs and pursue her talents her entire life. If she had strong community connections, a stable relationship, and access to resources, how far do you think she could have gone with her career?
She could have gone much further in the variety of careers she chose. She was writing. She was doing anthropology and theatrical productions. At one point, we don’t get into this in the documentary, but she was going to go to Yale Drama School! The sky was the limit. I feel like sometimes, even today, African American brilliance and ambition is not supported in the way that I think it should be when people show promise. I can speak to a variety of people just in the filmmaking field who should have had bigger careers. And they were brilliant. They showed their brilliance in their first films. Some guys and guys who are white got support when they did these great first films. But so many women who came before me weren’t supported.
One of Hurston’s supporters was a domineering wealthy woman, Charlotte Osgoode Mason. At the end of the day, was that relationship worth it for Zora?
It’s hard for me to say for sure, but we’ve benefited from that relationship in a number of ways. We have beautiful motion picture imagery of Black southerners, children, and adults, doing everyday things. Zora Neale Hurston was able to interview Cudjoe Lewis, one of the last survivors of what we consider the last slave ship, the Clotilda. Even though she couldn’t get her book Barracoon published during her lifetime, it was published in 2018. That’s an important document. So she was able to do important work.
It must have been entirely stressful. Charlotte Osgoode Mason was a woman who only allowed Zora to have one pair of shoes at the time, and she had to ask to buy new ones when the holes in the bottom were so large you could see her toes through the soles. I made a point of putting it into the film.
Hurston was married twice, and she attracted friends and patrons, but why do you think she wasn’t able to maintain those relationships?
I’m not sure exactly why she couldn’t maintain relationships. I have some thoughts about it. She had to raise herself, stay true to the self-raised person, and stay true to her Southerness in a northern Harlem society that was trying to get away from Black Southerness. And she was unabashedly Southern, and she was loud. So I can just totally imagine some people finding her to be off-putting. Also, even though Charlotte Osgoode Mason supported other people, people seemed to want to leave the impression that Zora did something bad, that she was particularly pandering. There are some letters that she wrote to Mason that are actually cringe-worthy. But I try to put myself in somebody else’s shoes. You have a goal, and you have to decide what you will and will not do to try to achieve your goals. Maybe Zora went too far in some cases, but I also think she saw Mason as a mother figure in some ways. It wasn’t perfect, but there was some kind of love there. It was complicated.
Some people label Hurston as the first Black female documentarian. What have you learned from studying her work as a documentary filmmaker as you worked on this project?
I see Zora Neale Hurston as the first ethnographic filmmaker because the term “documentary” hadn’t been coined yet. You can tell that the footage was, in many cases, ethnographic in nature, particularly the footage of the woman walking toward the camera, turning her head, and then you see this woman lounging. It’s not clear to me that she [Zora] was thinking storytelling. The main part of the definition of a documentary [is that] you’re trying to tell a creative story that’s being made with nonfiction material. I’m not trying to take anything away from her. What she did was groundbreaking and difficult.
I wonder who trained her, how she changed the film? For those of you who don’t know about film, you have to [develop] in the dark so that sunlight doesn’t expose it. How did she do this at that time while doing fieldwork? I admired that she knew film was important. When she was down in Beaufort, South Carolina, she even told her friend Jane Bello the anthropologist, “You gotta get a crew down here. You have to capture it.” So now we have this beautiful imagery and even a little bit of sound from inside the Commandment Keeper Church that, as a bonus, also includes Zora Neale Hurston in the church playing the drums. It also serves as an example of her social science expertise. Her participation with people as part of the community looked like she was enjoying herself, and it was a way to gain trust and have people feel connected.
What do you think brought Zora Neale Hurston the most joy?
I think she must have felt the most joy when she received not only one Guggenheim but two Guggenheims after being turned down a few years earlier. With those grants, she was recognized, was able to travel independently, and was her own boss. And while she was in Haiti on those Guggenheims, she wrote Tell My Horse and Their Eyes Were Watching God, which wasn’t successful at the time, but it’s very successful now.
Zora Neale Hurston: Claiming a Space premieres Tuesday, January 17, 2023, 9:00 pm–11:00 pm EST on PBS and streams on PBS.org.
Filmmaker Tracy Heather Strain (Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart) has written, directed, and produced an engrossing documentary that spans the incredible life of Zora Neale Hurston. BGN spoke with Strain via Zoom on a Wednesday afternoon in early January 2023 about this captivating film.
What do you admire most about Hurston’s connection to her work?
After she discovered anthropology she decided that her life’s work was to collect Black Southern culture to show that it was beautiful and significant. She made it her business to gather that information together and bring it to the world, both for the general public and the world of academia.
And what did you find to be the most frustrating aspect of her character?
She was probably a challenging person. I’ve met someone who had talked to Dorothy West, a Harlem Renaissance figure who was Zora Neale’s roommate at one point, and Dorothy said Zora was both charming and difficult, and they had a really warm relationship. We don’t get into this in the film, but it sounds like she [Zora] could be a handful and probably didn’t make it easy for some people to help her. She stuck to her convictions.
The film focuses on how many of her peers at Howard and Barnard had financial support, but Hurston was on her own after her mother died when she was thirteen and she struggled to meet her basic needs and pursue her talents her entire life. If she had strong community connections, a stable relationship, and access to resources, how far do you think she could have gone with her career?
She could have gone much further in the variety of careers she chose. She was writing. She was doing anthropology and theatrical productions. At one point, we don’t get into this in the documentary, but she was going to go to Yale Drama School! The sky was the limit. I feel like sometimes, even today, African American brilliance and ambition is not supported in the way that I think it should be when people show promise. I can speak to a variety of people just in the filmmaking field who should have had bigger careers. And they were brilliant. They showed their brilliance in their first films. Some guys and guys who are white got support when they did these great first films. But so many women who came before me weren’t supported.
One of Hurston’s supporters was a domineering wealthy woman, Charlotte Osgoode Mason. At the end of the day, was that relationship worth it for Zora?
It’s hard for me to say for sure, but we’ve benefited from that relationship in a number of ways. We have beautiful motion picture imagery of Black southerners, children, and adults, doing everyday things. Zora Neale Hurston was able to interview Cudjoe Lewis, one of the last survivors of what we consider the last slave ship, the Clotilda. Even though she couldn’t get her book Barracoon published during her lifetime, it was published in 2018. That’s an important document. So she was able to do important work.
It must have been entirely stressful. Charlotte Osgoode Mason was a woman who only allowed Zora to have one pair of shoes at the time, and she had to ask to buy new ones when the holes in the bottom were so large you could see her toes through the soles. I made a point of putting it into the film.
Hurston was married twice, and she attracted friends and patrons, but why do you think she wasn’t able to maintain those relationships?
I’m not sure exactly why she couldn’t maintain relationships. I have some thoughts about it. She had to raise herself, stay true to the self-raised person, and stay true to her Southerness in a northern Harlem society that was trying to get away from Black Southerness. And she was unabashedly Southern, and she was loud. So I can just totally imagine some people finding her to be off-putting. Also, even though Charlotte Osgoode Mason supported other people, people seemed to want to leave the impression that Zora did something bad, that she was particularly pandering. There are some letters that she wrote to Mason that are actually cringe-worthy. But I try to put myself in somebody else’s shoes. You have a goal, and you have to decide what you will and will not do to try to achieve your goals. Maybe Zora went too far in some cases, but I also think she saw Mason as a mother figure in some ways. It wasn’t perfect, but there was some kind of love there. It was complicated.
Some people label Hurston as the first Black female documentarian. What have you learned from studying her work as a documentary filmmaker as you worked on this project?
I see Zora Neale Hurston as the first ethnographic filmmaker because the term “documentary” hadn’t been coined yet. You can tell that the footage was, in many cases, ethnographic in nature, particularly the footage of the woman walking toward the camera, turning her head, and then you see this woman lounging. It’s not clear to me that she [Zora] was thinking storytelling. The main part of the definition of a documentary [is that] you’re trying to tell a creative story that’s being made with nonfiction material. I’m not trying to take anything away from her. What she did was groundbreaking and difficult.
I wonder who trained her, how she changed the film? For those of you who don’t know about film, you have to [develop] in the dark so that sunlight doesn’t expose it. How did she do this at that time while doing fieldwork? I admired that she knew film was important. When she was down in Beaufort, South Carolina, she even told her friend Jane Bello the anthropologist, “You gotta get a crew down here. You have to capture it.” So now we have this beautiful imagery and even a little bit of sound from inside the Commandment Keeper Church that, as a bonus, also includes Zora Neale Hurston in the church playing the drums. It also serves as an example of her social science expertise. Her participation with people as part of the community looked like she was enjoying herself, and it was a way to gain trust and have people feel connected.
What do you think brought Zora Neale Hurston the most joy?
I think she must have felt the most joy when she received not only one Guggenheim but two Guggenheims after being turned down a few years earlier. With those grants, she was recognized, was able to travel independently, and was her own boss. And while she was in Haiti on those Guggenheims, she wrote Tell My Horse and Their Eyes Were Watching God, which wasn’t successful at the time, but it’s very successful now.
Zora Neale Hurston: Claiming a Space premieres Tuesday, January 17, 2023, 9:00 pm–11:00 pm EST on PBS and streams on PBS.org.
The TV series The Last of Us, based on the popular video game of the same name, shows us a version of post-apocalyptic America wherein society has fallen to a deadly, brain-altering fungus. But, while most of the population has died or become shambling zombie-like hosts for Cordyceps, control has not fully broken down. No, the Federal Disaster Response Agency, or FEDRA, have largely taken over, plunging America’s remaining cities into martial law. FEDRA dictate every aspect of life in their crowded QZs, or quarantine zones. But one group has sprung up to fight them: the Fireflies. But just who are the Fireflies, The Last of Us‘ rebel group? And what role do they play in the HBO series? Let’s find out.
The Fireflies in The Last of Us, Explained
Now, the one thing you need to know right away about the Fireflies in The Last of Us is that their “war” is largely very unsuccessful. FEDRA sees them as nuisances at best and terrorists at worst. The second thing, while The Last of Us’ Fireflies may have started as a group of citizens intending to reestablish civilian government, after a while, they were just an organized militia group. Worse than that, when their first war against FEDRA failed, they turned to pseudo-religious zealotry. As we see in The Last of Us series’ first episode, the Fireflies try to recruit people who are lost and despondent. Their slogan, “When you’re lost in the darkness, look for the light,” is as much a rallying cry as a prayer. Although, of course, the infected are the chief “bad guys” in the show and game, we can’t exactly call the Fireflies good guys in The of Us‘ universe either.
Joel (Pedro Pascal) has no time for Fireflies. He sees them as a pain in his butt. Moreover, he resents them for convincing his younger brother Tommy (Gabriel Luna) to join. Because of this, he specifically has a grudge against Marlene (Merle Dandridge), the Fireflies’ leader. He calls her “Queen Firefly” derisively. Maybe the thing he resents the most is that they preach about hope. They believe they can find a cure for the fungal infection that has leveled the entire world. Joel, probably reasonably, thinks after 20 years, were a cure possible, someone would have found it by now.
But, as the premise of the show and game show us, Joel and Tess (Anna Torv) have to make a deal with Marlene to transport Ellie (Bella Ramsey) to the Fireflies base in Boston. The aim was for the militia to give Joel and Tess a car battery so they can look for Tommy in Wyoming.
The Importance of the Fireflies in The Last of Us‘ Universe
And while smaller, more brutal rebel groups will be their main consternation from Boston to the Rocky Mountains, the Fireflies are everywhere. Look around in The Last of Us game, and in the backgrounds of the first TV episode; you’ll see the Fireflies’ logo, a, you guessed it, stylized firefly, graffitied on walls and fences. The Fireflies are omnipresent, even when they aren’t physically around. Hell, the Fireflies symbol is practically also The Last of Us‘ unofficial logo.
The Fireflies may be the MacGuffin necessary to get The Last of Us started, but the context for them and their war against FEDRA and the infected create the backbone for the entire adventure.
Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.
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Mayfair Witches is the second in what AMC is calling their “Immortal Universe,” which is their name for the two series based on the supernatural novels of Anne Rice (the first being Interview with the Vampire). And in Mayfair Witches, they’ve now introduced us to the element that Rice used to connect her vampiric protagonists with her family of witches—the psychic order known as the Talamasca.
Although not introduced yet in Interview with the Vampire, this ancient, scholarly order is what united Rice’s supernatural cosmology. Although the two series have made significant changes from the novels, we expect this connection to remain. But what exactly is the Talamasca? Spoilers for not only Mayfair Witches thus far, but also several Anne Rice novels it is based on.
“We watch. And we are always there.”
Rice first introduced the Talamasca in her 1988 novel Queen of the Damned. That was the third book in her Vampire Chronicles series. She described the Talamasca as an order dating back hundreds of years. It was their sacred duty to gather information on all things paranormal in the world, and investigate their validity. Their official motto, which they printed on their business cards, was “We watch. And we are always here.” Rice found the word in a history book, learning it meant “animal mask” in Latin. (In some cultures, it meant witch or shaman.) Although very few things from the book transferred to the 2002 movie adaptation, the Talamasca was one of them.
The Order had motherhouses all over the world, with vaults containing all manner of supernatural artifacts of great historical value. The Talamasca took orders from mysterious Elders who no one ever saw, and whose true identities were shrouded in mystery. The Talamasca had motherhouses in cities like London, Rome, and Amsterdam, with other libraries spread all over the globe. However, the main branch was the London house. Two of the higher-ups in the Order, elderly British gentlemen Aaron Lightner and David Talbot, first came to life in this novel. We should mention the Watchers Council on Buffy the Vampire Slayer was likely influenced as well by the Talamasca.
Chronicling the Undead
In Queen of the Damned, our true main Talamasca character was a young woman by the name of Jesse Reeves. Her superiors tasked her with validating the historical facts of events described in the memoirs of the vampires Louis and Lestat. Their life stories were published as the novels Interview with the Vampire and The Vampire Lestat. The world at large passed off these books as works of fiction, but the members of the Talamasca knew better. Jesse got wrapped up in the world of the vampires, and eventually became one herself. Meanwhile, Lestat became enamored with her superior, David Talbot, leading to a long relationship between the two.
Talamasca in Anne Rice’s The Witching Hour
The second appearance of the Talamasca was in Rice’s 1990 novel The Witching Hour, the basis for Mayfair Witches. Aaron Lightner, a minor character in Queen of the Damned, was the main Talamasca agent asked to chronicle the history of the Mayfair clan of New Orleans. His paranormal powers include moving objects by telekinesis, and telepathy. His involvement with the family goes back decades, and later he begins to suspect that his benevolent, scholarly order might have darker intentions. For the TV series, they reimagined him as the character Ciprien Grieve, a much younger African-American man, and the lead’s love interest.
The Talamasca Order appears in several Rice novels over the subsequent years. She included them in almost every novel involving the vampires and witches. In fact, one novel, Merrick, was about a Mayfair witch who is a part of the Talamasca, who then became a vampire. Throughout, the identity of the mysterious Elders remained a closely guarded secret. Rice toyed with the idea of doing an entire book about the origins of the Talamasca, but she never got around to it. However, Rice finally unlocked the origins of the Talamasca in her 2014 novel Prince Lestat, over 25 years after their introduction.
The Origins of the Talamasca, Explained
Rice finally revealed that three ancient beings founded the Order in 758 A.D. The original founder was a being with the unusual name of Gremt Stryker Knollys. He was a disembodied spirit who gathered molecules to create a corporeal form. He encountered another similar spirit, Hesketh, who had once been a vampire, and whose spirit remained earthbound. Her vampire maker, the ancient Teskhamen, was still alive (so to speak). The three of them formed a pact to create a society whose purpose was to uncover the secrets of the supernatural, to better understand their own existence. They were the original Elders of the Talamasca, eventually passing down that mantle to human scholars, who then chose their own successors.
Will we see this complex history all play out on the AMC shows? Well, if they do, it would be way down the line. The Immortal Universe would have to have the kind of longevity that their Walking Dead franchise has before we get to all this intricate backstory. And we have not heard a peep from the Talamasca so far in Interview with the Vampire. However, we suspect they might pop up in that series much sooner than they did in their respective novels. We don’t expect AMC to waste any time in connecting their Anne Rice series together. Even if it means it happens much faster than it ever did in the novels.
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