Elizabeth Cheshire and Charles Hilton Silver welcome Abraham Lincoln Hinton into the family in Godfrey Cheshire's 'Moving Midway.'
A CG Film, Iron Films, Wake Drive Prods. presentation and production. Produced by Godfrey Cheshire, Vincent Farrell, Jay Spain. Executive producer, R. B. Reeves. Directed, written by Godfrey Cheshire.
With: Godfrey Cheshire, Elizabeth Cheshire, Robert Hinton, Charles Hinton Silver, Dena Williams Silver, Abraham Lincoln Hinton, Al Hinton.
Longtime film critic and first-time filmmaker Godfrey Cheshire revisits his ancestors' plantation in North Carolina to record its wholesale transport in "Moving Midway," a Herculean saga worthy of Werner Herzog's "Fitzcarraldo" (or perhaps Les Blank's "Burden of Dreams"). Operating within a more homegrown cinematic frame of reference, Cheshire explores the Hollywood myth of the plantation via clips, while witnessing its real-life transplant. But "Midway" also develops a contempo context as Cheshire discovers a black branch of the family that increasingly shares the frame. Uniquely Southern docu has become surprisingly timely this election year.
As Midway Plantation, the family's antebellum home in Raleigh, N.C., is now surrounded by strip malls, housing developments and chain stores, Cheshire's cousin, Charles Hinton Silver, resolves to uproot the house (along with its eight outbuildings) and haul it overland to another plot -- not coincidentally, part of the plantation's original land grant. As family members weigh in on the pros and cons of this ambitious undertaking, their all-white, descendants-of-English-nobility version of family history becomes increasingly at odds with its mixed-race, mixed-religion reality.
Much of the film reps a detailed chronicle of the move itself, an engineering feat of epic proportions, although perhaps not quite as fascinating as its key spot in the film implies. Nevertheless, watching men navigate bridges and swampy ground with their huge load indeed evokes a sense of historical weightiness.
Cheshire places his discovery of Robert Hinton, a professor of African studies at NYU who traces his ancestry back to Hinton plantation slaves, early in the film. Invited to Midway before the move, Hinton freely shares his knowledge and perspective with the family; indeed, he confesses he feels more at home with Southern whites than with Northern blacks. Yet this sense of shared history can be illusory, as pic soon makes clear.
Meanwhile, Al Hinton, a teacher in Brooklyn, and his 95-year-old grandfather, Abraham Lincoln Hinton -- who, unlike Robert, are actually blood relations of the Cheshire clan --enter the film relatively late in the proceedings, as they are graciously welcomed to the celebration of the home's reopening in its new locale.
"Midway" has been compared to Ross McElwee's work, particularly "Bright Leaves." But while McElwee's first-person diary approach depends on a constructed comic voice, the frequently on-camera Cheshire presupposes an "I" of transparent sincerity (and little humor). The innately problematic nature of such an affectless voice is only partly assuaged by Robert Hinton's presence as an alternate narrator of an alternate history.
If "Midway" proposes a South capable of incorporating contradictions, Cheshire is not unaware of more egregious co-options: Shopping centers sustain the Midway Plantation brand, and a housing project is named after the first African slave brought over to till the soil.
Tech credits are creditable.
Camera (color, HD), Jay Spain; editors, Ramsey Fendall, Greg Loser; music, Ahrin Mishan; sound, Matthew Polis; associate producer, Robert Hinton. Reviewed at Museum of Modern Art, New York, March 18, 2008. (In New Directors, New Films.) Running time: 98 MIN.
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Date in print: Mon., Mar. 31, 2008