Biography
Born in Detroit just before the earnest start of the automobile industry’s boom, Woods’ credits both the city’s vibrant cultural life and her mother’s love of film and dance as early artistic influences. Growing up towards the tail end of ‘the golden age of radio, Woods’remembers sitting under the radio with her siblings listening to the likes of The Jack Benny Program, Burns and Allen, The Life of Riley, Amos ’n’ Andy, The Shadow, Fibber McGee and Molly, Beulah, The Great Gildersleeve, The Lone Ranger. Of this, she claims growing up, she honed her skills of imagining the characters she wasn’t seeing. That ethos of portraitive, reciprocal representation comes through in her two shorts Killing Time (1979) and Fannie’s Film (1981), both of which foreground the rich interior lives of their main characters as much as they highlight a preoccupation with their visibility to the outside world. She attended Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan and graduated with a BA in Mass Communications and Russian. She began her career as a junior copywriter at a small Detroit advertising agency. In 1967, she relocated to New York City where she started working in television at ABC as a production assistant in the documentary unit. She also taught Pilates for a number of years at the Robert Fitzgerald Studio in Manhattan. Woods directed, wrote, and produced independent films, most notably ''Killing Time'' and ''Fannie's Film''. Before making her own films, Woods worked on shorts at the Women's Interart Center in Hell's Kitchen with the support of Ellen Hovde and Muffie Meyer. She also worked as a guest filmmaker in the Lincoln Center Film Society's "Artist in the Schools program." Fronza reflected on the start of her film career: "Almost nothing I’ve done in my life has really been by choice. I went into advertising because I was offered a job, I went into television because I was offered a job. The first time I chose something, it was movies." In addition to making her own films, Woods was an assistant sound engineer for John Sayles's film '' The Brother From Another Planet''. She was also involved as a cast member in the 1985 film, '' The Man Who Envied Women''. Of her role in the film industry, Woods said "I think the male-female divisions are more defining". Woods said that she was influenced by people as diverse as Bill Moyers, Malcolm X, Georgia O'Keeffe and others. Woods attended NYU film school until she left to became a teacher. She moved to Milwaukee where she taught filmmaking at the University of Milwaukee. After meeting her husband she immigrated to France in 1987.Legacy and cultural impact
Woods is one of the first black woman directors that completed multiple short films. In 2017, BAM Cinematheque in New York City included both ''Killing Time'' and ''Fannie’s Film'' in a new season. This proved to be the start of a contemporary "re-discovery" of Wood's work. Woods describes receiving the news in 2017 that her films were to be featured, nearly thirty-five years after they were produced: "It was very strange, not to say a bit destabilizing. Suddenly... I was catapulted forward, backward and sideways in time. I was an artist, and I use that word loosely, who had never really been discovered — I’m speaking solely of critics and the media, the people who have the power to make or break one’s career — yet was now being re-discovered." Richard Brody called ''Killing Time'' "very simply, one of the best short films that I’ve ever seen." Melissa Anderson of the '' Village Voice'' praised Woods's film ''Fannie's Film'': "she makes the mundane facts of Drayton’s life indelible." ''Short films
Killing Time (1979)
''Killing Time'' is a 1979 narrative short film written and directed by Fronza Woods. The film is a dark comedy that follows a woman (played by Woods but credited with the stage name "Sage Brush") as she prepares to commit suicide. The duration of the film is 9 minutes. Richard Brody called ''Killing Time'' "very simply, one of the best short films that I’ve ever seen." In response, Woods reflected: "The most beautiful, thoughtful, understanding and generous analysis being Richard Brody’s review of the series in his The Front Row column for the ''New Yorker''. I was touched and stunned that he was able to empathize so deeply with the plight of black women filmmakers of that era." Hugues Perrot describes the film: "...a bitter and insolent ballad, shows the casual disarray of a woman, alone in her room, searching for the appropriate attire for her suicide. In a jaunty rather than joyful tone (her artificially cheerful whistling), the film ends up hypnotising us, humour acting less as a safety valve than as a corollary of despair." Woods says of the film: "I would have a protagonist whose inability to decide what to wear in order to kill herself would ultimately save her life. It was never a film about suicide. It’s a film about what you think will happen if you kill yourself. I don’t want to make light of suicide, it’s not a light matter." Speaking on the impetus and conditions that bore Killing Time (1979), Woods describes what, in many ways, was a serendipitous orchestration of constraint: “To tell the truth, Killing Time was the best I could come up with, on the quick, for a subject for a student film It was developed around this very simple truth a friend observed about me—that I would never be able to commit suicide because I wouldn’t know what to wear.” Meditating on themes such as vanity, ego, self-pity, self-importance, and, as counter-intuitive as it may seem, the life-saving effects of indecision, Wood’s film sought to employ humor not as a means of trivializing the subject of suicidal ideation, but, instead, as a way of humanizing it.Fannie's Film (1981)
''Fannie's Film'' is a 1981 documentary short that follows 65-year old Fannie Drayton, a cleaning woman. The film is told from the perspective of Drayton and is 15 minutes in duration. Hugues Perrot writes: "In parallel with the hieratic figures that come and go on the sports machines, she is filmed alone cleaning the studio emptied of its ghosts. The film upends paradigms, plunging the visible world into a bare space and giving body to an inaudible voice – a voice that is especially moving as it recounts the joyfulness of the life it has led." ''Fannie's Film'' was selected for the 1985 Créteil International Women's Film Festival. Woods comments: “I like films about real people. I am inspired by almost everything but especially by struggle. I am interested in people who take on a challenge, no matter how great or small, and come to terms with it. What inspires me are people who don’t sit on life’s rump but have the courage, energy, and audacity not only to grab it by the horns, but to steer it as well.” With Fannie’s Film, Woods’ saw the short as an opportunity to filmically express her own anger about inequality and “benign” racism. Woods, of the film, said “ I really did want people to think about the “invisible” people who make their lives more livable. I wanted to make a film that showed that those people have rich lives and people that love them, too. They, too, dream. They, too, can be funny and insightful. But you’ll never know it if you don’t engage with them, if you pretend they don’t exist. In hindsight, it sounds embarrassingly ‘worthy!’”References
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* {{DEFAULTSORT:Woods, Fronza American women film directors People from Detroit African-American film producers American women film producers Living people African-American film directors American expatriates in France Film directors from Michigan Film producers from Michigan 21st-century African-American people 21st-century African-American women 1943 births