Did you know that Arthur Russell (avant-garde cellist, mastermind behind esoteric disco creations such as Dinosaur L’s “Go Bang,” dead at the age of 40 due to AIDS) and Arthur Baker (hugely successful pop-disco remix producer of “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” and many other ‘80s mega-hits, wrote New Order’s “Confusion”) are not the same person? I didn’t, or at least not until I got about two-thirds of the way through Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell the other night, a documentary from 2008. “When is Bruce Springsteen going to turn up?” He didn’t, because Arthur Russell and Arthur Baker were not the same person.
There’s an actor listed in the credits of Wild Combination for “young Charlie” (Russell’s real name was Charles, after his father), which must refer to what seems to be home-movie footage early in the film but, presumably, actually isn’t. Sarah Polley got a lot of attention for doing the same thing in Stories We Tell, her (ambiguously) autobiographical documentary from 2012: old super-8 home movies that we assume to be authentic are key to her reconstructing the story of her childhood, and when it turns out the footage was in fact created specifically for the film with actors, the rug is pulled out from under us and we have to rethink everything we’ve seen.
We’ve been seduced by an authenticity too powerful to resist: the overwhelming, hypnotic spell cast by home movies from the distant past. Blurry, herky-jerky, almost defiantly imperfect–with blotches, white-outs, and tears dotting the frame–the colour bleached and fading, filled with people often barely recognizable, even if central to our own lives. Mad Men’s Don Draper tried to describe the experience in his masterful pitch for Kodak’s new Carousel slide projector (a format fundamentally different from super-8 home movies, but his description holds): “This device isn’t a spaceship. It’s a time machine. It goes backwards, forwards. Takes us to a place where we ache to go again.”
Two examples from the movies:
- The home-movie interlude in Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull, which moves the narrative forward from 1944 to 1947. Two weddings, barbecues, poolside vacations–all in colour–intercut with (black-and-white, like the rest of the film) still shots of Jake LaMotta’s fights during those four years, Pietro Mascagni’s “Barcarolle” on the soundtrack. A representative YouTube comment, as people try to find the right words for their reaction (which will conveniently save me the effort of doing so myself): “Never fails to bring a tear to my eye. The beauty and frailty of life can pass you by in the blink of an eye.”
- Not quite so revered by viewers and critics: Kevin Spacey’s monologue as he ends his life in American Beauty. The sequence cuts back and forth between the now, various characters reacting to the gunshot they hear, and the then, glimpses of Spacey’s life passing before his eyes, shot to look like home movies (though, as I rewatch the sequence now on YouTube, considerably cleaned up): Boy Scout camp as a kid, his teenage daughter as a young child holding out a sparkler, his wife spinning around joyously on an amusement-park ride. “It flows through me like rain, and I can’t feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life.” People hate American Beauty so much. I don’t; I love the film, and I love this scene.
And two from my own life:
- Well, the first one’s actually someone else’s life, but documenting a time and a place that overlaps enough with my own that it may as well be mine: “The Seventies in Georgetown, Ontario, Chapter 3,” six-plus minutes of haphazardly assembled home-movie footage someone posted on YouTube 15 years ago (the clip is still there, along with seven other chapters). That’s where I lived from 1967 until I finished university in 1984, a small town of (then) around 12,000 people located 45 minutes northwest of Toronto. An accompanying note says that Chapter 3 was filmed between 1975 and 1977, years that cover about half my time in high school; the people in the clip are a few years older than me and probably graduating high school just as I started. (I think I recognize one of them, but I’m not sure.) The first half is a get-together at someone’s house–dancing, camping it up, drinking beer, making out–while most of the second half was shot around town: country driving, the Georgetown Mall, snowy residential streets. The poster added some music overtop the first half, “Fakers” by Black Swan Lake, a song I’d never heard or heard of till I stumbled over the YouTube clip; I’m not sure I’d take much notice of the song on its own, but–slow, dreamy, vague–in context it’s perfect. I’ve been obsessed with this clip since first finding it and writing about it on my homepage: “What the Dead Sea Scrolls or a newly unearthed Robert Johnson recording might be to someone else, that’s more or less how I feel about this footage.”
- The other personal example is in fact a family home movie, literally the only one I know of that survives: five minutes of the after-party for my christening that dates to the spring or summer of 1962.* For the first minute-and-a-half, my grandmother–“Ya-Ya,” my dad’s mom– greets people at the front door of their expensive home on Toronto’s Kingsway Avenue: first in line are Aunt Janet, Uncle Mike (holding me), mom, and dad. Most of the people who follow I don’t know, although I think I spot Uncle George, Uncle Jimmy, and Uncle Greg. Cut to the backyard, where the camera pans across scattered tables of adults sitting and eating while the kids play. Dress is formal, with the men wearing ties and the women dresses. There’s a brief shot of one aunt I remember well, but I’ll have to guess at the spelling: I called her Goglitza. Close to the three-minute mark, a formal group shot; a minute later, my aunt hands me to my dad and he holds me up as my mom looks on. Back to the group shot, it breaks up, and then there’s a shot of (I think) my cousin Steve playing ball with another young cousin. The clip ends with a shot of dad, mom, my cousin Debbie, Nanny (my mom’s mom) holding me, Aunt Joanne, Uncle Don, and my cousin David. I remember that when I watched all of this for the first time 30-some years ago, I acutely experienced Don Draper’s ache, the wish to go back there; it was almost too much to bear. I didn’t feel that as strongly this time, even when confronted by shots of my own mom and dad, both of whom have died in the intervening years. Maybe the distant past is receding somewhere that’s out of reach now, I don’t know. Whatever the reason, I wish it weren’t so.
That’s a lengthy lead-in to a simple point: I am very susceptible to the emotional pull of old home movies, and if there were 50 music videos out there that employed that device, I’d probably be writing about 10 or 15 of them here. If there is, though, I’ve only found a few of them. So I’ll limit myself to two.
Karen Dalton, a Greenwich Village folk singer who made a couple of LPs as the ‘60s gave way to the ‘70s, resurfaced two decades later via the mania for re-releasing old music on CD in the years before the iPod and illegal file-sharing took over the market. In 1969 she released It’s So Hard to Tell Who’s Going to Love You the Best, which was followed by In My Own Time in 1971; both albums were re-released by Koch Records on CD in the late ‘90s. I found out about her myself when Noel Baumbach ended Margot at the Wedding with “Something on Your Mind” (written by Dino Valenti of Quicksilver Messenger Service) over the end credits. It made as deep an impression on me as Bert Jansch’s “Courting Blues” had in Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale two years earlier. Dalton’s story–like Jackson C. Frank’s (“Blues Run the Game”)–is a sad one that did not end well; I’ll leave you to look up the details online. She had one of those voices–Blind Willie Johnson on “John the Revelator,”** Janis Joplin on “Ball and Chain,” Jimmy Scott in Twin Peaks–that guarantees she’ll never disappear into history, an otherworldly quaver that leaves you dumbfounded.
The video for “Something on Your Mind” is credited to Phil Bebbington, who also has homemade clips up there for Dylan (“The French Girl”–surprised that one hasn’t been taken down),*** Tom Waits, and the Red House Painters. The natural assumption would be that the home movies Bebbington uses for the Dalton video are his own, that the song has some importance in his life, and that the combination adds resonance to both. Because of a second Dalton video available on YouTube, though, footage of her performing “A Little Bit of Rain” on the front porch of her Colorado home in 1970, I initially thought that the home movies in “Something on Your Mind” may have actually been Dalton’s, acquired somehow, with or without permission, possibly from some commercially marketed DVD. Highly doubtful, especially when you start to notice the occasional artiness of certain shots: a child at play reflected in a toaster; reflections in a moving car’s side mirror of people strolling down a downtown street (there are enough reflecting surfaces here for Fassbinder). In any event, from Dalton’s opening invocation of “Yesterday…” to a succession of store windows at night, it is indeed a perfect match of song, mood, and visuals. A few black-and-white photos are mixed in along the way, but most of the clip consists of colour home movies of sleepy small-town American life circa (going by the cars, always a good marker) 1960. The contrast between the black-and-white stills and–as you might expect, the very middle-class and very white–home movies is given an intriguing twist at the two-minute mark when a woman walking towards the camera, one hand holding a pinwheel and the other pushing a stroller, is suddenly colourized just before she leaves the frame. May mean nothing, may be a sly, Pleasantville-like comment on a country about to undergo radical changes. It’s there if you need it. You may be so hopelessly lost inside Dalton’s voice, you may not even notice.
Home movies and an early-‘70s singer-songwriter are a natural pairing; indeed, Carole King’s Tapestry and Neil Young’s Harvest very much feel like home movies in album form, blurry fragments of memory recast as songs (with cover art to match), a leap back across a tumultuous decade in search of a lost time. Carole King: “So far away/Doesn’t anybody stay in one place anymore?” The video for Boards of Canada’s “Nothing Is Real,” credited to Scott Shepard and again almost certainly user-uploaded, takes the pleasures of the home-movie experience–the strangeness, the long-goneness, the ache–and adds a level of abstraction that paradoxically brings me even closer to what I’m seeing. Literally the only thing I know about Boards of Canada is that, unlike me, they’re not actually Canadian. They’ve been releasing music since the mid-‘90s (and still seem to be semi-active), but they only came into my own orbit with “Nothing Is Real,” when I was doing one of my last-minute cramming-for-the-test listening binges that I used to do every December so I could get together a year-end Pazz & Jop Top 10.**** The Wikipedia entry for Boards of Canada (Scottish, by the way, brothers Michael Sandison and Marcus Eoin, who for some reason have different surnames) quotes someone describing them as “one of the best-known and best-loved electronic acts of the last two decades.” Which I have no reason to doubt, but I don’t wonder for a split-second if the home-movie footage in “Nothing Is Real” is authentic, by which I mean actually connected in any way to Boards of Canada themselves. I know that ambient electronic duos from Scotland have lives and histories and beginnings like Karen Dalton, like Neil Young, and like the rest of us. But I assume theirs are somewhere in the ether, anonymous and abstract, the space where their music exists, not documented by actual home movies that someone preserved and that would one day end up on YouTube courtesy a dedicated fan.
So when I watch the “Nothing Is Real” video, I feel like I’m watching not so much home movies, but someone’s dream of a home movie, which is maybe the truest approximation of how such things affect us anyway. The video begins with two children climbing aboard a motorized miniature car–the car begins moving in perfect sync to the song–and takes us through scenes of people at leisure in a variety of settings: a lake, a zoo, a playground, playing ice hockey on an outdoor pond. Technically, the footage is all over the place: colours that are alternately faded and over-saturated, lengthier shots mixed with quick cutting, bits of slow-motion here and there, random flashes of light. Transitions include whiting out the frame, fade-ins and fade-outs, dissolves. Some images are relatively sharp and defined, some are out of focus. Halfway through, a child holds the frame in close-up for 20 seconds: winter, big grin, a shot of the child’s eye at 2:09. More disjointed travelogue–oil field, trailer park, desert–and, at 2:52, what could be a fireworks display or the interior of a light bulb, a kaleidoscopic wash of filament melting away into abstraction. To finish, a darkened, bluish beachfront at dusk, then a fade to black.
Shot by shot, second by second, note by note, a reverie so exceedingly beautiful and serene that one might be tempted to take Boards of Canada’s title literally, as a comment on what you’re seeing: nothing is real, not even (or especially) these people and the rich, well-lived lives they preserved on film. Because life is never this beautiful and serene; the ache is supplied by us, not the images, which are a shadow of a dream of a memory so elusive as to not really exist anymore.
And yet they do–the images, the people, the lives.
*My dad was not a home-movie guy. Possibly under the influence of some clever Don Draperesque ad campaign, he went all in on the slide format Kodak unveiled in the 1950s, and for the next quarter-century, almost all photographic documentation of my family life was stored on carousel after carousel of Kodak slides that were kept in the basement and trotted out for viewing whenever guests were over. There were a few hundred photos boxed up, too, but, except for this bit of footage from the christening party, no home movies. In a well-meaning but shortsighted attempt to preserve the slides, my dad had them all transferred to a VHS in the early ‘90s (around the time when the super-8 christening footage was also transferred to VHS; I think someone else did this for my dad, a gesture that may well have been the inspiration for transferring the slides). Or what I thought was all of them; I recently had the VHS tape digitized, and there’s a lengthy gap in the file–shades of Watergate!–where images were either erased or never transferred in the first place. And I don’t think he took all the carousels in; I suspect a few were simply junked. (Following my dad’s lead, but in the right direction this time, I’m going to digitize the christening VHS sometime in the next few weeks so I can post it on this blog.)
**A recent obsession after reading John Szwed’s Cosmic Scholar: The Life and Times of Harry Smith.
***Dylan guarded copyright as closely as Disney before he sold off his song catalogue a couple of years ago; perhaps that’s loosened up some since.
****I listed “Nothing Is Real” fourth on my 2013 Pazz & Jop ballot; a few years later, I put it 13th on a decade-end Top 25 I drew up.
we don't want to know 