Holly Fisher - Watermen
Holly Fisher - Watermen (1968)
WATERMEN
1968 | 16mm | color | sound | 63 min
filmmakers: Holly Fisher & Romas V. Slezas
Technical Information: Filmed between 1966 - 68, Eastern Shore MD.
music: Performed by Captain Daniels and his wife, various watermen skippers and African American crew
with: Captain “Daddy Art” Daniels, members of Daniel extended family, crew of “City of Crisfield” 1968, last sailmaker, Wenona on Deals Island, Maryland. Other watermen and relatives from Wenona and Tilghman Island, Maryland.
In 1966 Holly Fisher and co-director Romas V. Slezas filmed the annual Skipjack Race off the coast of Annapolis, Maryland, focused especially on local folk hero skipjack Captain “Daddy Art” Daniels, who won that day. Over the next three years they filmed Daniels, his family, his Afro-American crew, and his colleagues catching oysters, at home, singing & preaching in church, high school graduation, last sail maker (Wenona, MD), three generations featured (1967) on Maryland TV station, i.e. the passing of a way of life on the Chesapeake Bay. The film tells a simple story of the watermen working the last sailing fleet of workboats in North America and it is perhaps also the story of Manifest Destiny playing out in an isolated pocket of American culture.
Slezas and Fisher worked as a cinema vérité team for over three years 1966-1968, returning when they had funding to continue. The film has no outside narrator, and is carried by stories lived and/or told by the characters themselves. In the fall of 2009, Fisher returned to Wenona to film Captain Daniels, then in his late 80s, who would skipper the “City of Crisfield” in one more Skipjack race. By now Daniels had become a local legend, and was featured in multiple T.V. interviews plus the local Deals Island parade, filmed waving from the back seat of a red convertible.
At that time two of Daniels’ sons were still catching oysters in the traditional way; his oldest son was also a local country western singer who broadcast especially to other fishermen from his own Skipjack. His youngest son “Bobby” had become a well-respected and fiery preacher. He oystered well into his nineties.
Captain Arthur “Daddy Art” Daniels, waterman, Minister, and great-great-grandfather, died at home in Wenona, MD, June 2017 at age 95.
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