 |
| USA 1978/1984 |
Charleen, an hour-long vérité portrait of a poetry teacher in North Carolina... is about Charleen Swansea, a dynamo of a woman in her early 40's. In a classroom of mostly black children, she talks ebulliently about the expressing of feelings. Selecting one slightly embarrassed, definitely awed boy to join her at the front of the room, she fantasizes about failing in love with him, telling him rather vividly how he smells and feels. The rest of the class giggles a lot, but there's no doubt that they get the point of the lesson. In her private life, Charleen is divorced with two teenaged children and has been 'living together on and off' with Jim, a poet who is 14 years her junior. Following Charleen around town for about a month, Mr McElwee succeeds in capturing the complexity of the woman. On the surface, she is strong, cheerful and determined. But, especially when her relationship with Jim begins disintegrating, she is also seriously troubled, conceding that she has reached 'that point where your age is aesthetically relevant.' When we leave the woman who has corresponded with such literary figures as Ezra Pound, she is wearing bandages around her wrists. But she is still sure that she is going to learn something about herself, and she adds with a wink and a laugh, 'I'm gonna love it!' Charleen is an irresistible force, caught beautifully on the run. — John J. O'Cannor, NY Times One summer, the filmmaker, having no money, lots of time, and just enough second-hand film stock, decided to return to his home in North Carolina to see if anything had changed in the ten years since his defection to the North. Nothing had. Backyard is about insecurity, schizophrenia, envy, anger, compromise, acquiescence - in short, all those feelings that make going home to visit the family a warmly memorable experience, especially if the family is a Southern one. Backyard is about a politely enforced Carolina style of apartheid where blacks clean up after whites in the kitchen, the bedroom, and the hospital operating room. It's about the tensions arising from the expectations of a doctor father for his two sons, one a medical student, the other a filmmaker. And it's about a mother's death, a death that's never been discussed in the family. Backyard is more about what's not said than what's said, what's not done than what's done. — Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston |
 |
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
