Earl Swift, a reporter in Virginia, spent more than a year on Tangier Island before writing his excellent 2018 book, “Chesapeake Requiem: A Year with the Watermen of Vanishing Tangier Island.”
Tom Horton, a longtime environmental reporter for The Baltimore Sun, moved with his family to Smith Island before writing his acclaimed 1996 memoir, “An Island Out of Time.”
Other journalists and photographers have immersed themselves in isolated places to chronicle life there and capture the people and cultures. Practicing ethnography requires long commitment and patience — not to mention underwriting — and, as a result, immersive story-telling is a relatively rare and special thing.
Forty-eight years ago, Allen Moore, then a young Baltimorean and Gilman grad emerging as an ethnographic filmmaker at Harvard, went with a colleague, Jack Shea, to document life on Berneray, an island in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland.
Moore and Shea spent about a year there, getting to know and filming the sheep herders, or crofters, and the fishermen who lived on the island. The result was a 1981 film, “The Shepherds of Berneray.” Once screened in the U.S., the documentary won awards and launched a long career for Moore that has included filming for Ken Burns and teaching at the Maryland Institute College of Art.
Moore has now produced a follow-up, “Returning to Berneray,” that will be screened, along with the original film, on Saturday, Oct.3, as part of the New/Next Film Festival at the Charles Theatre.
The new film revisits some of the people from the original documentary and highlights changes that have occurred since Allen Moore and the late Jack Shea first visited the island.
The following interview with Moore took place by phone and email, and it has been edited for clarity and brevity.
DR: Tell me about that first film about Berneray. How did it originate?
AM: Jack and I were commissioned by a small research group at Harvard, called the Film Study Center, to pursue the subject of this remote island community and the traditional crofting way of life. In Scotland, through centuries, crofting was basically subsistence farming, where everyone who had a croft had to pay a landlord to use the land. The director of the film center at Harvard, Bob Gardner, a famous ethnographic filmmaker, said, ‘Well, you guys, I want you to embed yourselves and sort of get to know the community before you start filming, because I’m not going to give you very much film.’ I was only given 15 hours of film footage to use over a year period.
DR: Why Berneray? Where did that specific idea come from?
AM: Jack was a still photographer who had been doing photography of shepherds in Scotland. He moved there to raise a family after he left college, and during his photography expeditions, he just kind of thought, well, maybe there should be a film made. He wrote to the folks at the Harvard Film Study Center and said, ‘Hey, I got a great idea for a film. ’ Jack was the man who conceived the first film.
DR: This was a remote, Gaelic-speaking community. How did the interviews go?
AM: We ended up doing a lot of work with the crofters, helping out and learning their work. We didn’t learn their language. They all speak Scottish Gaelic, but they also spoke English really well, so we communicated fine. It was so amusing that, whenever the crofters were doing something with the sheep, and there was some kind of mishap — or if I stepped in a pile of sheep [manure] or something — the crofters all turned to each other and started talking and laughing in Gaelic.
DR: Did you spend a full year on Berneray?
AM: It was, more accurately, 11 months over a year and a half, because we took a break every few months. It was a pretty primitive place.
DR: And you filmed shepherds as well as fishermen.
AM: And the fishermen were fishing for lobster. If you were a fisherman and owned your own boat, you were a rich man on Berneray. The lobsters were all shipped off the island; some went to London, but most of them went to France, to Paris. The lobsters fetched a really great price. But it’s very hard work, as you see in the original film.
DR: So the idea of the new film is to follow up and see what’s changed in nearly 50 years on Berneray.
AM: Right, and I follow up with the young man who’s in the original film as a lobsterman. He now has his own boat. … The new film weaves together both the old and the new perspectives, and then there’s a very dramatic turn. [Author’s note: In fact, a tragic turn.]
DR: The old and new film segments are very distinct in Returning to Berneray. It shows, for one thing, how much the technology of film production has changed in 50 years.
AM: Part of the excitement for me, when I decided to go back and make a new film, I also wanted to restore the original 16-millimeter film from 1981. I’d never had a really good video transfer, and there’s nothing like the technology today. So I just put up some of my own money and got Harvard to loan me a really good print, and I digitized the original film in ultra high definition. It just looks so much better.
DR: And that’s what people will see at the Charles?
AM: Exactly. It’s kind of like the remaster and re-release of the Shepherds of Berneray, and then my new film, Returning to Bernerray, about my relationship to the island and how the community has adapted to modernity.
DR: How many times have you been to Berneray over the years?
AM: About a dozen times. I love the people on the island. After 1981, I went back to the U.S. and had my career, working for Ken Burns, and 20 years ago started my teaching career at MICA. But during that time, every few years I would go back to Berneray and visit the community and reconnect, especially with the family that had put us up. I went on my own a few times, and then [with family].
DR: Why so many trips to that distant island?
AM: I nurtured a bond with several families in the community. At the impressionable age of 27, when I first arrived on Berneray, I felt a sense of immediate connection to the place. I have never lost it.
The screenings of Moore’s two Berneray films start at 11:45 am Saturday, Oct. 3, at the Charles Theatre, part of the New/Next Film Festival.
