My aunt Lorraine lives here, and we built this house here. Then aunt Lorraine ended up moving so I bought her place. I rent that out and then we have this five or six acres. My cousin Margie and my wife, they do alot of gardening in the summer. Jan’s been fooling around doing all the native plants.
Its been totally different from doing my first ah - lemme figure - I built the house when most people are starting to think about going into retirement, buying condos. I designed the house, we built it, that was eight years ago. Now I’m sixty five. So I was fifty-seven when I decided to build the house.
Listening to your stories, already I have a sense of you being the antithesis of the American thing. You are so connected to the community, so richly alive in that way. To hear you describe your neighborhood in terms of all your relatives who live there -
Yeah. I talk about it in this one film, Lighting, about how I’ve never been alienated from my environment. Which is in some ways its good, in some ways its bad. I wish I had more angst to work from.
(mutual laughter)
Stigmata Tony Buba 2008 1:10
There’s more than enough angst happening out in the world, we don’t need more.
I’ve got nothing going for me. I come from a functional family. Heterosexual white male, nothing going on. I’m lucky I’ve gotten any grants in my life. Nothing to say ...
If I’d been born Presbyterian I would have really been stuck.
(more laughter)
Yeah its strange because it is a totally different experience. We used to go up there every night in the summer - they use to have the acres planted with corn up until the mid-60’s. When the mills went on strike they would huckster food from the property.
That’s a tremendous image.
It was always cooler up there, so at night we would go up to the hill.
How did it start for you, making films?
Really serendipity. As an undergrad -- I didn’t start college until I was twenty-five. Went up to Edinboro ‘cause it was the only place I could get in. They took me there and I got a work-study job at the campus TV station.
Almost all schools had film units at that time, to be the PR units for the school. And this guy got hired, David Weinkopf, who just finished his Master’s degree. He was about 28 or 29. He hired me to work in the film unit for the work-study. I did audio for him. He was comfortable with me because I was older and not just a kid, and it was just one of these things where I enjoyed doing that.
Nobody ever told you you could choose to do that as a career at that time. Film or video. It never entered your mind that you go see a movie people are actually working behind that camera.
I wasn’t quite ready for academics. I mean I did OK but I didn’t really enjoy it. So I combined the two.
It really got started when I would go to all the anti-war demonstrations and take a lot of photos. For the one psychology class I did a slide show presentation instead of a paper, with the photos. Then I turned that into a short film. Then I applied to graduate school.
I applied to grad school based on if there were no fees, or a five dollar application fee. I applied to Ohio University, and I got accepted. The head of the department was this strange guy, Joe Anderson. Anybody who had a funny last name, he took, that year. He didn’t care if you had a 1-3 as an undergraduate ...
