Pigs on the Wing
by Steve Dollar 
Too much pork for just one fork. That was the motto for the North Carolina neo-hillbilly trio Southern Culture on the Skids. It also
should belong on a bumper sticker, attached to the back of Joe York's Ford Taurus station wagon. The filmmaker, based in Oxford, Mississippi, logged 40,000 miles of mostly rural backroad in the last year-and-a-half, chasing across a region that stretches from the shrimp-and-slide-guitar shores of East Texas to the white-picket-fenced pastures of Virginia. This weekend, York is in New York City, sharing some of what he?s documented at the
Big Apple BBQ Party, an annual throwdown where the nation's top BBQ chefs convene to show 'cue-starved urbanites how it's really done.
It was only last month that York found himself in Mansure, Louisiana, deep in the heart of Cajun country. It was there he discovered that "you can pretty much stand anywhere on the road down there and you'll meet someone who'll invite you to come eat a pig." He ate a whole damn lot of pork on his trip, which he offers a taste of in the new short film
To Live and Die in Avoyelles Parish. The piece, which premieres Sunday during festivities at Manhattan's Madison Square Park, samples the revelry at a far more rustic, hog-roasting celebration: the Cochon de Lait Festival. Every Mother's Day weekend, the town becomes the site of a massive public ritual, as some 30-odd pigs get hoisted up on metal racks that resemble a giant, improvised coat-hanger contraption, and are cooked into a state of sublime tenderness before a roaring blaze. The outcome,
cochon de lait, is named for the suckling pigs that constituted the original dish?literally, animals that are still subsisting on Miss Piggy's milk. When it's done right, the pork is juicy on the inside and crunchy on the outside, as the white flesh is encased in crispy skin known as cracklin'. "When you screw up the skin, you screw up the whole pig," York says. If everything's done right, the pig turns into a sandwich, with the skin used like slices of bread.
To Live and Die is only the latest in a nearly thirty film oeuvre that York has built up in the past decade. The archive is distributed by the Oxford-based
Southern Foodways Alliance, an institute of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. Each of them details an intimate encounter with regional tradition and its keepers: the family that runs a South Carolina barbecue house (
CUT/CHOP/COOK), a fifth-generation Georgia cattle rancher (
CUD) or a pig farmer who likens raising livestock to the art of the tango (
Ride That Pig to Glory). The subjects "are so rooted in place that they really can?t exist anywhere but their own ecosystem," says York, a passionate champion for rugged, joyous, idiosyncratic, poly-cultural Americana versus what he terms a creeping national monoculture. "I love being an insider looking at your own region almost in an outsider way," he said. "I'm constantly amazed at how much diversity there is right next door. I don't have to go to Italy or South America to get my fix."
York, who holds a degree in anthropology from Auburn University and a master's degree in Southern studies from Ole Miss, is lucky in that he has a "studio" to back him. In this case, it's the SFA, whose director, John T. Edge, has probably done more than any journalist to advance the cause of BBQ and other deep Southern food traditions. Their efforts will be poured into a larger-scale production, due to be completed next summer:
Southern Foodways: The Movie.
As a filmmaker, York keeps it basic: a Panasonic HVX-200 video camera, a wireless mic and a shotgun mic, and a good pair of walking shoes. "The footage is really a conversation between two people," he says. "It's just us hanging out." That intimacy, and York's usual self-effacement on the other side of the camera, echoes the cinema-v�rit� style of the DA Pennebaker/Maysles Brothers era, though the productions are notably slicker: there's usually some sort of minimal soundtrack music, and cleanly edited scenes that can sketch a narrative arc in as brief as six or seven minutes. The core of each is some unguarded reflection, snatch of philosophy, or comical riff that conveys soulful meaning. In
CUD, for instance, a conversation with cattle-man Will Harris of White Oak Pastures (Bluffton, Ga.), it's the sight of Harris kicking back on his Jeep at sunset, a trusty hound at his side, drinking straight out of a bottle of red wine as he gazes out at his pastures. The perfect, unfiltered moment.
York, who basically learned filmmaking on the job, cites two main inspirations, and you can guess them without resorting to a lifeline:
Errol Morris and
Les Blank.
Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, which Blank made to commemorate the
German director's paying off a bet with Morris, was a game-changer: "I think every first-time filmmaker in the world should see that film," he said. "It really speaks to why the hell you should even do this."
Watching Blank's Creole documentary
Dry Wood recently, York was struck by its determined style. "Les is not afraid to hold on a shot of a guy digging a trench through a flooded pasture for a minute. That is just incredible. That's the heart of the picture, as it happens. You're watching this thing that?s only going to happen once in the history of the world."
York hosted Blank during the filmmaker's visit to the Oxford Film Festival this year and wasn't disappointed by the auteur of
Garlic is as Good as Ten Mothers. They had made plans for a fancy dinner, but a flight delay meant Blank arrived after the restaurant closed. York was stuck ordering pizza. "And there was Les in the kitchen," he recalls, "chopping up a clove of garlic for every single slice of pizza."
[To watch York's documentaries online, visit the Southern Foodways Alliance website. A freshly edited cut of To Live and Die in Avoyelles Parish screens Sunday at 4pm at the Big Apple BBQ Block Party in NYC. Visit Demonstration Tent 1 by Madison Park between 23rd and 26th Streets.] 
Posted by ahillis at June 11, 2011 7:28 AM
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