Old Times in Tennessee - A conversation with Rory Fraser and Joseph Watson
Published April 2nd 2026
Interview by Joseph Watson
Old Times in Tennessee
Nonfiction, Super16mm film
43 minutes
USA
Synopsis
In the late summer of 1830, just months after signing the Indian Removal Act, President Andrew Jackson met with Chickasaw leaders in Franklin, Tennessee, to negotiate their removal from homelands their ancestors had lived in for thousands of years. “Old Times in Tennessee” returns to this overlooked encounter not through reenactment or exposition but through a layering of landscapes, architectural imagery, and archival text.
Shot on Super16mm, the film moves slowly along the Natchez Trace and its surrounding terrain—burial mounds, plantation homes, golf courses, cities, and subdivisions—intercut with fragments of 19th-century correspondence and press clippings. The result is a quiet excavation of place and memory, an invitation to consider how histories of removal persist beneath the surfaces of modern life.
Interview
Throughout, the film creates these confrontations between past and present. There are the golfers using the Glass Mounds as a driving range. There’s the car that flies across the road in the foreground of the Bear Creek Mound. There’s the audio of Donald Trump discussing Andrew Jackson’s legacy. But there’s a refusal to simply confer a specific meaning or moral on these confrontations, to tell the viewer what kind of conclusion to draw from them. What are your thoughts on this—how you staged these confrontations (if that’s even the right word), what they have to say about our relationship to history, how a medium like film can cultivate that relationship, etc.?
I consider the work experimental nonfiction which is sort of an indefinable genre that can sometimes blur the line between pure documentary methodologies like cinema verité or direct cinema, traditional documentary, and narrative filmmaking methods. The only sequence/shots that were “staged” but speak to something true (per Werner Herzog’s idea of “ecstatic truth”) are the opening and closing shots of my nephew and father. The first, of my nephew looking for arrowheads, is meant to simply represent me as a young boy wandering around looking for arrowheads right in that same landscape where the sequence was filmed. In the Franklin, TN, area, especially within the vicinity of the Harpeth River where I grew up and that sequence was filmed, it is common to find arrowheads. The shot of my father looking out at the Pharr Mounds is meant to represent me in adulthood, looking at and interpreting the landscape and its human history, which is what this film tries to do.
The rest of the imagery is observational. What was filmed was what happened. The idea of these confrontations, “juxtapositions” may be a better term, was indeed a deliberate part of the visual approach to the film. My main idea, visually, was to show where the ancient history of this landscape runs up against modernity – what that looks like, but more than that, what that signifies. Or that was my hope. That the viewer – given space to look, think, and reflect on the images – may consider what it means. I tried to trust the viewer’s intelligence to draw their own conclusions, while at the same time, if you watch the film closely, my perspective on this history comes through. My perspective is that it is a brutal and immoral history, and one with which everyone must contend. Which is why I made the film. To be clear, golf is not the problem, tourists on the Bear Creek mound or at The Hermitage are not the problem. The problem, in the view of this film, is a lack of awareness on the part of many people about what allowed them to play golf where they do, live in a house, attend school, work, do anything in this landscape. What allowed for all of this is the forced removal of Indigenous people who lived here for thousands of years before Europeans arrived, and the subsequent rapid expansion of the plantation slavery system that occurred in the 1820s-30s in Tennessee (much earlier in the deeper south and the coastal south). This may sound like a statement of the obvious to some, but to many it isn’t obvious.
Still from “Old Times in Tennessee” showing a driving range near Franklin, Tennessee, with the Glass Mounds, constructed ca. 200 AD, in the background. Courtesy of Rory Fraser.
I intentionally made the film’s political perspective subtle, because I want people from both sides to watch it and think about it. I did not want to “preach to the choir” – make a film only for people who believe as I do. I knew that this film would probably draw criticism, ire, or anger from viewers on the far left and the far right. I realize that this film takes a somewhat removed, moderate view toward a highly fraught part of US history both in the 19th century and now. I also know that we do not live in a society or world anymore that rewards moderate thinking – coming towards the center, trying to find balance. This film tries to do that – it basically asks the viewer to do that. That may also be a reason it is confusing or jarring to some viewers. It doesn’t reflect the chaotic and extremely polarized nation we live in, and the equally chaotic and extreme discourse we find ourselves in. It tries to take a few steps back from that – not to normalize Jackson or Trump’s atrocities, or say “well, hey, in the grand scheme of things…” – no, it is trying to zoom out in order to warn, to try to make us think about the grand scale of human history, and remind the viewer that we are still in it, and we can change course. As William Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
The film focuses on the traces of Indigenous history in Middle Tennessee (also, to a lesser degree, West Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi), whether through the continued presence of Paleoindian mounds that are over 10,000 years old or some of the sites associated with the forced removal of the Chickasaw and other Native tribes in the 1830s. But alongside that larger history, there also seem to be hints of a more personal story. Could you talk a bit about that?
It is important to acknowledge that the Chickasaw are very much still here and that the Chickasaw Nation does a tremendous job of preserving Chickasaw history through various projects such as Chickasaw Television, Chickasaw Films, and Chickasaw Press, as well as their website chickasaw.net. My film partially draws on their work and does not intend to lay claim to or supersede the important work of Chickasaw historians, artists, and educators, only to connect with it.
The main visual idea for putting myself into the film, and my own history as a relatively privileged person who was raised in this landscape, was to simply film the sitting room of my parents’ house in Franklin, Tennessee, which contains some, but not all, of the oldest pieces of art and furniture that came from my great-grandparents house in Perthshire, Scotland (my father was born and raised in Perth, Scotland). The oldest things date to the 16th century, and when my parents moved to the US in the 1970s, the contents of the house and farm my father inherited, which was called Fields, were transported via cargo ship from Edinburgh, through the Panama Canal, to Port of San Francisco and to their first home in Los Altos, CA (my sister and I were born in Palo Alto in 1975 and 1980). In 1981, they moved to Franklin, Tennessee, and all these things moved across the country to where they are today. Tennessee is the only place I remember from childhood, and my little brother was born here in 1983. Considering the strong tradition of Scots-Irish immigration to the southeastern US, this seemed like an historically relevant way to place myself, though Dad only came to this country in the 1960s to go to college at CU Boulder. Both of my parents’ family histories involve immigration from Great Britain, but my mother’s ancestors came much earlier. They were English, and both sides (Tracy and Pickren) were here in the 18th century. My great-great-great-grandfather Col. Erasmus Darwin Tracy was given a land grant from President Fillmore in 1852 in Florida on the St. Mary’s River for service in the Indian Wars. My mother grew up nearby in Charlton County, GA. Of course, none of this is said in the film – all of it is contained in one image of a room with a lot of old things in it. In cinema language, this says what it needs to. At least it does for me.
Personal essay films, a major sub-genre in nonfiction cinema, are a huge influence on me – Ross McElwee, Agnes Varda, George Kuchar, Jon Bang Carlsen among many others. I love how these filmmakers brought themselves into their films, but for me, I couldn’t do it like they did. Not least of all because it would be copying, but stylistically I just felt I had to find my own way to point to myself, my family, and my own life in the film. Though it deals with ancient and modern history, the film is made from my perspective and is therefore a highly subjective meditation on these histories. What is personal in the film may not seem glaringly obvious, but it is there.
The main visual idea of the shots of my parents’ sitting room is to somewhat confuse the viewer as to where they are. They can tell it is a personal space from the beginning, because there are two living dogs on the floor (now both gone, rest in peace, Angus and Bea). But I inserted these shots in the film interstitially to break the film into beats, and I also intercut shots from their house with shots from the opulent interiors of The Hermitage, Andrew Jackson’s plantation home, one of many in this area. The point of doing that is to suggest to the viewer, or raise the idea, that in some ways there is no real difference between these interiors. The contemporary spaces we inhabit, however modest or opulent, are extensions of the space of The Hermitage in some sense. The Hermitage was literally bought and paid for by money made via the labor of the enslaved, and our own homes and lives today are made possible by those same economic factors combined with Jackson’s efforts in 1830 to turn the Indian Removal Act into a harsh reality in the next decade, ushering in the “King Cotton” economic boom (for wealthy landowners, and bankers in the North and abroad) that lasted until the Civil War, and have long reverberated after. We who live our lives in this landscape do so because of these events, which is one aspect of what this film is about.
I was intrigued by the way you alternate between more “atmospheric” portraits of sites, allowing the scene to kind of speak for itself, and sequences that involve extended narration, like the docent at the Hermitage and historian at the Masonic Lodge in Franklin. Then there are also the captions, intertitles, and other text that provide some context mostly by drawing from various historical documents. How did you think about what kinds of information to provide viewers and in what format?
First, the “information” in this film – the text and the spoken word – is the bare minimum needed to understand the history. My friends and colleagues who are historians or history buffs, while they accept that this is an art film, struggle with the fact that there is much more to the history, especially the fact that between 1830 and 1837, so much resistance and struggle went on to try to stop the forced removal of the Chickasaw and the other “civilized tribes.” My film elides that in a single beat between two bits of text, the last two inter-titles in the film, one from Chickasaw Chief Levi Colbert, the other saying he received no response, or implying that. This is not an attempt to disregard or minimize this struggle. Its cinematic function is to say, essentially, “despite the efforts and pleadings of the Chickasaw, Jackson did not answer the call for help.” It’s saying that in cinema language. As a filmmaker, I feel that if you include too much textual or other word-oriented information, you get away from cinema as a visual language, and at that point you should just write an article, or a book, or do a podcast on the subject. Cinema is about showing and not telling – not always, but at its core.
Which connects to your other question – when to let images speak for themselves. Ancient mound sites seen in a modern context (golf courses) speak for themselves. The Natchez Trace Bridge – a marvel of modern engineering to continue a 10,000 year old trail across a small valley – speaks for itself. The graphic match cut of the Pinson Mound to the Bass Pro Shop/Pyramid in Memphis speaks for itself. The interior of my parents’ house speaks for itself in a way – it suggests another space, possibly a personal space. A space that reflects what is old but also exists right now in 2026.
A still from “Old Times in Tennessee” showing a staircase in Andrew Jackson’s plantation The Hermitage, most of which dates from the mid-1830s. Courtesy of Rory Fraser.
On a related note, the shots of Beale Street Landing overlooking the Mississippi River in Memphis from the very beginning of the film take on a different meaning, a greater significance later, after we’re informed, via text, that the first group of Chickasaw departed from Memphis in 1837. I’m not sure if you thought of a narrative arc for the film, but could you talk about how you thought about the way this story plays out?
The narrative arc of the film, in keeping with my previous statement about a commitment to cinema language, was also a visual idea. The idea was for the sequencing of the shots to do two things: sort of zoom in, and zoom out, albeit through static shots (there is no zooming, panning, or tilting - the camera never moves). And the second was that the camera sort of moves through the landscape in a way that felt natural to me – meandering from Franklin to The Hermitage, back to Franklin, down the Natchez Trace, then back to Franklin, then finally… west. In keeping with this, I knew I wanted to end the film with a shot of the Mississippi River, as the river symbolizes so much in terms of Chickasaw history. Sadly, a sort of point of no return, as they spent seven years fighting their removal only to finally begin mass removal in 1837 (also the year that Jackson left the White House and returned to The Hermitage to retire). Including the shots of Memphis in the beginning of the film, I suppose, was a bit of foreshadowing. But I had no clear idea of a narrative arc when I was filming it other than that idea. I constructed the “narrative” in the editing process when I found connections in the images and sounds I recorded.
You shot the film on Super16mm. Could you say a bit about why you chose that particular medium?
It was simply opportunistic, there was no aesthetic or artistic reason, though I do love the process and considerable labor related to shooting film. I first shot 16mm in high school in the late 90s and then on two shorts in graduate school at Stanford. I was an Assistant Professor in the Park School at Ithaca College from 2015-2020, which is IC’s film school, before my wife and I decided to move back home to Nashville. IC had two Aaton XTR Prod Super16mm cameras, which are legendary in the 16mm world. In the summers of those years, my colleague Josh Bonnetta shot two films - El Mar La Mar in the Sonoran desert with JP Sniadecki, and then Josh made The Two Sights in the outer Hebrides of Scotland with one of the Aatons. With the other, I made Old Times in Tennessee. One of my favorite films is If…. (UK, 1968) by Lindsay Anderson, which mixes black and white and color film. When asked what that blending of the two stocks “meant” he said, basically, “Oh, we just shot what we had on hand.” That’s sort of like this film. I happened to have on hand a very nice French 16mm camera that I could use for three months every summer. And as a professor with a Kodak educator discount, as well as a grant from Ithaca College, the confluence of those factors made the film the way that it is. I will always be grateful for that because it will probably never happen again.
Rory Fraser shooting “Old Times in Tennessee” at the Hermitage in August 2017. Photograph by Carolyn Benedict Fraser.
The sound design seemed, to me, to be a rather powerful, if subtle, way of establishing the mood of the film. I’m thinking of the footsteps of a person we hear but never see in your parents’ living room or on the footpath along the Natchez Trace. Or the thunder that just kind of rumbles through several scenes. Or the cicadas that begin to overpower the Hermitage docent’s monologue. What are your thoughts on how the sound design enhanced, augmented, or otherwise affected the story you’re telling?
Well, one formative idea behind the sound design is that it is guided by Chekhov’s quote in the beginning, “Just think, Anya: Your grandfather, your great-grandfather, and his forefathers before him, all were serf-owners, they all owned living souls, so isn’t it possible, then, that in every blossom, every leaf, every tree trunk in the orchard, a human soul now gazes down upon us, can’t you hear their voices?” So, one idea in the sound design is that, via the sounds of nature, we may be possibly hearing the spirit world making comment. The footsteps are never seen. I suppose you could say this is in keeping with renewed interest in Derrida’s concept of hauntology, which seems to be “hot” right now, but I can’t claim I was going for that. Two of my former students at IC, Tyler Macri and Sophia Feuer, both great filmmakers based in NYC sent me that Derrida piece when I started making this film. Maybe it bubbled up into the work. Probably so. I was a philosophy major at Sewanee, and am prone to this type of thinking, both the philosophy element and the element of chance influence.
Aside from the theoretical approach to the sound design, I just love the practice of sound designing. I recorded the sound along with my friend Wes Hart, and my brother, Ross Fraser. The process yielded a lot of great sound, mostly asynchronous, so there was a lot of material to work with. Listening to what was recorded, disconnected from imagery, allowed me to think of ways it could be used to say something just through sound itself. The sounds of the frogs, cicadas, and other insects possibly say something. The sound of footsteps whose source we cannot see possibly say something or allow for interpretation. The idea of a film like this is you are asking the viewer to interpret it for themselves, while hoping of course that they watch and hear it closely in order to do that.
There’s something to the disparate sources you pull into this story. Most of the text that appears on screen comes from authors with a direct connection to the history you’re exploring, but then there’s that incredible passage that seems like it’s describing the antebellum South but in fact is from Anton Chekhov. The music accompanying the film comes from the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, the contemporary American composer/sound artist zaké, and the singer-songwriter Casey Black. Do you see this disparateness as a kind of complement to the way past and present collide in the film? Or were there other ideas at play here?
I see the music, as disparate as the selections may seem, as working in concert with one another. Two of the pieces also have meaning to me that is not expressly stated to the viewer. The first piece is my father’s favorite piece of classical music that I grew up listening to over and over again, the “Karelia Suite” by Sibelius. The second piece, by zaké, is an ambient piece from a record of his that are loops of samples taken from orchestral recordings. I first heard it and was really drawn to it and used it in the film as a kind of echo of Sibelius during the Natchez Trace sequence – it is beautiful, ominous, and reverberant. The final song, “The Museum Made of Glass,” was written by my childhood friend, Casey Black. We played in a band together in high school, and he still makes records today under the name Nada Rien. This song always stuck with me. When I asked if I could use it for this film, he said yes of course, and I asked him what, to him, it was about. He said that, atypical for him as a songwriter, it was written during a time when he had watched a number of David Lynch films and read some of his writing and decided to write songs that were just straight transcriptions of his dreams. And this song was one of them. So it had no “meaning” in one sense, to Casey, but its collision with my film gives it an evocative type of meaning, at least within the context of the film. And it was meaningful to me to include the song and have it and my images create new meaning together.
The text is all correspondence or news clippings, uninflected, which is meant to give the film even more editorial remove as it relates to the facts of history. The only text that does not fall into this category are the two first pieces, from Josephus Conn Guild and Chekhov.
Guild is the author of the book from 1878 that the film is named for, Old Times in Tennessee. I included it because that book is considered a primary text of Tennessee frontier history and is much lauded for this. Don’t get me wrong, it is an amazing book full of interesting stories, but it is primarily about white frontier history. I used his title for my film, provocatively, to undermine its meaning. To instead extend Guild’s sense of “old times” in Tennessee from two-hundred years (or only one-hundred when he was writing) to around 12-20,000 years of human history in this area – the amount of time the Chickasaw and their ancestors have probably been living here, not to mention the Creek and Cherokee.
The use of Chekhov is meant to expand the viewer’s sense of the brutality of removal and genocide to a global level. Sadly, it is a tale as old as time and seems to exist everywhere. We see it now all over the world, and we see it in our country via ICE. As Rachael Harrell Finch said in the film, “Jackson wanted to consolidate the power of the Executive, away from congress, to remove people for the benefit of the United States. For the benefit of very white, wealthy, educated, male individuals.” My hope is that this quote sits with the viewer because she could just as easily be talking about President Trump in 2026 as Jackson in 1830.
I don’t believe that war and genocide are inevitable byproducts of human nature, which would be a politically conservative view of European settlement in North America, the Indian Wars, and the Indian Removal Act and its aftermath. But I do think they are byproducts of the nature of capitalism (and now hyper-capitalism) and the political structures that fuel it and have sent it into overdrive. That’s also what this film is about. That, and how we are all a part of it, no matter our political positions. Whether we want to be or not.
Artist Bio
Rory Fraser is a filmmaker and teacher who grew up in Franklin, Tennessee, and lives in Nashville. He attended Sewanee (BA ’04), Ole Miss (MA ’09) and Stanford (MFA ’11). More information about Fraser and his work can be found at roryfraser.com.
Interviewer Bio
Joseph M. Watson teaches architectural history and design at Belmont University. He received his Ph.D. in the History and Theory of Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania in 2018.