Stan Woodward

Stan Woodward is an award winning filmmaker who has devoted his work as a documentary video artist to the capture of last-generation practitioners of folklife traditions and associated communities in the South.

He concentrates on folk heritage foodways as the most natural "doorway" to enter into these communities.

He is what is known as an “auteur” filmmaker – shooting camera, directing, interviewing in the “first-person” and editing all himself.

Stan was in New York during the 1960’s working for the International Film Foundation when Richard Leacock and Donn Pennebaker “freed the camera from the tripod” by inventing the crystal synch device that enabled a portable Nagra taperecorder to operate free from connections to the 16mm camera used in that day. Stan's hand-held, spontaneous, "you-are-there" style of "first person singular" filmmaking was greatly influenced by these experimental filmmakers, as well as the Maysles brothers and other pioneers with the hand-held camera.

This style of filmmaking has the viewer behind the lens as the story unfolds on location - unrehearsed, unflinching in it's reality and naturalism, and, for the most part, unadorned with "TV lighting" and other production methods that so often intrude on the naturalism he prefers in the documentary process.

Using a low-profile mini-DV professional camera with a wide angle zoom lens, the filmmaker is able to move easily and intimately and in-close to remote folklife settings and communities to capture story elements in the "voice" of the practitioners themselves as they are working and interacting. “Stan becomes one of us", as one stewmaster put it.

This ability to immerse the viewer directly into the culture is what distinguishes this filmmaker's work, going all the way back to the Southern film classic, IT'S GRITS!

Contact: Please communicate any messages for the filmmaker to Folkstreams administration by our Contact Form. Thank you.