Alex Johnson grabbed the neck of his bass guitar, placed the strap over his head and walked toward his microphone. His fingers hugged the strings as he played a few riffs to warm up while his father Craig set up the Pro Tools program on the computer. Since February, Alex had been working on a short documentary about beekeeping as part of a filmmaking course at Belhaven University in Jackson, Mississippi, centered on the nearby Greenwood Cemetery. With the filming wrapped, the junior film major decided to add music to his project, with his dad’s help.
Craig nodded to Alex to silently signal that he had begun recording, and Alex’s fingers danced as played the baseline that had been stirring inside his head. After a few minutes, however, he paused until an idea struck him.
What if we add a piano?” Alex asked his father, who knew how to play the keyed instrument.
Keeping the recording going, Craig walked over to a keyboard and began playing to Alex’s baseline, toying with possibilities. Over the next week, the father-son duo collaborated in the windows of time they had together between Alex’s classes and Craig’s work schedule, but they continued to tweak their song, adding drums, until they created a tune that mimicked a funky, ’70s sound that put satisfied smiles on their faces.
Alex took audio from his interview with David Buck, a beekeeper at the cemetery, and layered it across the instrumental. Using a method known as sampling, Alex directed his father on how to edit Buck’s voice to echo every so often across the music. He used the method to highlight the reverence that Buck has for the bees.
“ He really respects what they do, and I think he sees it as a benefit for him and the bees,” Alex Johnson said. “Like, he’s helping grow their hive, and he also gets something out of it. And he gets to help the community with the honey he gets from them.”
The student shot his film in two days using improvisation, something he learned from a directing class he took during the spring semester. He and Jack Myers, his filming partner, would show up to Buck’s house and talk through the shot process before picking up the cameras. If Buck had any criticisms or input, Johnson would incorporate it.
“The way I’ve shot and colored it (the film), it looks very ’70s, and ’70s is full of funk, bass and all that stuff,” Johnson said. “I just pulled inspiration from some of my favorite bands to just change it up a little bit. I showed more of the process than the bees, so I think having it look industrial and like a factory kinda goes together.”
The finished product culminated into “David Buck and His Bees,” a six-minute short film part of Greenwood Cemetery’s campaign to revamp its website and overall online presence. The cemetery approached Belhaven’s film program with an opportunity to create digital, short-form content around the space using funds the Mississippi Humanities Council gave them.
“Greenwood Cemetery is still Jackson’s largest green space: It’s an enormous park set up right in the middle of downtown,” Film Production Department Chair Joey Nelms told the Mississippi Free Press. “Back in the day, families from all over would picnic in it. You could find people treating it like a miniature Central Park.”
‘I Just Fell In Love’
The Mississippi State Legislature approved and established the Greenwood Cemetery on Jan. 1, 1823. Until the end of the 19th Century, all residents of Jackson could be buried there. Though early records are incomplete and work continues on identifying the people, individuals like Eudora Welty, past governors, Confederate brigadier generals and more than 100 soldiers are buried at the site. The cemetery is decorated with a variety of flora such as towering oaks, magnolias, crepe myrtles, cedar shades, antique bulbs, own-root roses, wisteria and Camellia bushes.
Belhaven’s film students created short documentaries highlighting the lives of people buried in the cemetery, as well as the cemetery’s role as a green space in the community. The program has been given full freedom to be as creative as they want, and the series will exist for future semesters to come.
“Each semester we’re gonna do a number of videos,” Nelms, a Pearl native, said. “Some of them, we do in class as we’re teaching. The more straightforward docs we’re doing this semester came out of our film production class, where students learn how to pull focus, light things and all that stuff.”
Participating students are encouraged to play around with various types of storytelling such as narrative, experimental and traditional documentary. The short film’s lineup includes an overview of the cemetery and historical figures such as Jones S. Hamilton, Lewis T. Fitzhugh, Lucius Lamar Mayes and Lucy Tapley.
“The whole Belhaven neighborhood is named after (Hamilton’s) ancestral house in Scotland,” Nelms explained. “Funnily enough, he gave a house to the school that eventually became Belhaven. Lewis Fitzhugh was the first president of the college.”
Lucius Lamar Mays created a mythological setting of nymph statues, concrete staircases and a small library where Laurel Park sits in the Belhaven neighborhood. Lucy Tapley was the first female voter in Mississippi history, predating American suffrage.
“I’ve got a student doing the Lucy Tapley story, and that wasn’t done in class,” Nelms said. “His process looks like online research, archival research through the databases the library gives us here, and then he took his work down to the two Mississippi museums, and he scoured what they had on her down there.”
The film department hosted a special screening for students on the second floor of the student center on Thursday, April 23. Alex Johnson said seeing his short film premiered for friends and peers was a surreal moment and made his heart race a little as he enjoys showing off the content that he makes.
As a kid, he would help his dad with commercial advertising work, which is much different than making movies. His dad Craig got a job at Belhaven and encouraged Alex to apply for the film department, and Alex hasn’t regretted his decision.
“I just unlocked a visual part of my mind; I’ve always wanted to make videos, not really movies,” the rising college senior said. “The first semester we had a few projects, and I just fell in love with creating shots and seeing how to tell a story through visuals.”
‘Who Else?’
Since the film series began during the spring semester, the department chair has learned that starting as early as possible and organizing the films around the students’ other assignments will be helpful in the future. As he continues to cultivate the next generation of filmmakers, Nelms hopes that they decide to stay in Jackson and develop a culture of cinematic artmaking that creates a “poetic experience through cinema” of Mississippi.
“ I’d love to see people turn the lens on what it means to be here. We have this whole robust and interesting and romantic life in Mississippi,” Nelms said. “We all know the brutal history of Mississippi, but before then, we had Spanish conquistadors traipsing through the forest looking for eternal fountains of youth and cities of gold.”
“We had this native population down the coast that used to feast on this enormous wealth of seafood and live, (and) we had French explorers here,” he continued. “Our history is this grand and romantic conglomeration of factors, and it’s still that way to a large extent.”
Many Mississippi stories are told through the past and highlight the negative experiences of living here. Rarely do audiences get to see modern stories of Mississippi life or experiences rooted in the culture, art and literature that exist here in the present day. But it’s up to Mississippians to tell those stories because people who aren’t from here don’t know, Nelms said.
He hopes that locals understand the state’s history and how it continues to evolve. And for people outside the state, he hopes they come to recognize and appreciate the new voices that are telling Mississippi stories in innovative ways.
“If they’re not from here, how would they know how interestingly modern, how fun it is to actually hang around in Jackson?” Nelms posited. “It’s a great place for stories. … The only solution I think we could possibly have to get modern, contemporary Mississippi stories would be that they have to come from us. Who else are they gonna come from?”
To learn more about Greenwood Cemetery, visit greenwoodcemeteryjackson.org. To watch videos from the Greenwood Cemetery Film Series, visit the project’s YouTube page.
