“Ultimately I knew that words have power.” — Toni Morrison
The visionary and essential novelist Toni Morrison was born on February 18th, 1931 and died on August 5, 2019. In between, she was a voice of great power and resounding truth, a celebrated writer and editor, a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom and a Nobel Prize winner, a mother of two and a teacher of millions.
It is her powerful voice that carries us through director Timothy Greenfield-Sanders’ sweeping and intimate documentary Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am. “She is a friend of my mind,” says Morrison in the opening moments, reading from Beloved, her 1987 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. “She gather me, man. The pieces I am. She gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.” Her voice is soft and warm and smooth, the cadence measured and even, inviting us into her extraordinary life. We watch as a pair of hands assembles irregular shards of photographs and patterned paper, a scrapbook portrait built, piece by piece, upon itself. The hands belong to Brooklyn-based Mickalene Thomas, a mixed-media artist whose work often takes shape through painting, collage, photography, and video and draws on culture, history, and themes of sexuality, beauty, and power.
In the opening sequence, Thomas physically gathers pieces of Toni Morrison which include photographs created by Greenfield-Sanders as well as others and arranges them into a shifting video portrait. The opening recalls the style of Morrison’s 1974 nonfiction project The Black Book, “a lavishly illustrated scrapbook spanning three centuries of African-American history, reproducing newspaper clippings, photographs, advertisements, handbills and the like.”
The footage of Thomas’s collage assembly is beautifully buttressed by Kathryn Bostic’s lilting and contemplative jazz score, joined with credits designed by Declan Zimmermann and Perpetual Motion Graphics, and made whole through cuts and rotations by the film’s editor and producer Johanna Giebelhaus.
It’s an astounding opening, a prelude that takes Morrison’s words literally and continues her work championing Black artists and voices. It also gorgeously sets the stage not just for Morrison to speak candidly but also for her friends and colleagues Hilton Als, Angela Davis, Oprah Winfrey, Fran Lebowitz, and others to share their memories and thoughts. The film goes to great lengths to create a sense of craft, ease and intimacy between subject and viewer and it all begins right here, in the opening titles.
Director Timothy Greenfield-Sanders and Producer and Editor Johanna Geibelhaus discuss working with Toni Morrison and the challenges of distilling her remarkable life for film.
A discussion with Director TIMOTHY GREENFIELD-SANDERS and Producer and Editor JOHANNA GIEBELHAUS.
Timothy, you had a relationship with Toni Morrison that spanned decades. How did you first meet?
TGS: I first met Toni Morrison 38 years ago, in the winter of 1981, when she came to my East Village studio for a Soho Weekly News cover portrait. She wore a dark suit with a white blouse and smoked a pipe.
TGS: I was a young photographer and Toni had just finished her fourth novel, Tar Baby. I was impressed by her confidence on the set. Toni liked my work and…
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