• And when I die, I won’t stay dead
  • Marseille après la guerre
  • And when I die, I won’t stay dead
  • And when I die, I won’t stay dead

And when I die, I won’t stay dead

  • In Person

    Les Blank Lecturer

Woodberry’s most prodigious artistic feat . . . is to fill the film with Kaufman’s poetry and to give his writing a distinctive and vital cinematic identity.

Richard Brody, New Yorker

Perhaps no American poet has been so reactive to, and beaten by, his times as Bob Kaufman (1925–1986). In North Beach, among the Beats, he was a street poet in the oral tradition, always on the outside; in Paris, he was the Black American Rimbaud. Even his FBI file credited him as a “smooth talker.” Like his hero, Charlie Parker, he lived in “that jazz corner of life,” and Billy Woodberry organizes his beautiful, soulful, picture-filled film on Kaufman in clear riffs and natural strains as they emerge from the telling of an uncompromising life of provocation and poetry.

Judy Bloch
FILM DETAILS 
Screenwriter
  • Billy Woodberry
Cinematographer
  • Pierre H. Desir
Print Info
  • Color
  • DCP
  • 99 mins
Source
  • BAMPFA
Additional Info
  • Poetry by Bob Kaufman read by Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis, Suzanne Cockerel, Roscoe Lee Browne.
Preceded By

Marseille après la guerre
(Marseille After the War)

Billy Woodberry, United States, France, 2015

Billy Woodberry explores archival photographs of dockworkers in postwar Marseille, an homage to Ousmane Sembène and his first novel, Black Docker.

FILM DETAILS 
Print Info
  • B&W
  • DCP
  • 11 mins
source
  • Comedia Divina