For more than six decades, Richard Kinard worked with wood.
By the time I filmed Richard in 2015, he was eighty years old. The work had followed him through most of his life, measured in timber and sawmills, long days and the kind of knowledge acquired only by doing something over and over again.
He was not the first Kinard to know this work. Nor would he be the last.
I made Wood: A Family Affair in 2015 while I was a student at the University of South Carolina. The documentary followed three generations of the Kinard family whose lives had been shaped, in one way or another, by the wood industry. Richard’s son, Danny, began working for his grandfather at the sawmill when he was sixteen. What began there became his own career.
Not every inheritance is written into a will. Some things are learned by watching. By getting up in the morning. By knowing the weight of a piece of timber before lifting it, the sound of machinery running correctly, the difference between a job nearly finished and one actually done.
For the Kinards, that knowledge moved from one generation to the next.
But inheritance does not guarantee continuation.
The wood industry that sustained generations of the Kinard family is larger than any one family. Timber becomes the lumber used to frame houses and the paper handled every day without much thought. It is an industry woven quietly into ordinary life, even as the work itself remains demanding and dangerous.
Richard and Danny knew that work intimately. They knew what it provided and what it required.
When I made the film, the question hanging over the story was what would happen next. Would another generation take up the work, or would this particular tradition end with Danny?
More than a decade has passed since the film was made.
Richard has since passed away.
The footage remains much as it was in 2015: Richard at eighty years old, talking about work that had occupied more than sixty years of his life. At the time, the film focused on what would happen next. Whether the knowledge would pass to another generation. Whether a way of life could continue simply because it had continued for so long.
Time has given the footage another meaning.
A camera has no way of knowing what will matter later. It records the ordinary without distinction. A conversation. An afternoon. A man going about work he has done most of his life. It cannot know what will remain ordinary and what will someday become a record of something that is gone.
I have considered returning to the original footage and editing the film again.
It is an unusual proposition to revisit work made more than a decade ago. The footage has not changed, but the person sitting at the editing desk has. There are cuts I would make differently now, moments I would allow to linger, and perhaps things I once thought important that no longer seem so.
For now, the original film remains a record of 2015 in more ways than one. It preserves Richard and the Kinards as they were then, but it also preserves an earlier version of me as a filmmaker, still learning what to leave in and what to leave out.
Perhaps that is reason enough not to replace it.
Perhaps the better thing is to make another version.
The original will always belong to 2015.
Richard is there. The work is still being done. The camera is running.
And for a little while, he is still there
