Tropical Depression Movie Night
"Stranded in Canton," directed by William Eggleston
Let’s watch a movie! For previous Tropical Depression Movie Night entries, see here and here.
This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.
Marilynne Robinson
In 1974, the photographer William Eggleston shot video footage of his friends and cohorts in New Orleans, Memphis, and Greenwood, Mississippi, with a Sony Porta-Pak. The result was a loose series of vignettes, though even that probably overstates the coherence of Stranded in Canton, the film that collects some of his footage.
It’s weird, thrilling at times, maddening at times—a dreamy vérité, a pulsing American document of oblivion. I think I would call it beautiful, but there is something about its affect that I can only compare to nausea.
The film has traces of the uncanny pop of Martian poetry: It is just the world that you are viewing, but it looks otherworldly with such indulgent attention. The kind of attention that might unwind meaning—the way a word sounds like something other than a word if you say it enough times, or your vision starts to blur if you stare at something too long.
Or the way that I myself, trying to describe this film, seem to be missing the trees that are there in favor of describing the strangeness of the forest. I mean, stuff happens. Someone rants, another raves. Someone bites the head off a chicken. Alex Chilton shows up. And there’s Jim Dickinson! Everyone seems to be far enough gone on whatever they’re taking that they won’t remember what happened. But that is the thing about a camera: The verb to capture.
Eggleston is a zookeeper, corralling the everydayness of what would otherwise be lost indiscretions and carryings-on. This is maybe the uncanny part, or the nausea part: the imposition of permanence on the fleeting. “In the real world, something is happening and no one knows what is going to happen,” Susan Sontag wrote. “In the image-world, it has happened, and it will forever happen in that way.”
Unsurprisingly given the man behind the camera, the film is unusually invested in portraiture, in giving attention to the physicality of a face for its own sake (it’s a rare treat when a filmmaker is patient enough to explore portraiture in this way—our best current film artist on this front that I’m aware of is Khalik Allah).
Back to the forest: The film seems to seek a mode of perception that is pre-socialized and stripped of manners. As if some raw and florid truth might reveal itself if we ditched our neural shortcuts and subtractive focus. Even if such a way of seeing was possible, there would be no way to communicate it, as communication itself is socialized, dependent on manners. But for all of its loosey-goosey, partying style, I found the film’s look and feel to be utopian in aspiration. As if, relying only on pictures in motion and accompanying sounds, it might unspool the very grammar or logic of visual perception. Stranded in Canton is not as weird as the universe, but it’s as weird as the local goings that are right there in front of all of us—if we would only look.
Eggleston had an indefatigable curiosity for the visual world, for everything he laid eyes on. He was a character who loved characters, an eccentric Southern shutterbug with an antebellum accent and an affection for trouble. His was of seeing, perhaps, was unique. He photographed people, places, and stuff. It looked familiar and altogether unfamiliar. Even an empty room was infused with ultra-vivid drama, as if he had a special filter in his seeing such that trivial moments pulsed like Edward Hopper paintings.
And so he could reveal what we should already intuit: No moment is trivial. You just have to get the color and the shadow and the framing right. Every chunk of space and time is a stitch in the miracle of Creation. Or, you know, whatever you want to call it.
Meaninglessness is just a story human consciousness likes to tell. Whatever meaning might mean, it’s exploding in front of your eyes. If you can’t see it, look again. You might have to look at a slightly different angle; you might have to wait for the light to hit in a certain way.
In this way, the photographer is a sherpa for the creative act of looking. The meaning of the object depends on the subjectivity of the observer’s perception. It depends on the interplay of the stuff in the universe and the inexplicable private expanse of your consciousness.
The pebble or the face of another or the empty room. Just stuff, made of atoms, which are made of subatomic particles governed by a probabilistic rules of reality. But then you look, and there is a new reality, a reality possible only via a funky mix of that probabilistic truth of particles and the even weirder truth of your own consciousness, which is not made of atoms, or at least it doesn’t seem that way. It is the most beautiful reality, this mix and mash of the observer and the observable. Just look. You might have to fool with the aperture. But just look.
Take the particular redness of the red in “Greenwood, Mississippi,” often known as “The Red Ceiling.” And the way that redness changes in relation to light unseen in the photo. This photo became famous, in its own right and as the cover for Big Star’s album Radio City.
I’ve pasted an image of the image, but Eggleston would no doubt find that inadequate. “I've never seen it reproduced on the page to my satisfaction,” he said. I love this detail, because it suggests that replicas, like memories, can only imply. Since the domination of photography and video, our whole lives and all of our art get dissolved in the power of simulacrum. The actual becomes subordinate to the virtual, and so in our art, we seek virtual representations that ever more crisply fool us into thinking we are experiencing the actual. It’s a strange business.
It makes me think of this riff from the writer Ben Lerner, from his first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station:
I tended to find lines of poetry beautiful only when I encountered them quoted in prose, in the essays my professors had assigned in college, where the line breaks were replaced with slashes, so that what was communicated was less a particular poem than the echo of poetic possibility. Insofar as I was interested in the arts, I was interested in the disconnect between my experience of actual artworks and the claims made on their behalf; the closest I’d come to having a profound experience of art was probably the experience of this distance, a profound experience of the absence of profundity.
There’s a little bit of this going on with Eggleston’s hyper-vivid mundanity. But while Stranded mostly doesn’t have the look or feel of his photographs, watching the momentum of its vignettes reminded of what I suspect was actually Eggleston’s great trick as a photographer: There is something narratively expansive in his images. The medium is still, but I have the feeling of time in motion. A past and a future are implied—or that’s too subtle, actually, to me they seem to burst from the frame. I am both thrilled and a little unnerved by his photographs. And where I wind up is this: His photographs have the charge of the real and of the replica, at the same time. Do you know what I mean? As if the artificiality of the image is threaded with its intimacy. They are like life and they are like dreams, and they are not like life and they are not like dreams.
I’m not sure I wholly agree with everything in Sontag’s On Photography, but it is precisely in the pull that Eggleston’s photographs have on me that I recognize her most punishing claims.
“A photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence,” she wrote. “Like a wood fire in a room, photographs—especially those of people, of distant landscapes and faraway cities, of the vanished past—are incitements to reverie. The sense of the unattainable that can be evoked by photographs feeds directly into the erotic
feelings of those for whom desirability is enhanced by distance.”
Okay, back to the movie. The element of color is so extravagant in Eggleston’s most famous still photography works that Stranded in Canton’s nighttime chaos, black-and-white fuzz, and oversaturated light feels initially like the vision of an entirely different artist. But adjust your eyes and there are numerous moments you could imagine as perfect Eggleston stills. The difference, though, is that when the pictures are in motion, the voyeuristic edge becomes a little sharper. Movies just have a more immersive and intense hold on us—I always think about a line from Maggie Nelson: “At times I have been tempted to think that we dream more colorfully now because of the cinema. (To know what dreams were like before the cinema!)”
In Stranded in Canton, Eggleston is an artist among friends, and this is a tender and loving portrait of the wild texture of their lives. Still, as a viewer, I cannot help but experience this as peeping anthropology. I don’t think this is the film’s purpose or the source of its oomph, but mechanically it is what it is: an inside look at the manner and style of a particular underground scene. Curated, of course, but presented with the flat veneer of the passive observer, like a nature documentary stripped of commentary. And I notice myself getting squeamish at times bearing witness to their quaalude oblivion. The partying on display does not always seem joyful. I find myself periodically almost impatient with their extremity, or maybe just numb rubbernecking at these lost souls.
That it works, anyway—that it often feels like an unwieldy American masterpiece—is a testament to the way that Eggleston sees, to the humane poetry in his vision. (And maybe this is the voyeurism that matters: We experience some sense of his way of looking at the world, his way of seeing.)
Dig the grotesque climax, when the dude bites the head off the chicken. Where does the camera linger?
On something so exquisite and punishing, so beautiful: the awful and knowable and wet glisten on his human lips, so like his lips, so like our own.