Film’s Silent Erasure of the Gay Black Man

By Claire Ernandes, Edited by Matthew Chan

Social change has come a long way in regards to race, sexuality and gender. Despite this, the gay black man is still erased in history, media and film: “rendered invisible” (Tongues Untied). This taboo is what Marlon Riggs exposes and deconstructs in his short documentary Tongues Untied (1989), that testifies the gay black man’s experience in the bustling environment of New York City during the AIDS crisis. On top of its empowering subject matter, the film distinguishes itself by repurposing techniques that are not usually associated with documentaries and therefore, revolutionizes and experiments with the genre as a whole. Another rare example of this occurrence is Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight (2016), that uses narrative fiction as a way to immerse the viewer in the realistic experience of a black gay man’s journey from childhood to adulthood in the vibrant atmosphere of Liberty City in Miami. Though these two pieces take place and are produced in vastly different locations, times and climates, both illustrate how film can use intricate cinematic techniques to explore an identity severely underlooked before. One, an experimental documentary, and the other, a truthful work of fiction, these two films are binded in a fascinating way, through their impact on making the black gay male experience universal. 

The analysis of sound showcases how both films delve into the intersectionality of gay black men. Firstly, Marlon Riggs utilizes intermittent silence as an ambivalent embodiment of entrapment and protection. As Essex Hemphill proclaims in his poetry, “silence is a way to grin and bear it, a way not to acknowledge how much my life is discounted each day” (Tongues

2 Untied). Riggs amplifies this by placing the asynchronous sound of a constant repeating heartbeat throughout his film, which carries multiple layers. It undeniably expresses the ominous presence of the AIDS crisis, with a strong and steady rhythm that reminds the viewer how precious health is. On another note, this sound illustrates the basic human need for survival and the pressure gay black men in America face from merely existing. The combination of this binary rhythm with the absence of any other sound, creates an artificial silence that establishes an unsettling atmosphere in what is most normal: a heartbeat. The viewer is plunged into Marlon Riggs’ body and experience and there is an eeriness to this silence that is hostile: “silence is my shield, it crushes, silence is my cloak, it smothers, silence is my sword, it cuts both ways, silence is the deadliest weapon” (Essex Hemphill, Tongues Untied). 

Moreover, Riggs builds a push and pull effect with the audience in a teasing, almost demeaning way. This is what Leah Anderst explores in her article Calling to witness: complicating autobiography and narrative empathy in Marlon Riggs's Tongues Untied, that highlights the ambiguous perspective of the director on the authorship of his film, “swinging between revelation and concealment.” Paradoxically, this prolonged silence is used to initiate conversation. The absence of audio is positioned suitably for dramatic moments, triggered by dark questions in which a black gay man considers his own erasure from society: “What future lies in our silence?” (Essex Hemphill, Tongues Untied). Along with making the screen cut to black in these sustained periods of time, Marlon Riggs gives the audience time to pause and think about the content he is presenting. This attributes an interpretative property to his documentary, experimenting with the self-referential aspects of the genre for the viewer, producing a cut-off from an almost inhumane reality. Additionally, it ingeniously ties racial aspects of the subjects’ identity: the black color of their skin, to these brutal moments. Hemphill utters “the beat was my salvation..led me past broken dreams, solitude, fragments of identity, to a new place, a home not of peace [...] but truth, simple, shameless, brazen truth” (Tongues Untied). Thus, this simple heartbeat is an example of how the film uses sound and the absence thereof to remain impactful, being truthful to the gay, black and male experience. The equivalence in Barry Jenkins’ work of this profound silence is the recurring presence of a breeze: “It comes through the hood and everything just stops for a second, cause everyone wanna feel it. Everything just gets quiet […] it’s like all you can hear is your own heartbeat” (Kevin, Moonlight). Presented with the low hum of white noise in the film, the breeze transfigures into a universal pause, even in the obscure environment of the hood. Both sounds are indicative of a temporary freedom, but, in their mysticality they appear sinister. 

Undoubtedly, Moonlight uses sound and the lack thereof as well, to link performance and corporeality to the visualization of the alienation that black gay men face. Indeed, Chiron, the main character in Jenkins’s narrative, is mainly characterized by an expressive silence throughout the course of his life. An example of this is in the first chapter, where Little is pushed to find a hiding place from his bullies. On top of this physical encasement and entrapment, growing synchronous sounds of the other kids throwing debris at his window surge in the audience’s ears while Little covers his own ears as a form of isolation within a confining space. This instance of forced disconnection is illustrated sonically and shows how sound can contribute to the effect of visual performance. When Chiron is brought to the principal in chapter two after breaking his silence through violence, the volume of the principal’s speech gradually reduces until it becomes fully mute, manifesting Chiron’s dissociation from reality.

Understanding the multiple functions that the film’s sound design carries pushes this observation further. Firstly, sound has the role of immersing the viewer in the environment of Liberty City. This is where, in contrast to Riggs’ piece that mainly uses asynchronous sounds to contribute to the stylization of his film, diegetic sounds are used to make the story as credible as possible, such as the blaring sound of the horn of a train in the scene where boys are playing football in the grass. Inserted discontinuously, this blow overlaps with the end of a panning shot of other boys glaring at Little, triggering the next tracking handheld shot of Little running that carries abrupt movement and disrupts the scene. 

This is where sound’s second functionality can also be perceived since, on top of accomplishing a more realistic atmosphere, sound interplays with cinematographic techniques to capture the subjectivity of its performance in its fabricated reality. Similarly to Tongues Untied, this creates a sort of push and pull effect, but here between objective reality and subjective truth and in looser terms, realism and formalism. Yet, the accentuation of Chiron’s reality is associated with a certain dissonance, partially due to the diametric relation between sound and editing. Along with synchronous sounds, underscoring is presented in the scene to almost contradict its visual elements. A harmonious, ballet-like symphony can be heard during that same shot of boys glaring at Little in a threatening way. It seems misplaced here within the context of the scene, a masculine game of football, and shows how out of place Chiron feels, with the overwhelming sonic quality of dissonance to translate his bitter experience. 

   Contrary to its preconceived notions of genre and to the melo declamation in Tongues Untied, Moonlight is not driven by dialogue but by its stylization. An example of this is the fact that Jenkins always incorporates a sort of blurriness one way or another in most of his shots. Whether it be through the rack focus of the lens or actual camera movement, the pacing is shaken up through either handheld or stationary quality. Though this is also partially intended to sophisticate Jenkins’s otherwise long shots, all of these moments amount to Chiron’s distancing from the audience and his unclear perception. With a similar function to Riggs’s heartbeat, the longevity of each shot creates this ambiguous hesitance, but differentiates itself from the fast intervallic pacing in Tongues Untied that consists of overlapping voices and shots. For instance, the first shot of the film takes place for the span of a whole two and a half minutes Though featuring a dialogue between Juan and his drug worker, Jenkins reorients the viewer’s expected way of seeing a conversation take place in a shot-reverse-shot fashion and instead uses a disorienting panning shot that contributes to the realist desire of wanting one’s work to appear untouched, uncut and thus uncomfortable, putting the audience on edge. As a performative documentary, performance is one of the primordial elements in Tongues Untied and appears in a way that diverges from Moonlight. It has the qualities of experimental and personal filmmaking but with a strong emphasis on its impact on the audience. Compared to Jenkins’ film, that fabricates movement in almost every shot by tracking the subject to make its content appear more seamless, Riggs creates movement corporeally. He uses his own body, looking directly into the lens, which emphasizes the relation between the creator and viewer in his film. In other words, Riggs uses performance contrastingly to create space for the abstract in his non-fiction work. Indeed, the body is used as a vessel for identity mainly through dance, such as in the first scene that shows glimpses of him naked in the frame of a medium shot. This can be interpreted in many ways. Riggs uses an expressive medium of art to combat masculinity and change what the word “masculine” denotes, similarly to the football scene in Moonlight. But instead of taking the lens of the subject’s perception, Marlon Riggs’ bare body serves as a canvas for the viewer’s observations. At the same time, dance is also identified ironically as a “ticket to dissimilation” (Marlon Riggs, Tongues Untied) and linked to the exotification of black men. Reduced to his craft, Marlon Riggs conflictingly appears dehumanized and lifted free. The film goes through multiple stages to illustrate these multidimensions of intersectionality. 

Early on, in Tongues Untied, homosexuality is evoked through the focus of the drag queen and the performative element of snapping, that is simultaneously used as an episode of collective experience and a rhythmic sequence to enable movement. The other three layers of the film: race, masculinity and religion, are also exteriorized with the use of pervasive speech through persistent poetic prose as a form of inner-verse: “anger unvented becomes pain, unspoken becomes rage, released becomes violence cha cha cha” (Tongues Untied). Even these words have a corporality to them in their rhythmic pace that embodies this repetitive dance of destructive behavior. This phonetic use of speech and language shows that this film is dominated by sound. The passage from Joseph Beam’s “Brother to Brother: Words From the Heart” is a crucial dialogue that expresses anger, hurt, pain, love and seduction while commenting on the black church and Christianity with its choral chants that, just like the overwhelming use of close-ups of mouths and overlapping voices in the film, ties the intersectional wave of deception towards black gay men. 

Both works deliberately go against what their respective genres insinuate, whether it be a documentary that does not content itself to chronicle statements and B-roll or a work of fiction and drama that is so stylized to the point where it immerses you fully into the reality of its content. Through the complex use of sound and its relation to editing, both amplify visual components to capture the viewer’s attention, though Tongues Untied carries pervasive speech through a persistent poetic monologue and inner verse, whereas Moonlight is characterized by a reduced dialogue that leaves room for its cinematographic stylization. Silence is applied to embody the conflict gay black men face regularly: Should they stay silent and therefore complicit in their erasure to society, or break the silence, untie their tongues and risk the cost of getting cut?

Works Cited 

Anderst, Leah Routledge. 'Calling to witness: complicating autobiography and narrative empathy in Marlon Riggs's Tongues Untied', Studies in documentary film, 2019, Vol.13 (1), p.73-89. PDF. 

LeBlanc, Robert. ‘Representing Postmodern Marginality in Three Documentary Films’, CLCWeb : Comparative literature and culture, 2009, Vol.11 (2), p1-10. PDF. 

Moonlight. Directed by Barry Jenkins, distributed by A24, Camera Film. 2016. English; United States; 1h51min. 

Pincheon, Bill Stanford. ‘Invisible Men Made Visible: Review of Tongues Untied’, Black camera: the newsletter of the Black Film Center/Archives, 1991, Vol.6 (1), p.5-6. PDF. p.73-89. PDF. 

Tongues Untied. Directed by Marlon Riggs, distributed by Frameline, California Newsreel, 1989. English; United States; 55 min.

Dead Air, Dead Space: Culpability and Collapse in Landscape Suicide (1986), Grey Gardens (1975), and Pictures of Ghosts (2023)

By Micah Slater, Edited by Avana Wang

Documentary cinema has spent time in alignment with prevailing thought and subversion in equal measure. It has engaged as both dissident and conformist; employing the apparatus as an agent of change, of conservatism, and practically every (nominal) shade in between. Subversive cinemas subsequently frequently employ documentary in service to alternative histories and perspectives. Unfortunately, in order to legitimize these perspectives, these documentaries often reference established documentary norms in terms of form and structure. These norms can be and have been established outside the influence of Hollywood alone. Therefore, it is both of note and of interest when documentaries on subversive subjects make use of subversive forms. This paper poses that the unconventional histories told in Landscape Suicide (1987), Grey Gardens (1975), and Pictures of Ghosts (2023), reject both prevailing social sensibilities and conventional documentary form. They instead labor towards a film language of space itself, where events and narratives are not best told by people, but through the places where they occurred, the air through which they moved. They choose to thread their narratives through the cracks in the foundation, revealing the looming, imminent collapse of space itself.

James Benning’s Landscape Suicide is part of an anthology focused on space, in an oeuvre already thoroughly marked by meditations of the same. California Trilogy (1999–2001), Ten Skies (2004), The United States of America (1975), and Thirteen Lakes (2004), should all in name and release date alone indicate the expanse of Benning’s spatial sensibilities. His work has often been described as among the greatest of slow cinema; despite the term itself being coined only in 2003 (Luca and Jorge 2022). This combination of slowness, of a deliberate lingering and occupation of space, and of the topics chosen here—Cheerleader Bernadette Protti, who stabbed a friend to death over an insult, and Ed Gein, American serial killer—creates a stark contrast to prevailing models of true crime documentary in both its patience and its condemnation. “Anti-true crime, or the truest version of it,” Landscape Suicide is a product both of Benning’s preoccupation with space and of an effort towards a more ethically-concerned alternative to conventional crime documentary narratives, notorious for their voyeuristic lens and exploitative content (Cole). Picturing the conventional American true crime documentary about these people makes Landscape Suicide’s individual impetus towards a spatial language much more apparent. The people Benning selected–an all-American cheerleader and the Butcher of Plainfield—are high-profile cases that have stirred deep emotion in the American consciousness for decades. However, Benning’s ethics regarding these subjects are acutely apparent in all of the scenes where the individuals are not present. Landscape Suicide is not solely weighing space as an auteurist signature; it is being used to mediate (or perhaps even soothe) the strong feelings that conventional true crime seeks to inflame. The landscapes audiences see are all spaces that the subjects have occupied, spaces we feel to occupy as we view them. Though the locations themselves are explicit, in that they are tied to events of national importance, the rows of houses, two-lane roads, and ungroomed vegetation could very well exist in any part of America. Therefore, Benning’s common experience of space is his great middleman. The “rejection of drama, the implementation of long takes, and stationary shots [...] allow audiences to come to their own understanding,” pointing to efforts toward a film language that believes ethics are tied to spacetime itself (Ross 261-62). This spatial language becomes concentrated—more so than in Benning’s visual diaspora—in Grey Gardens.

Upon release of Albert and David Maysles’ Grey Gardens, many critics condemned the film, claiming that “the brothers had exploited two vulnerable and perhaps unstable women” in the interest of direct cinema (Abbot 108). While discourse has proliferated on this topic for decades, Grey Gardens’ titular estate has remained a visual landmark, a space so iconic (or iconoclastic) it nearly supersedes its residents. After all, the Beales themselves were not mentioned in a title until the 2006 sequel The Beales of Grey Gardens. The first film was made when Big Edie and Little Edie Beale, two eccentric socialites, were subject to headlines after the Suffolk County Board of Health cited multiple violations against the property. The film makes Grey Gardens’ otherness even further apparent: opening on a brief conversation about a lost cat, the camera drifts through empty rooms, focusing on chipped paint, broken baseboards, and finally, zeroing in on a gaping hole in a wall into which Whiskers the cat has allegedly disappeared. And, while Little Edie remarks on the policies of East Hampton (“they can get you for wearing red shoes on a Thursday. They can get you for almost anything”), the film cycles through static shots of the village—affluent, well kept homes; ponds, beaches—before ending on a static shot of Grey Gardens: unpainted, run-down, overgrown [00:01:50]. The language of space here is not nearly as much of an assertion as in Landscape Suicide as it is a foundation, both the source of the sensation surrounding the Beales and what we first—and most consistently—are presented with. While the Maysles seem to marvel at the otherness of this space, again raising the discourse of exploitation, no compromises or alternative locations are used. Little and Big Edie are not transported to another place for interviews, the camera never again physically leaves Grey Gardens after the introductory contrast: the lingua franca is the space itself. 

Pictures of Ghosts (2023) is both more conventional and more personal than Landscape Suicide and Grey Gardens together. As the only film that makes primary use of archival footage, its treatise serves as a remembrance of the analog cinemas in Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil, which were key features of director Kleber Mendonça Filho’s youth and adulthood. He spent both periods in residence in an apartment owned by his mother in Downtown Recife, and after her death, by himself. In fact, the first half of the film centers on this apartment, viewed through the lens of the dozens of amateur, and, eventually, independent films he made there through university. We see decades of change wear away the neighbor's yard; then we see the house devoured by termites. Brick arches go up and walls come down, bedrooms change into media rooms, furniture rearranges and disappears. It’s evident that the apartment, much like Belén Vidals’s theoretical house, has “accumulated a particularly fierce and determined specificity” (Rhodes 86). This is in explicit contrast to the cinemas, which, as victims of the public economy of interest, are presently becoming abstracted—abandoned, transformed into churches and malls, or plainly demolished. Therefore, the footage Mendonça Filho has amassed, in its sheer volume and longevity, is an invaluable resource in the film language he sets forth. Spatial portraits of both locations would be fruitful alone, but forty years of change—especially regarding such a marked decline—transforms the spaces from topics to parts of speech in the type of communication Pictures of Ghosts is aspiring towards. Shots of the same buildings, chronicling apogee, to decline, to shuttering, to decay, crystallize time and its passage. The changes are gradual, but they are drastic, and the cinemas hold those memories diligently. Mendonça Filho is also an interlocutor: in one instance, with the support of footage from three different eras, he notes a plain red external wall of a former cinema palace that used to contain vitrines of posters and memorabilia. It is this kind of rumination—on what used to be, and what is now hidden or remiss—that makes Pictures of Ghosts an extremely compelling (and, due in no small part to its seven-year direct construction and decades of preparation, authorial) tributary to a cinematic language of space. Though subject to time and decay, Recife’s cinema palaces speak for themselves, embodying the spaces—past, present, and future—they occupy.

The documentary form must inherently accommodate space. For decades, documentaries have taken iconic spaces as subjects. However, as these films postulate, spaces are not only passive elements, alike to a stage or venue. Space is a language capable of communicating ethics, character, history, and time. Landscape Suicide circumvents documentary norms by using space to ethically and simultaneously interrogate genres and a subject characterized by polemia and hyperbole. Grey Gardens examines the house as a private and public subject, where space communicates institutionally (and societally) imposed right and wrong ways of being. Pictures of Ghosts sees space in dialogue with time, discussing the changes to downtown Recife, the Brazilian film industry, and the failures of their buildings themselves. These films are all also efforts in preservation. As Paula Rabinowitz has noted, filming an “essentially ephemeral event, a vanishing custom, a disappearing species, a transitory occurrence, is the motivation behind most documentary images” (120). This is true in the cases of many documentaries, but the efforts towards a spatial language in these films augment her argument: it is not just the filmed that is ephemeral, that is in need of preservation, but the act of filming itself. Spaces decay, but they do so in the labor of conveyance. Even the kind of space and the way it is depicted create meaning. 

The spaces of these three films are not only centered as agents of language, but possess a shared discourse on spaces in decay—what happens in order for, and after, a place’s ‘death.’ Landscape Suicide foregrounds the idea of topography itself being capable of murder. Benning is keenly interested in individuals as a born-in parts of the places in which they exist, and in the interconnectivity that arises from this relationship. Therefore, homicide, and especially serial homicide, is the most intimate and violent form of collapse: self-harm against the biblical clay from which we were formed. Landscapes abound; suburban houses and roads stand vacant and anonymous, yet this spatial language encourages the assumption that they are somehow relevant to the crimes that Landscape Suicide centers. An audience is encouraged to imagine how this place, despite its void of delivered context, is somehow liable for murder. Further, they are prompted to consider how these places have been abandoned, due to imprisonment, death, or other intentionally-undetermined exit. In many ways, Benning’s film is a cinema of the rapture. Dead air hangs over once-occupied scenes, landscapes that have caused their own death. A unique kind of rot is represented here: one that is not structural but spiritual, a para-natural abandonment that may one day lead to a collapse that has yet to occur. Perhaps refracted off of the condition of the film’s subjects—prison does not allow for itself nor its subjects to decay—Landscape Suicide sees collapse as a perpetually imminent consequence of the ruin we cause each other. Julian Ross cites Benning with the quote “I couldn’t get a sense of the murder, but the collective guilt still lingers” (271). Where this guilt lingers, out of the abstraction of the crimes themselves, is the locus of blame. For Benning, collapse is the inevitable aftermath. 

Meanwhile, Grey Gardens’ picture of dead space is very nearly an argument in the reverse. Big and Little Edie inherently exist as “victims of and subject to the house in which they live,” as they had two years prior to coming under scrutiny (Rhodes 87). Deterioration is the premise of their lives as they lived them at the time of filming: they are surrounded by the debris of memory, sleeping in piles of papers and photographs, a large portrait of a much younger Big Edie leaned against the wall near the door. Grey Gardens postulates that decay is not a consequence of abandonment, but instead of use: it is its tenured occupation by these two particular women, alone with each other for decades, that has caused the house to rot. It is the containment of these years that amplifies the spatial voice of this film; despite the fact that we are not actually privy to much of it. Despite the house boasting 23 rooms, we only see 5, imbuing the space with “potentiality [...] a kind of imminence” that promises new and unknown forms of collapse (Rhodes 87). The Edies seem very skilled at the compartmentalization required to cut themselves off from society and their squalor from themselves. The Maysles filmed two years after the surprise inspection, and two years after affluent relatives (including niece/cousin Jackie Kennedy Onassis) paid for renovations, including hygiene facilities and running water. The unknown of a prior, more dilapidated space is perpetuated in these unseen rooms. Space is being used to proliferate ideas of worst-case scenarios, made more voyeuristically taboo by how frequently the Edies speak from offscreen, or talk about going to (or having been in) rooms we never see. Little Edie searches for cats in the attic and references a maid’s dining room. Big Edie speaks of her bedroom as “concentrated ground” [01:12:12]. A misuse of the word, as one of the Maysles corrects, but nonetheless resonant with the course of collapse as it has taken throughout the house. The very variety of home that Grey Gardens is, or once was, is diametrically opposed to constant, continuous, concentrated occupation. Many (and at the time of its construction, most) of the houses in East Hampton were vacation homes: temporary residences for socialites affluent enough to shirk loyalty to spatial notions of permanent residence. Space speaks loudly of the ways the Beales have neglected to perform their station. 

Pictures of Ghosts uses its spatial language to resist collapse, likely because it has a long-lived and personal stake in the preservation of Recife’s movie theaters. The film is also acutely aware of its inevitability. Neither Landscape Suicide nor Grey Gardens visualize an end to their decay: American prison sentences for murder are synonymous with forever; the Beales will presumably always have relatives to bail them out of eviction. Menonça Filho is surrounded by the imminent demise of the cinemas he loved so dearly, thus the making of Pictures of Ghosts—with its years of footage—while these places are still discernible in the landscape. Mendonça Filho treats the past as a vision of transcendence, acting with a reverence for the unique temporal palaces of cinemas: inside, time stands still, but outside, the winds of time and socio-economic forces chip away at their grandeur. This is particularly emphasized by a remarkably tender interlude in material history where Mendonça Filho grinds to a halt to memorialize a projectionist and a dear friend, who worked in one of the once-many cinemas in Downtown Recife. Aside from the director’s own interjections (including his own voiceover), this is the most human that Pictures of Ghosts identifies itself to be. Cinemas and their magic, at least to modern audiences, have forgone the projectionist for many years. With the proliferation of digital cinema packages (DCPs) and the dwindling need to switch reels during a film, projection—a profession that already intentionally hides itself behind the image—has become personless, automated. It reminds that decay is not merely structural or ideological, but has direct ramifications on concrete modernisms: employment, industry, real estate. A limb of Pictures of Ghosts addresses a time during World War II when one of the once iconic, now defunct theaters was constructed as a UFA cinema, a way for the Nazi party to reach South America with propaganda pictures, and also to benefit financially from Recife’s rich moviegoing culture. This event predates Mendonça Filho, of course, but the history is not being conveyed by him (despite his voiceover). These spaces speak of their own histories, carried forward through time. Marquees here earn their own segment of the film: towering above masses of blurred people, their cinemas mark time in equal measure as they move through it. 

Despite disparate doctrines on what their shared filmic languages actually communicate, Landscape Suicide, Grey Gardens, and Pictures of Ghosts raise a shared question: by whom did this occur? What accommodated for these images of decay? Who is truly to blame for these murders? Who allowed the Beales’ living conditions to become so unsafe as to be threatened with eviction? Who took these palaces and tore them down? Who is liable for the death of these places? The indictment is clearly institutional. Throughout a question and answer at AFIFest 2023, Mendonça Filho repeatedly cited one reason for the remaining cinemas’ marginal, but surviving, present condition: state funding and cultural preservation grants. He spoke of cinemas as an endangered species, of the extant few still in Recife as landmarks whose spaces are imbued with narrative. While the spatial filmic language of Pictures of Ghosts allows itself to meditate on theoretical concepts, the utilitarian purpose of the film is extremely clear. Because of this, in many ways, this film is by far the most conventional; and with evidently good reason. Neither of the two aforementioned have courses of action to offer; they do depict problems but are nonetheless without solutions. Interestingly, though, they agree with Pictures of Ghosts in placing blame. Landscape Suicide identifies failures in bureaucratic systems as much as it does in humanity. Collective guilt’ is an accusation towards things that can feel guilt, certainly; but it also speaks towards the judicial verdict. Hinted at with its presentation of public ‘landscapes’ in schools and roads. Grey Gardens, interestingly, finds fault in both the Village of East Hampton and in the distant relatives that merely sent money for minimum repairs and did nothing to ensure the wellness of the Edies, nor the soundness of the house. Spatial language is a particularly effective medium for conversations on negligence: nothing bears accusations of decay like a rotting house, an abandoned building, or an empty street. It is infinitely more possible to defend oneself against a person than an empty room. 

And yet these interpersonal defenses abound. Grey Gardens’ human protagonists insist on their lifestyle; Big Edie “thrives” on the smell of her room (which, if the length of the film is to be considered, is a combination of cat food, urine, food waste, and body odor), and both of the Beales defend their lifestyle vehemently [01:12:08]. Little Edie refers to the Village’s surprise inspection as a “raid” [00:01:51]. Concerns regarding the mental wellness of the two are what sparked much of the film’s initial controversy, but ultimately they are adults who manage a daily life, feed and clothe themselves, and seem, though occasionally cantankerous, ultimately content. An element of resignation colors Pictures of Ghosts as well. For many of these lost cinemas, there is no way to bring them back: the camera meditates on vacant lots where demolition has befallen a theatre; abandoned implements of construction hang like tissue and jut like bone in other half-augmented structures. It’s only natural that these places would not last centuries; the social mode and cinemagoing culture specific to Recife that enabled their renaissance certainly didn’t. Projectionists aren’t expected to live forever; neither is film stock. As intrinsic as time is to space, ephemerality inevitably wins out with decay. For its ideas of shared culpability and shared place, Landscape Suicide occasionally errs to apathy. If we, and all of our loci, are all guilty of every murder, then there is no authority to define or prosecute these crimes. There is no space to hold perpetrators of a crime that is not itself a criminal. 

With a range of concerns, and a wider range of tactics, Landscape Suicide, Grey Gardens, and Pictures of Ghosts are all collectively laboring towards an alternative film language, one that centers space as dialogue, as mediator, as lingua franca. Benning’s ethics of duration indict the collective American occupation of land as complicit, our violent crimes a product of our landscape, images of shared guilt echoing through our foundations. Our decay is spiritual, he posits, an internal rot that threatens to erode our structural selves. The harm we do to one another is reflexive; auto-desecration. Grey Gardens speaks in terms of spatial otherness, presenting the Beales in contrast to their neighbors and their estate as defiant of its governing bodies. Space is the mouthpiece of the eponymous house and its turbulent relationship with its occupants, as much as it is their defender. It is what drew the filmmakers to the topic and is what attracts their camera throughout the film. Pictures of Ghosts, in all of its conventional structure, perhaps allows space to speak the loudest. With images spanning a lifetime, these cinemas become familiar, if not trustworthy. They contain iterations of appearance, of use, of structural stability. They accumulate in a demand for continuous support that simultaneously accommodates understanding of the reason for their decline. Documentary cinema’s ability to chronicle environments, locations, landmarks, and even the anonymity of indeterminate places is deeply charged and deeply effective for the thrust of these films. Throughout Landscape Suicide, Grey Gardens, and Pictures of Ghosts, silence speaks louder than words, for it is then when space is permitted to speak for itself.

Works Cited

Abbott, Mathew. "Grey Gardens and the Problem of Objectivity." Emotions, Ethics, and Cinematic Experience. Berghahn Books, 2021.

Directed by Benning, James. Landscape Suicide, performance by Anonymous , 1987.

Cole, Jake. "Review of Landscape Suicide." , 2022.

Luca, Tiago d., and Nuno B. Jorge. "Introduction: From Slow Cinema to Slow Cinemas." Slow Cinema. Edinburgh University Press, 2022.

Directed by Maysles, Albert, and David Maysles. Grey Gardens, performance by Anonymous . Portrait Films, 1975.

Directed by Mendonça Filho, Kleber. Pictures of Ghosts, performance by Anonymous . CinemaScópio, Produções Ancine, 2023.

Rabinowitz, Paula. "Wreckage upon Wreckage: History, Documentary and the Ruins of Memory." History and Theory :Studies in the Philosophy of History, vol. 32, no. 2, 1993, pp. 119-137. CrossRef, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2505348, doi:10.2307/2505348.

Rhodes, John D. ""Concentrated Ground": "Grey Gardens" and the Cinema of the Domestic." Framework, vol. 47, no. 1, 2006, pp. 83-105. CrossRef, https://www.jstor.org/stable/41552449, doi:10.1353/frm.2006.0006.

Ross, Julian. "Ethics of the Landscape Shot: Aka Serial Killer and James Benning’s Portraits of Criminals." Slow Cinema. Edinburgh University Press, 2022.