Obituaries / St. Clair Bourne, 1943 - 2007 - Documentary maker focused on black issues

St. Clair Bourne, a prominent independent documentary filmmaker whose work focused largely on African American social and political issues and cultural figures such as Paul Robeson and Langston Hughes, has died. He was 64.

Bourne, a Brooklyn resident, died Saturday of pulmonary embolisms after undergoing surgery for the removal of a benign tumor on his brain, said his sister and sole survivor, Judith Bourne.

In a career that began in the late 1960s as a producer for the public affairs series "Black Journal" on public television, Bourne launched his production company, Chamba Mediaworks, in New York City in 1971.

Over 36 years, he produced and/or directed more than 45 works, including documentaries for HBO, PBS, NBC, CBS, the BBC, the Sundance Channel and National Geographic.

Among his most notable films was "Half Past Autumn: The Life and Works of Gordon Parks" (2000), an Emmy-nominated feature-length documentary about the renowned photojournalist and filmmaker that ran on HBO.

Other biographical subjects included poet-writer-activist Amiri Baraka, historian and Pan-African activist John Henrik Clarke, and Hughes, the poet, novelist and playwright.

"Black men who define themselves from an Afrocentric point of view fascinate me -- how they succeeded and overcame opposition," Bourne told American Visions in 1999, the year "Paul Robeson: Here I Stand," his documentary about the singer-actor-activist, was part of the PBS series "American Masters."

Bourne's films, however, spanned a variety of topics, including religion in "Let the Church Say Amen!," a 1974 documentary about a young black seminarian moving into the secular world.

He also dealt with popular music in "Big City Blues" and "New Orleans Brass," the past and current role of African Americans in the American West in "Heritage of the Black West" and black athletes in the BBC series "Will to Win."

He also produced and directed "The Black and the Green," a documentary chronicling a trip to Belfast, Northern Ireland, in the mid-1980s by five black American activists.

Six years later, he produced and directed "Making 'Do the Right Thing,' " a behind-the-scenes look at Spike Lee's feature film about race relations in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant section. The well-reviewed documentary received a national theatrical release.