Street Scenes:

CLASSIC VAGABOND DOCUMENTARY, ‘HOBO’ AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE

BY JOE NOLAN, FILM CRITIC

Here at Moving Pictures, we keep our eyes on all types of social-message cinema. While there are always new movies of conscience being made, sometimes we also come across classics to point our readers too. Street Scenes is our ongoing chronicle of classic social cinema tucked in the corner of your local library or buried in the search results on your favorite video platform. Street Scenes movies are established classics you may have never heard of, and which are ripe for re-watching or enjoying for the very first time.

I can’t think of many movies that deserve a place in our Street Scenes curating as much as Hobo. The 1992 documentary by Northern Ireland filmmaker John T. Davis is one of the best movies about folks without houses because it immerses viewers in the experience of a rootless vagabond existence. Along the way, Davis and the characters he meets disrupt myths about a carefree life “on the road,” and the false securities of the well-to-do.

Davis might be a familiar name to some Nashvillians as his film career is all tangled up in music: As a kid Davis stumbled upon DA Pennebaker filming Bob Dylan strolling down a street in Belfast. Pennebaker was working on his Don’t Look Back masterpiece, and Davis was badly bitten by the film bug. After inheriting his own camera from an uncle, Davis created a groundbreaking punk rock documentary trilogy: Shell Shock Rock, Protex Hurrah and Self-Conscious Over You. The trilogy is a definitive documenting of the northern punk music scene that incubated bands like Stiff Little Fingers and The Undertones. The trilogy also pointed towards Davis’ ongoing explorations of American subcultures – like American hobo culture in the 1990s.

Hobo is Davis’ most famous film and it deserves its audience. Davis meets a man named Beargrease at a hobo convention. The pair agree to ride the Highline railway from Minneapolis, Minn., to Seattle, Wash., one cattle car, one scenic vista, one striking close up, one dumpster dive at a time. Beargrease reveals that he’s spent his whole life in motion, with stints as a sailor, an engineer in Southeast Asia, and as a rail-riding hobo all over America.

Beargrease is an unforgettable character, but the star of the film is Davis’ camera. The director literally stuffed his camera in his bedroll to protect it during the 2000-mile journey he captures in the film. It’s Davis’ courage to risk life and limb — not to mention jail or a beating in a train yard – to hop on this journey that gives his film such immediacy. Hobo is a film about intense isolation captured out in the middle of beautiful nowheres that most of us will never see from our cars on the roads that lead from home to work and back again.

Hobo has moments of transcendent beauty accompanied by the thrill of boundless-seeming liberation. Davis films those scenes because that part of the myth of the free American individual is real. It’s out there and anyone can touch it, but only briefly. Davis also kept his camera running in the hours and days that went by between those magical glimpses. He captures the hard realities of being exposed to elements, of hunger, and the personal tragedies that can make the difference between a life of sameness and stability, and a life on the move or on the run.

Nashvillians might also be interested in John T. Davis’ film Power In the Blood, which compares and contrasts the evangelical American South with the religious conservative culture of Northern Ireland. Davis’ subject in the film is Vernon Oxford – a singing preacher from Nashville. Hobo is currently available for free on YouTube and Power in the Blood can be screened for free at https://qft.vhx.tv/john-t-davis

Joe Nolan is a critic, columnist and performing singer/songwriter based in East Nashville. Find out more about his projects at www.joenolan.com.