From compact one-room churches and town halls to high school football games and leafy sidewalks bereft of pedestrians, the most unsettling aspect of Banished, a new documentary by Marco Williams, is the utter familiarity and timelessness of its all-American backdrop. For while our nation turns its lonely eyes to the picket fences of Desperate Housewives (and Weeds, and whatever other recycled iterations of 1950s middle-class ennui folks are currently gawking at), Williams has excavated from our suburbs a crime far more insidious than marital infidelity. That his tale hinges on dusty municipal plat maps and lost deeds makes it no less stirring.

Banished, which opens a two-week run at New York’s Film Forum, is about the ethnic cleansing of blacks from white communities between the end of the Civil War and the early days of the Depression. Williams focuses on three communities in particular—Forsyth County, Georgia, Pierce City, Missouri, and Harrison, Arkansas—where through a series of lynchings, hangings, and murders, African-Americans were systematically chased from their homes, leaving behind property that was then fraudulently acquired by white neighbors.

By following the descendants of those who were expelled from these communities in their efforts to seek restitution, Williams demonstrates that the legacy of these atrocities is palpable in modern America, even as it remains unacknowledged. For example, there are fewer than forty African-American residents today in Boone County, where Harrison is seated. The county has a total population of 34,000. Harrison is also host to the headquarters of the largest contemporary sect of the Ku Klux Klan, whose leader, Thom Robb, grants Williams an interview.

Shot in varying grades of video, with Williams as narrator, Banished derives a quiet power from just how deceptively banal its scenery looks. Yet the seasoned cinephile will notice the long takes, and the camera’s attention to details at the edge of the frame. Williams has made a documentary with an unforced naturalism that’s every bit as credible as the best frame in a Jean Renoir movie.

Last week Fanzine sat down with Williams in his office at New York University, where he teaches documentary film production, to talk about how this history of ethnic cleansing in America has been so easily suppressed.


FANZINE: Early in Banished, James Brown, a descendant of those who were expelled from Pierce City, MO, explains how he came to discover what had happened in that town, how he met someone at a professional conference who happened to be from there and when she learned that his relatives had once lived there immediately said, “I’m so sorry.” He said he didn’t know at the time what she meant. His surprise seems to stand in for the way that many people react elsewhere in the film when they learn about this history. Was there any element of surprise for you in this project?

MARCO WILLIAMS: You know I want to say there was an element of surprise and even shock and yet—I don’t want this to sound callous—but once I learned some of the details of what had happened...

There have been so many atrocities committed against African-Americans over the centuries that you almost become inured to the shock value. I made a film called Two Towns of Jasper about James Byrd. Black man dragged behind a pick-up truck. The most horrific, heinous, racially-motivated crime. And yet some part of me was like, business as usual.

I do think where I join the legions of people who have seen Banished and reflected on it is that I too was ultimately unaware of the particularity of this history of forced expulsions of African-Americans, resulting in communities being white or virtually all white today. The effective perpetuating of an American ethnic cleansing, that’s where I’m stunned that we don’t know about this.