They’re going to tear down my grandfather’s shoemaker’s shop, so I did a little short piece on that. Stuff is not going to last forever, so let’s start documenting.
I was influenced by Appalshop. They’re down in Western Kentucky.
They’re a real interesting group. They built this real nice media arts complex there in the town of Whitesburg. They were all in Kentucky, and everybody was coming to Appalachia to do stories on the poor, on the poverty of Appalacia. It was right before the Great Society, and Walter Cronkite.
And there were these things, send your shoes to the poor people of Appalachia. This group, they’re in high school when all this is going on. They were the people getting the shoes. They were just so pissed off. They were being portrayed as, they didn’t see themselves that way.
So they all went to college, they all leave. When they all came back, well, if anybody’s gonna tell the story of Appalachia we’re gonna do it through our eyes.
I met them when I was in graduate school. It was really inspirational about if you’re going to create myths, how you have to create your own myths.
At that time 16mm was the medium of the masses cause it was inexpensive, like digital video is now. What was so great about those old home movies because it was a 3 minute roll of film. Nobody wanted to spend all three minutes in one place, so you’d have your birthday party, you’d have christmas, and easter. You’ll have three events in three minutes.
Those limitations are really freeing. Instead of just snapping stuff off constantly or just shoot hours and hours of video that nobody ever watches
What value does shooting constantly have? I wonder sometimes about the average consumer who shoots everything that their child does. Is there nothing special?
How do you enhance the story if its actually there? You can’t even create anything, you can’t eggagerate, enhance, you can’t embellish or incite ...
This friend called me up yesterday, he was watching the Steeler parade in New York. Every Steeler had a video camera. So they were all shooting the crowd. He thought it would be, you know, I was actually going to talk to Charlie Humphreys at Filmmakers, What if they were able to get all that footage, to donate, to try to come up, like they did with the Pittsburgh 250 thing, like try to come up with different people to make some short films with all this footage the players shot, yeah.
It’s like, they won six superbowls so you could only use 6 shots or something. Put a structure on it.
What if Terry Bradshaw was shooting stuff in the 1970’s?
He’d have to carry the reel-to-reel Sony packs.
Because I moved to Pittsburgh in 2002, I only know Braddock by coming to it in its present state, the last couple of years. My sense of it is only through other people’s memory. Like through your films or stories.
Most of the memories have become romanticized. That’s one of the problems of oral history. Even when people move there, they talk about the buildings that are no longer there, the buildings that are gone.
I have photos of some of these buildings that were on the avenue. We’re talking one storey, wooden frame buildings.
They were like my grandfather’s shoemaker shop. Probably smaller than this space here. And it was a frame, just this little frame building. Every so many years, a big fire would sweep through.
There were studies done in the 60’s and 70‘s that the historical society did and the only one of any architectural significance was the building going up fourth street. It used to be the Bell Telephone building. Its an interesting looking structure, but, it’s not the library.
Nice looking buildings, I mean there’s not that many.
You saw the video that I made, they are still images, they are photographs of what is there standing in for something else, standing in for the loss that this area has dealt with.
What’s interesting to me is, it’s just a place. It has this history, but, I’m just taking these pictures, I’m just putting them in this video.
Some people respond very negatively. One person said, “There’s so much judgement in what you’ve said here, you’ve made these things so big, and so powerful,” and I was just like, ‘Wow, that says alot about you...’ I don’t know if you’ve had any feedback like that.
When I finished Lightning Over Braddock, people really got pissed at me, ‘cause they thought I was making fun of the steelworkers. ‘Cause it’s funny, the film’s funny. I was like, This stuff is funny!
I wanted them to get mad at the filmmaker. In the background were all the steelworkers losing their jobs. In the foreground was a personal story between me and Sal, this guy, I can’t get him out of my life. I wasn’t concentrating on the steelworkers, I was missing the story.
I wanted people to come up with that themselves.
You have to play with the misdirection, of, I want you to think about this, but I’m going to make you think about this by talking about something else the whole time.
