Tuesday, February 27, 2024 at 7:30pm
Robert Frank's Conversations in Vermont + Camille Billops and James Hatch's Suzanne, Suzanne
361 Stagg Street, Suite 407, Brooklyn
Introduced by Melissa Anderson
Conversations in Vermont, Robert Frank, 1969, digital projection, 26 mins
Suzanne, Suzanne, Camille Billops and James Hatch, 1982, digital projection, 26 mins
“This film is about the past and the present,” Robert Frank says in Conversations in Vermont, a declaration that also holds true for Suzanne, Suzanne, by the married documentarians Camille Billops and James Hatch. Each running less than half an hour, these potent nonfiction works reveal children and parents attempting to have candid discussions, with the latter trying, never quite successfully, to make amends.
The more autobiographical Conversations in Vermont opens with Frank looking at old photos of wife Mary and their children, Pablo and Andrea, as babies and toddlers. Now teenagers, the siblings greet Frank as he arrives for a visit at their alternative school in the New England state—a refuge, it would seem, from the mayhem of living in New York with two self-serving artist parents. “I feel the burden of bringing myself up,” Pablo says at one point, his poise and thoughtfulness, qualities he shares with his younger sister, belying his years. It’s a piercing insight that Frank does not dispute, in a chronicle made all the more poignant by the fact that Frank outlived his children by decades.
Although Billops plays less of a central role in Suzanne, Suzanne than Frank does in his project, the film, like nearly all in the Billops-Hatch corpus, draws on her own family’s history and features her in front of the camera. In Suzanne, Suzanne, the focus is on Billops’s niece, who matter-of-factly recounts her traumatic past, particularly the physical abuse she endured from her father, dead since 1968. Suzanne is not the only one interviewed; Billops extends her inquiry to Suzanne’s older brother and especially to Suzanne’s mother, Billie (Billops’s older sister), who recalls the “relief” she felt after her husband died but who had done little to stop him from beating their child. In the most wrenching segment, mother and daughter take part in a restorative-justice tableau: Suzanne, in the foreground, with her eyes cast downward, calmly asks her mom why she didn’t intervene—an interrogation that causes Billie, seated directly behind her child, to break down into a very real torrent of tears.
- MA
Melissa Anderson is the film editor of 4Columns and the author of a monograph on David Lynch’s Inland Empire from Fireflies Press.
Tickets - Pay what you can ($10 suggested donation), available at door.
Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served. Box office opens at 7pm. No entry 10 minutes after start of show.