How I Became a Teller of Sometimes Inconvenient Truth

Yes, these are drums.  Haitian drums.  Actually, voudou drums.  Haitian voudou drums that I brought back from Port-au-Prince in 1952 when I was 14. The designs on the drums are of the various loa, the spirits of the voudou pantheon.  I knew their names and images by heart:  Damballah, Papa Legba, Erzulie Freda, Agway ‘Woyo…

Sometimes, when I walk by these drums, now in our living room in Pine Plains, NY, I see the swaying dancers, hear the throbbing drums, smell the clarin, the smoke and sweat thick as a texture. I hear the chant  of the houngan inviting Damballah to take possession of one of the congregants as he calls out, “Damballah, Damballah, koté ou ye?”

The ceremonies started around midnight on Saturday and continued into Sunday morning. My parents would have me nap until around 11 PM and then let me go off alone in one of the people’s camionnettes for the half-hour coast down the mountain from Petionville, where we lived. I would tell the driver I wanted to go to Telegraf San Fil, one of the poorest sections of Port au Prince, where he would drop me off to be guided by the compass of drums in the night,

Eventually, dawn arrived and with it the Twentieth Century and the Western Hemisphere.  I would find a camionnette to take me back up the mountain, this time with the engine running, exhausted but fulfilled, while the others trudged to Sunday mass and prayed to the same spirits but with different names and images.

During the following week, I would go back down to Telegraf San Fil and search out the houngan whose hounfor I had visited. I was curious. He was curious, too, but he had the answers.  I had my father’s Argus C3 35mm rangefinder camera,

This might be the strangest part of this story. Haitians did not want their pictures taken.

A photograph was a ouanga, the voudou doll that held part of the subject’s soul captive and subject to manipulation. So here’s an American kid going around expecting to get pictures of a voudou priest? We are on the verge of weird here.

The houngan must have sensed that the young American seemed genuinely interested in learning about his religion and was sincerely curious to the point that he spoke Creole and was only using the camera as an aid to his learning.  The priest willingly drew the designs of the loa in the ground just the way he did during the ceremonies, dipping his hands in a bowl of corn meal and letting the white powder sift through his fingers like a brush and onto the dirt floor.

I was not TAKING photographs. He was GIVING them to me as part of his answers.

I was learning skills for what would eventually be my career, taught by a voudou priest in the slums of Port-au-Prince. Through detours as a surgical technician at the Lahey Clinic, a researcher in the Neurochemical Research Laboratory at Harvard Medical School, experiences in professional theatre, and training in Vienna, I finally found my life’s calling at WGBH-TV in Boston as a documentary filmmaker.  A documentary, as I define it, is the exploration of reality with the intent to convey it to others.  I was recognized for being able to “get” at the truth — If Stan shot it, it happened.

And it all started in voodoo temples in the slums of Port-au-Prince.  And I have the drums to prove it.

One of many photos of the disorder and chaos now raging in Haiti.  It is dangerous for anyone to walk those same streets that the 14-year-old American explored in the middle of the night some 70 years ago.

How and why did Paradise become Hell ?

Trying to answer that question became a life-time calling.

While Haiti was churning through dictators, I was trying to unravel the dilemmas of group life at UCLA’s Graduate School of Management, The Washington School of Psychiatry, The Tavistock Institute in London, and the Doctoral Program in Clinical Psychology at Columbia. Fancy places, but basically embellishing skills learned in voudou temples in Haitian slums.

I did not have to go back to Haiti to find civil unrest. In 1963, I covered Civil Rights in the USA.

I was working for WGBH-TV in Boston in 1963, the year of the March on Washington, filming voter registration efforts in Greenwood, Mississippi.  Just a year later, about 70 miles away, the three civil rights workers – Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner – were murdered with the alleged collusion of the local police.  Jim Forman, Field Secretary of SNCC, is seen in the background looking on.

I had been a lot safer in Telegraf San Fil with the voudou priests.

Here is my story told by Fred Barzyk, the director of the program I was filming for WGBH-TV, telling the story of his trip to Atlanta to meet me.

 

Education and Work Experience

Stan Hirson began his studies at Antioch College as a pre-med student in its work-study program. He worked as a surgical technician at the Lahey Clinic in Boston and later in the Neurochemical Research Laboratory at Harvard Medical School. Though he originally planned to attend medical school, his interests shifted, and he ultimately graduated with a degree in theatre and an Actors’ Equity card.

Stan volunteered at WGBH-TV. Just three weeks later, he was hired. It was 1962—a time of social and political intensity—and he became deeply engaged with documentary filmmaking. He quickly transitioned from the television studio to the world of documentary film. In the summer of 1963, he covered the civil rights movement in the South for National Educational Television, producing film portraits of James Baldwin, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

Stan later joined the Maysles Brothers in New York as an associate and contributed to iconic films including The Beatles in America, Salesman, Gimme Shelter, Grey Gardens, and numerous television documentaries.

As a result of his films about the workplace, he was awarded a Ford Foundation fellowship to the Graduate School of Management at UCLA at the Center for Quality of Working Life and left his film career to practice organizational consultation.  He trained in group relations behavior at the Washington School of Psychiatry and was awarded a fellowship at London’s Tavistock Institute of Human Relations.  In addition to consulting, he taught group and organizational dynamics in the Doctoral Program in Clinical Psychology at Teachers College of Columbia University.

Stan’s long relationship with the Bell System, initially as a filmmaker and then as a consultant on workplace issues and strategic planning, gave him opportunities and resources to develop the use of film to effect organizational change as well as to understand and document it.

He currently lives and works in the Hudson Valley, where he has consolidated careers to make documentary videos for the internet.