My Life as a Dog

She said, now I will get to see your name come up too when you release “White Guilt.”

Hi all,

I’m often asked why I make films. Or what inspired me to make films. My mother recently revealed to me that she was pregnant with me this month many years ago and she needed a name for me. As she sat in a movie theater, she saw the name Eli come up on the screen for an Eli Wallach film. She said, now I will get to see your name come up too when you release White Guilt.

We believe in signs in my family. We’re superstitious that way. As I was making White Guilt I had this strange feeling of déjà vu throughout the process. On the one hand, I was responsible for helping my father, Shelby Steele, adapt his 2006 book of the same name to the upheavals of the last twenty years from Black Lives Matter to October 7.

On the other hand, I was telling the history of race in America through my father’s life. As I struggled to bring his life to the screen, such as the time he decided to hop on a plane and visit the Black Panthers in Algiers, I found myself marveling that these stories I had heard my entire life were now being transformed into the visual form. It was a strange sensation. At one point, these stories had been sources of entertainment. Something I could deploy to give other people a sense of the family I came from. Now, these stories suddenly had a purpose for me: a way to illuminate how my father’s concept of white guilt has undermined the American principles since the 1960s.

I say this to say, yes, I do believe that fate played a role in allowing my father and I along with my mother to work together as a filmmaking team.

But it is not why I became a filmmaker.

As a kid, I had a tough relationship with movies. I was born profoundly deaf and my hearing aids allowed me to hear about 15 percent of what others could hear. I did like seeing movies like the 101 Dalmatians or the first Superman but I often had to rely on my imagination to make sense of what I was seeing on the screen. Perhaps that is why I have an intensely personal relationship with some of those earlier films. But then there were those films, the ones where people did nothing but talk their way through the entire films. The Woody Allen movies were the worst. I have one memory of being about eight years old and begging my parents at the local mall to not drag me to yet another Allen movie.

What I did love about the movies though I could not hear them were the beautiful shots. Even Allen movies had some gorgeous shots of New York City. Perhaps that’s what led me to photography. One of my favorite things was playing with my parents’ point-and-shoot Canon.

I loved the idea of grabbing a moment in time and taking unorthodox shots. I remember riding in the back of my grandfather’s Oldsmobile across the midtown bridge from Queens to Manhattan and leaning out the window to grab different angles of the bridge. The photos had an abstract look to them and I remember Sandra, my teacher for 12 years, looking at them and saying they were quite good. I realized that photos were not just memory-capturers but could also have the artistic, transformative quality that showed the world around us in a different way. I was about twelve years old.

One day, my mother came home excitedly and told me that there was a great foreign film playing at San Jose’s downtown Camera Cinema theater. She explained that the film had English subtitles and I would be able to follow. It was Lasse Hallström’s “My Life as a Dog.” I remember being skeptical. A foreign film?

After dinner at our favorite restaurant, Original Joe’s, by the San Jose State campus where my father taught (an important location in White Guilt) we walked over to the theater. When the lights dimmed and I saw the subtitles come on the screen, I experienced the magic of cinema for the first time. I laughed at the opening scenes and realized that I was one with the audience around me. As the film unfolded, I watched how young Ingemar dealt with the pain of his dying mother by comparing himself to Laika, the poor dog.

“And what about Laika, the space dog? They put her in the Sputnik and sent her into space. They attached wires to her heart and brain to see how she felt. I don't think she felt too good. She spun around up there for five months until her doggy bag was empty. She starved to death. It's important to have something like that to compare things to.”

That film was comedy and tragedy and remains one of my top five films to this day. It changed my life. I knew I wanted to do something with photography and stories.

Shortly after that experience — another sign? — my family was invited by one of our closest friends, Warrington Hudlin, to visit the set of the movie that he was producing. It was the scene where Kid visits Tisha Campbell at her home. The film was House Party.

It was the first time I ever saw a film being made. Those two experiences confirmed what would become my passion for life. I was lucky to have discovered it at a young age.

Shortly after that, I decided to make my first documentary. I had lost touch with many of my deaf friends when I was mainstreamed in first grade and had reconnected with some of them when I was about 14 years old. I decided that the name of the film would be: “The Hearing Impaired: Their Struggles and Successes.” My parents got me a VHS camera and I found some garage lights and drove all around the Bay Area, interviewing deaf teenagers on their lives.

I’m still doing the same thing today. Not much has changed. The passion is still why I get up every morning ready to work. It was not an easy path and there were times when I tried to walk away and even took years away from filmmaking. But somehow I always found the way back to my passion. Perhaps that is the power of fate, that it reminds you of what your purpose is. I’m thankful for that because it led me to the place where I could help my father make White Guilt. I can’t wait for the film to leave our hands and become yours. Once that’s done, I’ll be looking for my next subject.

All my best,

Eli