MEADOWLARK REVISITED

Week 22.  16mm and Digital Video, Color, 18:12

This week's film reaches very far into my past. In 2006 I started making a movie that dealt with my brother's murder. 

Charlie was stabbed to death in 1993, when I was 12 years old. For many years I shelved my brother's death as a "to be reckoned with at a later date" item. When I made Meadowlark I confronted his death (and several other overwhelming, life-changing topics) head on.

As I was close to finishing the film, I showed a cut of it to James Benning. He talked to me at length about the film, but the part of our conversation that has always stuck with me...nagged at me in fact...was when he told me that he would like to see me do something different with the final act of the film when I speak directly with my brother's killer.

He told me that he didn't need to see shots of the prison housing Frank Fuhrmann.  He told me that they were too obvious in their emotional hook.  Too easy. He told me not to lose the audio, but to consider changing the image...and as an alternative to the images I ultimately used in the final film, he suggested an out of the blue alternative that, at the time, I found absolutely ridiculous.  He said, "what if that last 15 or 20 minutes was just a wash of color?  Maybe something that slowly fades from white to pink?"

For the longest time I have thought of that suggestion as utter nonsense.  I was even annoyed for a short time that this macho straight man would blithely suggest to a silly homosexual the color pink.  "How typical" I thought to myself.

But his suggestion has hounded me. It dogged me to the point of becoming something of an obsession. The more I thought about it, the more I got over myself. The more I got over the fact that I am gay and James is straight.  The more I realized that James Benning never viewed my film through the lens of gay identity or gender politics.  He viewed my film through the lens of a person who is, at all times, acutely aware of how the thing he is seeing absorbs, reflects, rejects, amplifies, dampens, deflects, or enriches the things he is hearing.

The more I thought about it, the more his suggestion seemed more inspired than radical. 

So, here I am...giving it a try.  I've watched this over and over and over...and it has opened up new ways of understanding my own work, and even my own experience.  It's too personal for me to say much more than that.  I hope you find it as enlightening as I do.  But if you don't, that's fine too.

For reference, here is the original feature:  http://www.snagfilms.com/films/title/meadowlark