Review: Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts Is an Exhilarating Tribute to an Outsider Artist

Jeffrey Wolf’s Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts is a spry and inventive account of extraordinary transcendence. Bill Traylor was born into slavery around 1853, in Dallas County, Alabama, where he and his family worked a plantation for their owners. Though slavery would be abolished 12 years later, Traylor continued to work the land and nearby plots for 60 years, becoming an adept and profitable farmer, until bad health and harvest drove him to Montgomery. Living on the streets, Traylor became a local character who painted and sketched on seemingly any surfaces that could serve as a canvas, including trash and debris, the odd textures and shapes of which he ingeniously blended into his compositions. Bill’s art was admired by a local white artist, Charles Shannon, who assisted the man financially and got the work seen to initially little fanfare. Now, however, Traylor is embraced by the art world as an audacious creative as well as a chronicler of America’s struggle to conquer its original sin.

Given their astonishing use of color, scale, and sense of movement, Traylor’s work suggests a blend of cave painting and surrealist art. He drew and painted animals—especially dogs, horses, mules, and snakes—as well as people in various modes of emotional extremis, often either arguing or dancing, the latter rendered as stick figures in and even atop spare buildings that suggest the juke joints of the segregated South. The documentary is attentive not only to the roughness of the materials that Traylor used, but also to the context of his work (such as the grit of the society that yielded his paintings’ textures) and of a life that spanned slavery, Jim Crow, the Great Emancipation, and the American prosperity that flourished after World War II. Taking a cue from the vital patchwork quality of Traylor’s art, Wolf and screenwriter Fred Barron fashion an exhilarating mixture of university lecture and performance piece, utilizing scholars and artists and archive materials to capture various aspects of a singular life.

Chasing Ghosts somehow feels simultaneously focused, covering nearly 90 years of a man’s life in granular detail over the course of a sprightly 75 minutes, and appealingly free-associational. A miniature discussion of African-American dance and rhythm, accompanied by tap dancing by Jason Samuels Smith, is used to expound on the rapturous movement that often drives Traylor’s art. Quotations and past interviews are performed by actors Russell G. Jones and Sharon Washington, while Zora Neal Hurston’s writing is poetically utilized to evoke the pain, and even the beauty, of plantation life. The film’s ephemeral, symbolic nature is complemented and enriched by an equal fascination with nuts-and-bolts detail, including close-ups of old censuses, newspaper articles, and photographs. These artifacts underscore the atrocities of slavery with a particularly chilling sense of banality, such as when the murder of Traylor’s child, William, is referred to as the shooting of a “negro robber.”

Dramatizing Traylor’s life, Wolf resists the pat binaries of many history lessons; as one interviewee says here, even the Civil War wasn’t quite such a literal matter of black and white. Wolf unearths nuanced, uncomfortable details in Chasing Ghosts, from the Traylors’ authentic bond with their white masters to the brutal reminder that emancipation led to a response of mass white-driven terror that pervades in permutations to the present day. But Traylor isn’t condescendingly utilized here as a victim or martyr for the sake of coaxing white guilt. Though his life was riven with strife, Traylor was also a shrewd, hard-working, mischievous, thirsty, lusty man (he had several wives and at least a dozen children), who managed, late in age, to channel that passion and baggage into art whose stark, illusory simplicity contained multitudes of experience. Traylor was both an artist and a historian, and Chasing Ghosts is appropriately both a work of art and history—a beautiful film with a sense of swing and soul.