John Greyson speaking via Skype at the Flaherty NYC event, Anthology Film Archives, November 27, 2013.

I stitched together the several cell phone videos I shot. No idea why the second clip is upside down!

Dan Streible

(additional note) Slightly Off Angle: Orson Welles and Home Movies as Records of Production

A followup note to my previous post--  

Paul Dunbar, a noted Pathé newsreel-man was the cinematographer of Welles' Too Much Johnson. I thought this was particularly interesting considering Welles' relationship to newsreel, especially in his Citizen Kane "News on the March" reconstruction.

Slightly Off Angle: Orson Welles and Home Movies as Records of Production

            Monday night, I went to see the Orson Welles' recovered film Too Much Johnson (1938) at the Director's Guild of America Theatre. The event was hosted by the George Eastman House and the film was narrated by various curators and archivists who worked on the preservation of the film, including Paolo Usai Cherchi. Found in Italy in 2012, the recovered and restored 35mm print was screened for the first time at the Pordenone Silent Film Festival earlier this fall.

            While the feature film deserves its own dissecting of various Wellesian techniques (especially considering that it was actually intended to be a prologue for a theatre version of William Gillette's play), I would like to focus my discussion on the supplemental 16mm home movie that was screened directly after the 35mm print. This film, specifically distinguished as a "home movie," was—to to the best of my knowledge, considering its presentation notes at the screening—not found with the feature in Pordonene or restored with it in Pittsburgh, but rather it was originally located at the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Doing a quick online search, I found a short clip of the 3 minute film along with archival information on the website of the National Film Preservation Foundation.[1] As the website details, the footage was donated by the family of Myron S. Falk, who was an investor in the Mercury Theatre.

            Seeing Welles directing is fascinating in itself, but it was also telling to see this home movie footage after the final scene of Too Much Johnson. As Paolo Usai Cherchi discussed at the Monday night screening, whoever was making the home movie was within close proximity to the cameraman of Too Much Johnson. While the short film cut between Welles and the scene he was directing, the final scene of Too Much Johnson, depicting two women running towards the camera and then stopping and screaming (played by Virginia Nicholson Welles and Ruth Ford), can be seen just slightly off angle as compared to the feature film footage. In the feature film, these women ran towards the camera and were then presented in a close up shot depicting only their faces. In the home movie, the women are presented in a medium shot, from the just above the knees upward. This angle along with the recording of actors acting and Welles directing is an especially important "history of below."[2] It at once preserves fragments of the Too Much Johnson film production while presenting the enigmatic persona of Orson Welles. As a home movie, this is a private history rather than a public production. It places its audience in closer proximity to Welles, whom scholars and fans have been trying to dissect for decades. While Welles is still very much acting while he directs, his mannerisms and temperament are in accord with the histories of his volatile but jovial temperament. This short fragment of his directorial work adds just one more dimension to his persona.

In her introductory discussion of home movies, Patricia Zimmerman quotes Jim Sharpe on history from below:

"those writing history from below have not only provided a body of work which permits us to know more about the past: they have also made it plain there is a great deal more, much of its secret still lurking in unexplored evidence, which could be known. Thus history from below retains its subversive aura."[3]

Zimmerman continues this discussion:

"[h]istory from below raises questions about the nature of evidence, conceptual models, and methodology. These questions require moving beyond the traditional historiography of elites into intellectual alliances with social theory, anthropology, psychoanalysis, ethnography, and even science to admit—and find—new source material that tells different stories of those who have been denied a history."[4]

While Orson Welles is certainly not a subject of lost history, his disputes with the studio system and arguments over editing and post-production (especially in Magnificent Ambersons, Lady from Shanghai) suggests that there might be conflicting histories that can be rectified through a different avenue of study. Clearly, research within studio archives might reveal his correspondence with producers but home movie footage of Welles provides a different angle on this history.

            I would like to argue that memories of Welles preserved in this home movie footage are semi-private rather than completely private. While it is a home movie, the film depicts a semi-public event, especially considering the celebrity status of Welles—even during his early film career—and the commentary given during the Monday screening of Too Much Johnson, which suggested that the final "Cuba" scene was shot on an operating quarry in New York, Welles and his team actually disturbing their daily schedule. However, despite this public presence that might classify the film as a type of tabloid, popular culture newsreel, the time and space of the home movie presents a particular function. The film not only presents fragments of an until-recently lost production, but also is a unique composition of a particular, private memory. Welles was not only directing, but he was among co-workers, friends, and his at-the-time wife, Virginia Nicholson Welles. While located in an actual archive, the film also participates in an imaginary archive like those discussed in Zimmerman's introduction.[5] Shots of Welles in his ridiculous straw hat, carefully directing his wife are not unlike the home movies of non-celebrities' family holidays or trips to Disneyland. According to Zimmerman, "[t]hese heterogeneous locations and functions of amateur film suggest the need for a parallel pluralization of methodological approaches to chart this large, variegated, multicultural, and international domain of home movies and trauma."[6] Certainly, dissecting Orson Welles and his newly recovered film needs a pluralization of methodological approaches. Especially due to the intended multi-disciplinary nature of Too Much Johnson, it seems appropriate to juxtapose the telling historical home movie next to the restored film.

It will be interesting to see what happens in the future editing and production displays of Too Much Johnson. Adding the home movie to the end of the screening of Too Much Johnson as an epilogue-like artifact does change the viewing experience. Considering the state of the film and the preservation efforts, it was extremely educational and useful to see this home movie after the final scene. However, if coupled with actual re-imagined productions of the play as discussed in long-term plans, I doubt the home movie will be a necessary component.

 

-Carrie Reese

---

[1] http://www.filmpreservation.org/preserved-films/screening-room/falk-home-movie

[2] Zimmerman, Patricia R. "The Home Movie Movement: Excavations, Artifacts, Minings." In Mining the Home Movie Excavations in Histories and Memories. Eds. Karen L. Ishizuka and Patricia R. Zimmerman . Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008. Page 3

[3] Sharpe in Zimmerman, 3

[4] Zimmerman, 3-4

[5] Zimmerman, 18

[6] Zimmerman, 6

Home Movies, Trauma, and the Marginalized: 'Tarnation' (2003)

Home Movies, Trauma, and the Marginalized: Jonathan Caouette's Tarnation (2003)

By Aden Jordan

           

In her introduction to Mining the Home Movie, Patricia R. Zimmerman writes about how the authors in the anthology believe that "the home movie can function as a recorder, an interrogator, a deferral, a condensation, and a mediator of historical traumas that extend beyond the self, such as labor, war, race, gender, religion, illness, diaspora, and displacement" [1](5). At multiple points in her essay, Zimmerman brings up the value of home movies in exploring and documenting historical and social traumas while simultaneously giving a voice to minority and marginalized groups affected by these traumas.

            Jonathan Caouette's documentary Tarnation (2003) is a relevant work for considering some of the ideas on home movies, trauma, and minority groups that Zimmerman discusses in her introduction. The trauma in Tarnation is not historical in the sense that Zimmerman uses the term, but is instead deeply personal. Caouette made Tarnation using hundreds of hours of home movie footage that he had created and kept since the age of 11. The film is an organized collage of Caouette's home movies that he edited using iMovie software to tell the story of his dysfunctional family. Using his home movies along with still photographs, voice messages, and text, Caouette presents the troubled life of his mother Renee. At a young age, Renee fell off the roof of her house and was unable to walk. A family friend suggested to Renee's parents, Adolph and Rosemary, that her paralysis might just be in her head. The parents consulted a doctor who suggested that Renee receive shock treatments, which she did on the unbelievable routine of twice a week for two years. Renee was not the same after her lengthy period of shock therapy, and exhibited severe symptoms of schizophrenia for the rest of her life.  After getting married and then giving birth to Jonathan, Renee was abandoned by her husband and was thrown into and out of mental hospitals. Jonathan was put into a foster home where he was beaten and molested, and by the age of 11 was put in the care of his grandparents.

            It was at the age of 11 that Caouette began to regularly make home movies on Super 8 and VHS. Taken by themselves, Caouette's home movies easily fall under Zimmerman's definition of 'auto-ethnographies': home movies that "position history as memory generated from the point of view of participants" (20). Many of them have an element of the subject performing for the camera. Two of the earliest home movies Caouette made are of him at eleven years old, dressed in women's clothing and giving improvised monologues from the perspective of an abused woman. Many of his home movies are clearly confessional and meant as pieces of video diary. In audio taken from a home movie or a tape recorder, Caouette, still a child, speaks of the abuse he experienced while in foster care and the molestation he experienced that he thinks has made him homosexual. For Caouette, his camera functions as both a diary and a mirror. In his home movies, he frequently adjusts his clothes and styles his hair while looking into the camera, and more than once literally exposes himself by displaying his private parts.

            At the U.S. government's 1993 hearings on film preservation, amateur film archivists testified that, "amateur film and home movies were often the only cinematic materials documenting and tracing regional history and minority voices" (Zimmerman, 11). Tarnation is very much the product of two minority voices. As a homosexual man with his own history of mental illness, Coauette used home movies throughout his life to document his struggle with understanding his homosexuality and dealing with his mental problems (Coauette was also hospitalized multiple times in his youth for psychotic episodes). His mother, Renee, is also a marginalized figure: a woman whose severe mental illness was exacerbated (if not created) by the shock treatments her parents forced her to have, abandoned by her husband, raped in front of her young son while hitchhiking, and has spent most of her life involuntarily put in state mental institutions. Through Coauette's home movies, both mother and son have had a chance to record and speak of their traumatic experiences.

            At the start of her essay, Zimmerman writes, "In the popular imaginary, home movies are often defined by negation: noncommercial, nonprofessional, unnecessary" (1). Coauette's home movies, both by themselves and taken as an organized whole in Tarnation, challenge the shallowness of this perspective. There is significant artistic depth to Coauette's home movies. One of the home movies shows a middle-aged Renee pretending to be a movie star while framed in a close-up. Renee speaks to the camera and in a warm Southern accent says she is Elizabeth Taylor's daughter. In the camcorder's tight close-up, she looks conventionally attractive and elegantly accessorized with earrings. When Renee finishes pretending to be Taylor's daughter, the camera zooms back and reveals her to be overweight and wearing an oversized sweatshirt with a cartoon animal on the front. Whether it was intentional or not, this home movie creates an artistic and revealing transition. In the close-up, Renee is pretty and her playing pretend seems fun and funny. When the camera pulls backward, she becomes shabby and her act of make believe seems more delusional and less harmless.

In addition to supporting the perspective that amateur films can provide a voice to minority and marginalized individuals and also explore multiple kinds of trauma, Tarnation ultimately shows that home movies can have commercial value. Caouette sent one of his home movies to the director John Cameron Mitchell as part of his audition tape for one of Mitchell's films. Mitchell was very impressed by the home movie, and upon seeing the completed Tarnation he and another established filmmaker, Gus van Sant, became executive producers on the film to help Coauette secure the rights to the songs he used throughout the picture. Edited and formed into Tarnation, Coauette's home movies did have commercial value. The film was a critical success (positively reviewed by influential critics including A.O. Scott, Roger Ebert, and Kenneth Turan) and enough of a commercial success (making over a million dollars in domestic and international box office)[2] to warrant a sequel: Walk Away Renee, which was released in 2011.

             

 

---

[1] Zimmerman, Patricia R. "The Home Movie Movement: Excavations, Artifacts, Minings." In Mining The Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories. Ed. Karen L. Ishizuka and Patricia R. Zimmerman. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008. P. 1-28.

[2] "Tarnation: Theatrical Performance." The Numbers. Nash Information Services, n.d. Web. http://www.the-numbers.com/movies/2004/TARNT.php