William Greaves

William Garfield Greaves (born 8 October 1926-25 August 2014)was an American filmmaker and actor. He was also a cinematographer and/or editor of seventy-nine films. Quotes “For the Black producer, television will be just another word for jazz. And jazz for the Afro-American has been a means of liberating the human spirit.” “I try to invest my work with a high  degree of artistry brought on by the fact that as a young kid I started  out as an artist and sculptor, a painter and potter on the wheel and songwriter and God knows what else—but I was very much—a dancer,  an African dancer and a modern dancer…All of those artistic  disciplines, shall we say, are factored into how I approach a film. I try  to make sure my films have rhythm, have movement, have intellectual  content, dramatic power of one kind or another—and I use any—I use a  variety of techniques to accomplish that” “We were aware that, you know, that we had to in a sense develop programming that somehow or other communicated to the black community, and in one of the paradigms or one of the devices that I used in developing the monthly programs was the black barbershop, you know, the kinds of things that are routinely discussed in a black barber shop. I used to filter these concepts through a black barbershop in my own head” Remembering Filmmaker.Actor."Black Journal".Producer.and Political Activist William Greaves(1926-2014) Black Film Center & Archive Blog(November 21, 2014) "I liked the commitment he had to excellence," "Having thought about it, agonized over it, and lost sleep trying to solve these differential equations of thinking," "I thought I was going to be a hurricane, but I ended up becoming ... merely a single raindrop falling on a stone. You could say, 'It took God trillions of years to bring us to this point, and all you are is just another raindrop.' But hopefully there are other raindrops of similar mind impacting this stone, this intractable humanity. And over time ... this [human condition] will change." "I see this film as an opportunity to enjoy cinema, but also as an opportunity to persuade people to become the things that, in their heart of hearts, they really prefer being. To see [Bunche] in action, making that kind of human effort, is very inspiring." "an incredible amount of reflection and 'permutating' and 'combinating' all kinds of images and ideas - trying to experimentally look at options and devise new, quite different ones." A director driven to do a little good-THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR(2February 2001) Category:Actors from the United States