Rediscover: Stranded in Canton

Rediscover:

1973-2008

Rediscover is a series of reviews highlighting past releases that have flown under the radar and now deserve a second look.

It’s hard to know where to begin. Stranded In Canton is a mysterious beast, a subtle and complex work of art that is also a place, a self-contained entity that is at the same time maddeningly open-ended. It is a state of mind; a limbo; a liminal space; a zone. It is also an object, so maybe I’ll start there.

On my desk as I type these words is a hardbound book. It is a product of Twin Palm Publishers, out of Santa Fe, New Mexico. Copyright 2008. Printed on the spine are the words, “William Eggleston’s Stranded In Canton” and on the cover is an image of a woman. If this was all it was, if Stranded In Canton consisted solely of this arresting black and white image, it would surely be enough to make it one of my most prized possessions. It is a full-faced, soft focused image with a wonderful and subtle texture to it. Close up it appears grainy, but not in the way that a low-resolution computer image or a newspaper photograph is grainy. This is more of a discrete sort of cloudiness, a concrete vagueness. The woman has her eyes closed and her rounded features are framed in a diffuse sea of dark hair and shadow. Her sensuous lips are parted in the faintest of smiles. She seems both deeply contented and slightly aroused. Her skin is almost translucent, especially where the light is most intense, and the angle is framed slightly below and to the right of where she lies. The photographer (although it is not a photograph) would have had to have been nearly lying on top of her to create this image. It is an altogether intimate portrait of a ravishing beauty, and it reminds me of certain shots of Dietrich in the films of von Sternberg.

It is unearthly.

Inside the book are 48 pages of similarly masterful images, all black and white, sumptuously printed on heavy stock. The blacks are liquid, the grays spectral. A woman all in white, sitting primly in an old-fashioned armchair, hands clasped together in her lap. We do not see her face. Bejeweled in schmaltz, her giant rhinestone shines. A shadowy close-up of an old man’s face. He gazes into the camera’s lens, sad eyes lost and disconsolate. A haunting image of a gaunt woman, seemingly miles away, trees behind, horizontal bars in front, smoke obscuring her face. A chicken. A light fixture. A dog. A bearded face, howling in the night. Another image of the woman on the cover, this time with her eyes open. She looks at us from out of the inky black depths surrounding her, inviting, inviting, inviting. All of the images are ghostly, oneiric, strange. All of them hold the eye, virtually requiring intense adoration. They are some of the most exquisite images I have ever seen. Inserted into the back cover of the book is a DVD – William Eggleston’s Stranded In Canton. The images on the cover and the inside of the book are, as it turns out, still frames from the video work contained therein.

“In 1973, American still photographer William Eggleston purchased the newly introduced Sony portable video recorder. Over the next two years, in Memphis, New Orleans and Greenwood, Mississippi, he created a series of portraits and vignettes that came to be called Stranded In Canton.” This is according to the introduction on the DVD. For years, Stranded languished in obscurity, fragments of the approximately 30 hours of footage only occasionally surfacing as Eggleston showed it to his students and friends. It was finally presented in its ultimate 76 minute configuration in 2008, accompanying Eggleston’s career retrospective, “The Democratic Camera,” which I attended at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. Situated in a room containing large-format black and white portraits taken in Memphis nightclubs during the early ’70s, the video was displayed on four monitors contained within a series of squat, rectangular wooden boxes. I hadn’t been expecting any video works to be presented at the show and as I passed through the room I would pause for a few minutes to watch. What I saw was mesmerizing, and the people around me seemed to have had a similar reaction. The energy in that particular room was unique and strange. The photographs in the show were outstanding, but for me the highlight was undoubtedly Stranded.

In his 1997 novel Underworld, Don DeLillo describes a fictional video that also speaks to Stranded In Canton: “There’s something about the nature of the tape, the grain of the image, the sputtering black-and-white tones, the starkness – you think this is more real, truer-to-life than anything around you. The things around you have a rehearsed and layered and cosmetic look. The tape is superreal, or maybe underreal is the way you want to put it. It is what lies at the scraped bottom of all the layers you have added. And this is another reason why you keep on looking. The tape has a searing realness.”

Photography is all about capturing reality and, by containing it within a frame, transforming it into art. The photographs of Eggleston are typically of the most mundane subjects imaginable. But his pictures of tricycles and windswept gutters and lonely old men, while entirely realistic and unobtrusive in themselves, take on a mesh of associations that extend their symbolic dimensions, pushing them into the realm of myth. And yet they never cease to be just what they are – pictures of everyday objects and people, both superreal and underreal at the same time. Stranded In Canton puts Eggleston’s pictures on the move. By moving, they sear their way through the forefront of the mind and into the subconscious. You have to keep on looking. Because Eggleston conceived of his project as a project, as something other than a series of home videos, he was able to imbue the work with meaning, albeit not in a preconceived, controlled manner. Eggleston was working on pure instinct here, and so the video, as in DeLillo’s example, lies at the scraped bottom of whatever layers of meaning may be added.

The fact that he was an intimate member of the community of freaks and outlaws, artists and transvestites that are his subject lends to the work a sense of coherence. No matter whether his subject be an old Mississippi bluesman or a drunken, violent biker, his children or his girlfriend or a pair of sideshow geeks biting the heads off chickens, everything is part of the same reality – William Eggleston’s experience with a camera in his hand.

It is worth noting that Eggleston is most famous for promoting color photography at a time when black and white was seen as the only legitimate form of expression. And yet the single most defining aspect of Stranded is the undeniably strange quality of its black and white images. They have a luminous, uncanny quality to them that is unlike anything I have seen. Eggleston, being somewhat of a techie, immediately modified his camera, outfitting it with a top-of-the-line wide angle lens and had a custom made infrared system fitted to it. With the infrared on he was able to record in dark clubs and bars without the extra lighting equipment that would have alerted people to his presence. It is said that many of the people in Stranded were unaware that they were being video taped and that this allowed Eggleston to capture their “true selves,” beyond all pretense and affectation. I find this hard to believe. The characters in Stranded In Canton, real people though they may be, are shown to be fictional constructs, characters in the stories of their own lives, born into a matrix of media saturation, trapped. Stranded, even.

What is “Stranded In Canton”? The phrase is repeated a number of times by various people in the video, both in the main work and in the various vignettes played over menu screens. Apparently this was a phrase and concept that spread amongst Eggleston’s friends and lovers at this time; a viral meme that caught on and stuck. During the video you hear it repeated and chanted, each time taking on a different texture and resonance. It is something more than an in-joke and less than a philosophy. The phrase itself is often said with a musical lilt: stranded in Canton. What did it mean to those who said it? It is impossible to say. There is Canton, China, or course, but also a Canton, Mississippi. To be “stranded in Canton” is perhaps to be lost in this other place, this place of otherness that is no-place at all, both near and far, inside the mind and out of the body. The ways in which the phrase is uttered lends to it a multi-leveled, mantra-like quality. When Lady Russell, a damaged and tragic transvestite character says it, he gives to it a vamping, playful aura, incorporating it into the ongoing performance of his life. And yet the undercurrent is deeply sad. For Russell, Canton is a place you’d never want to be. When the phrase is repeated by Randall Lyon, an exuberantly flamboyant artist, he conjures up a faraway land of possibilities, a place of escape from mundane reality. Or it could be that Canton just represents the murky depths of drug and alcohol dependence that most of the characters seem to be ensnared in.

And yet I can’t help but think. The camera in Stranded brings out the fictional aspects of the people under its lens. It acts as an x-ray and a microscope, exposing the strands and layers of narrative they have absorbed from books and movies and television and magazines and incorporated into their very selves. Who we are is media. We live in it and have become it. We are trapped in these roles, desperately trying to reach a state of grace beyond mere performance. To be “stranded in Canton” is to be stuck in the prison of the skull, that twisted loop of self-reference that tells us who we are, that we are. And these prisons are reinforced with the bars of visual media. Images trap us, strand us in our lives, intensify the ego that separates us from All. I believe that the reason why Stranded In Canton is so powerful is that it exposes that prison for what it is. And yet its prisoners are forever trapped; they can never leave; we are all forever stranded in Canton.

Stranded In Canton is a universe unto itself, a bottled limbo wherein the souls of the dead are eternally imprisoned. The video is saturated with images of death, from literal skulls to more subliminal intimations. Open doors that lead to cold, abysmal voids. Bodies splayed out as if destroyed in battle. People in death-spirals of drug and alcohol abuse. Marcia Hare, the woman on the cover, was Eggleston’s girlfriend at this time. We watch as his love for her, expressed through the lens of a camera, gradually drains her essence until she becomes the gaunt, haunted woman described above – victim of a slow, visual vampirism. Many of the characters in the video died violent deaths in the years that followed the end of the project. J.L. and Lillian Wright, a married couple whose bleak, acid hatred for each other poisoned their bodies and souls, died within months of one another; both suicides. T.C. Boring, murdered on Mother’s Day – his guilty conscience died with him. Campbell Kensinger, a gladiator with the heart of a poet, killed while stealing barbiturates. And then there’s Jerry McGill, a demon in human form, an outlaw killer who is like every bad guy in every old movie put together, well, he is the very embodiment of Death.

I have a friend who fears that by watching Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory, he is continually condemning its characters to be killed again and again, trapping them in a mindless loop of death. Paths of Glory is a fictional film; its actors walked off the set at the end of the day. But I think he’s on to something. Many so-called primitive cultures believe that photography steals one’s soul; that to have your picture taken is to have a part of yourself folded down to two dimensions; trapped in a sort of limbo or bardo state. Stranded In Canton is an electronic bardo, a shivering liminal zone, always hovering, always twinkling upon the edge of the Abyss. The people within are being tortured forever, stuck in time like flies in amber. What is true of every photograph and moving image is intensified in Stranded through William Eggleston’s ability to erase the distance between art and artist; to blend his life with that of others, to sneak up behind them and steal their souls with his magic, spectral camera. So to speak.

The purpose of the Rediscover series is to bring to light certain films that have “flown under the radar,” movies that have not been given the exposure or recognition they deserve. To entice people enough to want to take the plunge. Looking over what I have written so far, I fear I may have done just the opposite. Please don’t think that Stranded In Canton is a punishing or a horrid experience to endure; it’s not. Parts of it are hysterically funny. Eggleston’s friends at the time were uniformly creative and unique people – hipsters in the best, most original sense. It’s a creepy film, yes, but at times it is simply lovely. Eggleston was friends with Furry Lewis, an old time Delta bluesman who performs a number of songs in the video. One in particular stands out. He is in his room with some friends, celebrating his birthday. He’s leading them through a rendition of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” and he is in ecstasy. His love of God and his friends’ love of him has allowed him to escape from the trap; if anyone was able to get out of Canton, it was Furry Lewis. There are a number of other musical performances in the movie as well, ranging from more blues to snippets of Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis to a New Orleans street performer playing a mind-blowing clarinet solo. And then there is Jerry McGill and Jim Dickinson singing “Wild Bill Jones.”

God, I wish I had the time and the space to dissect this scene. Part of me wants to write about this movie forever – to break it down and give a moment-by-moment commentary on what makes it so amazing. But I’m more than 2,500 words in and I fear I’ve already lost most of you. But the rest of me wants to let you experience it for yourself without too much foreknowledge. But watch this scene – feel the sticky, sweaty closeness. Pay attention to McGill, to his eyes – what can you see lurking in those depths? And other scenes, too, like the one that takes place in the Wright’s living room – how did he do it? How was Eggleston able to capture the explosive, swirling energy of this scene, and why is it so surreal? Who is that woman in the chair, and what is beyond those open doors? Why does his camera focus on empty space, on fleeting, bizarre details? How was he able to encapsulate the entire career of David Lynch in a three minute domestic squabble? And the very first scene, of his mute, enigmatic children – my Lord, what kind of pantomime is this? What do those silent gestures portend? How on earth was he able to capture his daughter’s face as it changed? (Seriously, watch it – she becomes another person.) And the last scene, oh my God, I can’t even. Just…just watch it. There is so much to see and hear. Stranded is so dense, so rich and so strange.

Ah, but I can hear you asking, who is Robert Gordon? The credits say that the movie was “directed and photographed” by William Eggleston. But further on it states that “this presentation of the original footage was directed by Robert Gordon…under the supervision of William Eggleston.” I believe that Robert Gordon had such a formative influence on the final work as presented on this DVD that he deserves to be considered as co-author of the work. Check out the unedited footage of the opening scene included as a bonus feature. Notice how Gordon’s choices intensifies the scene, focusing in on the most relevant footage, excising all that is extraneous. He added music to some scenes, like Eggleston’s guitar piece at the end, and in general, his decision of what to include from the mass of 30 hours and in what order to present it, absolutely makes Stranded In Canton what it is. I believe that Gordon should definitely be considered to be the co-director of this work.

Okay, that’s enough from me. You’re tired; I’ve kept you longer than I intended. You’re probably at work right now, reading this on your computer. Or you’re on the bus, viewing these words on your iPad or cell phone. Or maybe you’re a hundred years in the future, accessing this data through the neural implants in your skull. To you I’m just a ghost from the past, my words trapping me forever in the net. But wherever you are, whenever you are, reach out through the web, take hold of this movie, this book. Open it up and fall inside. Pretty soon, you’ll be Stranded, too.

by Shannon Gramas