USA,
1999, 61 min
Shown in 2000
CREDITS
- dir
-
Elizabeth Barret
- prod
-
Elizabeth Barret, Judi Jennings
- scr
-
Fenton Johnson
- cam
-
Peter Pearce
- editor
-
Lucy Massie Phenix, Marta Wohl
- source
-
Appalshop Inc., 91 Madison Ave., Whitesburg, KY 41858. FAX: 606-633-1009. EMAIL: dreynolds@appalshop.org
- gga award
-
Silver Spire, History
-
COMMENTS
Screened with Woodrow Cornett: Letcher County Butcher and Mountain Farmer.
OTHER
Elizabeth Barret’s personal, compassionate documentary is a provocative examination of the media’s responsibility toward its subjects. In the 1960s, the Appalachia region near her home was invaded by news crews seeking images of poverty. While much of this footage helped bring about needed social change, few considered the impact on the residents—until Hobart Ison killed Canadian documentary filmmaker Hugh O’Connor. In 1967, O’Connor and his crew traveled to rural eastern Kentucky to shoot material for a project on the American Dream. When they stopped to film a coal miner sitting outside a rickety-looking house, O’Connor was shot by the angry landowner. Thirty years later, Barret returned to the area to unravel the stories behind this tragedy. In interviews with local residents (including some of O’Connor’s original interviewees), members of the crew and O’Connor’s daughter, many express the difficult issue of outsiders—strangers with cameras—versus locals. Some, like Ison, resented being used as icons for poverty. A miner’s son explains, “It was the greatest life.... It was ludicrous to consider that we were poverty stricken.” Barret herself observes, “I came to see that there was a complex relationship between social action and social embarrassment. As a filmmaker, I live everyday with the implications of what happened.”
—Kathy Geritz
FACTOID #328
Saul Bass, the genius graphic designer behind the introductory sequences to Hitchcock’s Psycho, Vertigo and North by Northwest, designed the posters for the second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth installments of the San Francisco International Film Festival.
