The Quiet Art of LA Rebellion Pioneer Billy Woodberry

Four years after he made The Pocketbook, Woodberry used this vérité approach again in Bless Their Little Hearts, which remains the director’s most well-known film and his only narrative feature. The protagonist, Charlie Banks (Nate Hardman), is a man in search of well-paid work and something fulfilling to spend his money on. The film begins by showing him at a job center, the camera patiently tracking his pencil and paper as he writes down potential employment opportunities, each deliberate loop on the page the mark of languid effort. As Charlie casts out in search of labor, we watch him traverse the area in and around Watts, a wood-and-steel enclave where working-class families hold on to a dignity primed to be stolen from them. The city appears as a landscape of duplexes, single-story split housing, and train tracks.

Bless Their Little Hearts is a meandering film but not an aimless one. Throughout, it seems as if Charlie is doing everything he can to say he tried to find a job, even and especially when his search results in failure. Woodberry’s view of Charlie is pragmatic, focused on the systemic forces that have resulted in the character’s wayward path through life. “What happens in the process, when a man loses his work?” he said in an interview with Filmmaker magazine. “Which is what was happening to a lot of people at that time, in the different industrial places. We imagine he was a worker in a factory . . . When he loses that, he needs to try to assess what is his place, what is his contribution . . .”

Charlie battles a deep and persistent malaise for which neither his wife, Andais (Kaycee Moore), nor his group of scheming buddies have an answer. He yearns for affection, first from Andais and later from a mistress who lives in the same neighborhood. Is he hunting for fulfillment, manhood, or some uncertain combination? Unable to settle on a path, Charlie finds himself heading in new, troubled directions. Soon, his affair, dreamy and comforting at first, curdles when his mistress demands that Charlie either step up as a proper father figure to provide for her and her son or leave.

Andais works, cooks, and cleans, supporting her husband in part to shield his wounded masculinity. Though Woodberry lavishes keen attention on all of his actors, the camera favors Moore. Andais’s disappointed glances at Charlie and thankless, monotonous hours tidying the house and tending to their children are shot with interest and patience; it’s clear that Woodberry wants the audience to notice the labor that is being taken for granted. In one particularly hypnotic scene, the film follows Andais as she tries to stay awake on her bus ride home from work, the flash of illuminated buildings and streetlamps seemingly lulling her to sleep. The small injustices Andais and Charlie experience give way to needling humiliations, culminating in a domestic argument that Woodberry captures in one bravura take over the course of ten minutes.

Following the release of Bless Their Little Hearts, which was widely praised as an essential entry into the LA cinematic canon, Woodberry wouldn’t complete another film for over twenty years. An adaptation of an Ernest J. Gaines novel, set to be the filmmaker’s second feature, took up some of his time but never came to fruition. Woodberry went on to teach at CalArts, where he would remain until 2021. When he returned to filmmaking in 2005, he directed his attention to documentary—a mode that, in his hands, is less an authoritative presentation of facts than the piecemeal tracing of a life, in all its contradictions, without any pretense of objectivity.

The film that marked Woodberry’s return—the nonfiction short Marseilles après la guerre—charts the political trajectory of Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène and his involvement in the French Trade Union Movement after World War II. Here, Woodberry’s affinity for monochromatic photography naturally dovetails with a subject whose life and work were largely documented in black-and-white archival materials. Sembène was one of many heroes Woodberry gravitated toward during his time at UCLA, and the two artists shared a sensitivity to the machinations of labor, collective solidarity, and historical complexity—themes that recur throughout the younger filmmaker’s career. As Woodberry has mentioned, his political consciousness was informed by his childhood in Dallas, where grassroots desegregation efforts were crowded out by real-estate interests and endless bureaucracy.

As Woodberry’s thematic preoccupations have evolved, so has the scope of his projects. Failing to complete the Gaines adaptation revealed to him that a different avenue for creative work was available. “In a way, it was liberating because I realized I didn’t need a big crew, didn’t need a script and all that to make films,” Woodberry told the Los Angeles Review of Books. The shift to documentary has afforded him the opportunity for deep engagement with both the social and psychic context of any given topic. It also offers him the chance to question the limits of cinematic form. Woodberry’s rigorously researched 2015 film And When I Die, I Won’t Stay Dead, following the life and work of Beat poet Bob Kaufman, plays with the expectation of what exactly a documentary is meant to do.

Woodberry’s films are remarkably nondidactic. What strengthens a documentary like And When I Die is its exploratory structure; after establishing Kaufman’s literary reputation and his poetic peers in traditional expository fashion, the film shifts to a more intimate, personal investigation into the subject’s singularity both as an elusive figure (Kaufman is known to have taken a decades-long vow of silence) and as a Black poet in an overwhelmingly white milieu. Kaufman comes across as a cipher to friends and family; to highlight this impression, Woodberry waits until the final scene to share footage of Kaufman speaking. But despite the poet’s enigmatic persona, Woodberry uses interviews and text to weave together a portrait that celebrates the poet’s contradictions and mysteries without slipping into hagiography or hyperbole. Woodberry’s abiding interest is in people and their interactions with the wider world, not exceptionalism or genius.

In 2018, Woodberry moved to Lisbon, and the following year he released A Story from Africa, a preamble of sorts to 2024’s Mario, which centers on the life and activism of Angolan politician, writer, and liberationist Mario Pinto de Andrade. Both films focus on the Portuguese colonization of Angola, allowing Woodberry to create a sprawling narrative out of hundreds of years of European and African history. To tell this story, he utilizes the same simple tools as before—talking heads, still photographs, archival footage, newspapers, books, an unerring patience and faith in the attention of his audience—but with an even greater sense of urgency. At the beginning of Mario, Woodberry succinctly and brilliantly encapsulates the scope of his film by presenting archival footage of colonists erecting a stone pillar that proclaims the boundary of the newly created Angola. The remnants of history are never far away in Woodberry’s documentary projects; in fact, they are often intensely, terrifyingly close.

The dissection of colonialism in Mario and A Story from Africa is a matter of direct encounter. It is rare to watch a nonfiction film where the filmmaker’s research and personal interest are so plainly presented as the result of passion rather than an ideological agenda. Mario is anchored by interviews with Mario Pinto de Andrade, his collaborators in the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), and their allies. The result is a powerful evocation of a burgeoning movement whose struggle encompasses the imperialist destabilizing projects of the West, the Communist solidarity of Africa, Asia, and the Soviet Union, and the internecine conflicts within and between African nations occasioned by competing ideals of liberation.

In part, it is their connection to a wide range of intersecting historical and sociopolitical movements that makes Woodberry’s documentary subjects worthy objects of study. The filmmaker is often asked about the political content of his films and his own convictions. But his work speaks so clearly and plainly for itself; it reveals life as it is lived within structures of power, and demonstrates his belief that individuals can be catalysts for change. He does this without overlooking the complexity of his subjects, whether they are fictional characters or historical figures caught in his observational headlights. As much as they are portraits of idealism and courage, Woodberry’s films—both the narrative and the documentary work—are also studies of personal shortcomings and idiosyncrasies.