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Buba's beautiful portraits
Friday, July 10, 1998 By Marylynn Uricchio, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
In 1979, when Tony Buba was a skinny lad still wet behind the ears, the great German director Werner Herzog came to Pittsburgh for a retrospective at The Carnegie. Herzog generously agreed to spend a day watching the work of local filmmakers, much of which was painful student stuff. Then "Sweet Sal" came on the screen.
The film about an irascible Braddock con man with snake eyes and a voice like rusty nails stopped Herzog cold. He asked who had made it, and Buba shyly raised his hand. "Do you have any more? I want to see everything you've made," Herzog demanded. The eternally unassuming Buba mumbled something like "OK," on the surface unfazed by this extraordinary compliment. Almost 20 years later, he hasn't changed a bit.
Buba's films, on the other hand, have matured a great deal. His early shorts have made way for full-length features, far more proficient technically and ambitious in their content. He tried his hand at pure narrative in "No Pets," the story of a man and his dog. "Struggles in Steel," his fine documentary on black steelworkers, aired nationally on PBS. Buba's work has been acclaimed by The New York Times, screened at prestigious film festivals around the world, lauded by assorted champions, including Herzog, and probably has never earned him a dime. If this is fame without fortune, it hasn't altered the quality that is apparent in every single film Buba has made. Call it heart. A heart so kind, so forgiving and so perceptive that Buba has turned his beloved Braddock into a microcosm that all the world can appreciate.
It is astonishing that 19 of Buba's 25 films have been about Braddock, and that each, in its own way, is completely universal. In "Washing Walls With Mrs. G," Buba simply chats with his elderly Italian grandmother while he cleans the walls in her kitchen. The film captures the warmth of their relationship, as well as the generational and cultural differences that every family has experienced. Buba uses subtitles to translate his grandmother's accented English, sometimes confessing that he has no idea what she's saying. She periodically yells at him, terrified he's going to knock over her St. Joe statue. Nothing really happens, yet in six short minutes Buba's film manages to awaken in viewers a remembrance of the ties that bind and the meaning of family.
In an age when so many filmmakers have chosen style over substance, Buba's work has an immediacy that disguises the skill necessary to create such little gems. Buba's films don't scream for attention or depend on visual pyrotechnics. Instead, they ingratiate themselves. Humor is an essential ingredient in most of Buba's films, a sly, gentle humor that never makes fun of the eclectic characters to which he's been drawn over the years. In the midst of decay, despair and depression he uncovers the nobility of the human spirit and celebrates the resiliency that makes them go on.
One of Buba's finest early films, "J. Roy - New and Used Furniture," is a perfect example of what makes his work so special. J. Roy is a Braddock entrepreneur who has failed in business 12 times. But this time, he tells the camera, things will be different. His revolutionary concept is a drive-in used car and new and used furniture store. He's dressed in a tuxedo waiting for the mayor to arrive for a ribbon-cutting ceremony. He expects 2,000 to show up for the grand opening, though not a soul besides the mayor does. We know J. Roy is doomed even if he doesn't, and because he doesn't, we are inspired by his fervent belief in the American dream.
Buba's films succeed on many levels. They are beautifully rendered portraits of people. Taken in batches, they chronicle the experience of living in a steel town during the death throes of the industrial revolution. Stepping back even farther, they document the continual changes that affect society when its livelihood is radically altered by progress. Warm, whimsical, insightful and always quirky, Buba's films are above all highly personal sagas informed by his unique viewpoint rather than by traditional documentary confines.
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