Stranger With A Camera: a 2003 review by Tom Rankin
Halfway through watching Elizabeth Barret's film Stranger with a Camera for the first time, I was struck by the thought that this is a film we've needed for a long time. People who make documentary movies, conduct oral history interviews, or do a variety of forms of documentary fieldwork, have reflected on just what it means-and how complex it is—to look into the lives of others in an attempt to tell a story. Documentarians talk of this with intense regularity, and I know of nothing better to frame, and advance, such a discussion than Barret's film Stranger with a Camera. Artfully conceived and beautifully shot, layered with multiple intersecting narratives, and honest in its agenda, Stranger with a Camera revisits the story of the murder of Canadian filmmaker Hugh O'Connor by Hobart Ison in 1967, at the height of Lyndon Johnson's "War on Poverty". Ison, a local resident and landowner, killed documentary filmmaker O'Connor with his gun just as O'Connor's crew had finished filming a tenant living in one of Ison's rental houses. As several local citizens explain in interviews, Ison was apparently offended by yet another filmmaker "mining" the desperate image of his home region. Ronald Polly, Hobart Ison's attorney, says simply that Ison believed the filmmakers were setting up a "circumstance for ridicule."
The story of the murder alone could make a good film, but Barret went much further to make this exceptional piece. What makes this film profoundly successful is that in addition to recounting the story of the murder from the perspectives of a range of community residents and members of the film crew. Elizabeth Barret also reflects on her own perceptions of her native Letcher County, Kentucky, and more than twenty-five years as a documentary filmmaker at Appalshop in Whitesburg, Kentucky. Part historical documentary, part memoir, and part meditation on the responsibility of the storyteller, Stranger with a Camera interrogates the documentary process in such a way that while we come to understand the complexity and nuance of the murder of Hugh O'Connor in 1967, we also are challenged to question and ultimately to better understand the intricacy of the documentary process.
By the end of the film the viewer understands that as filmmaker Hugh O'Connor was a stranger in Appalachia, so too has Elizabeth Barret been an "outsider" while making documentary films in her home region. At one point in the film Barret, in a first-person voiceover narration that gives the film unusual honest authenticity as well as reflexive depth, says, "I grew up in a place inundated with picture takers.... I didn't think much about it back then. After all, what did those images have to do with me?"
She continues by asking the hard questions: "What is the difference between how people see their own place and how others represent it? Who does get to tell the community's story? And what are the storyteller's responsibilities? And what do these questions have to do with the murder?"
Barret effectively employs historical footage throughout the film, and in a poignant illustration of the insider/outsider portrayals of the region, she uses canonical Charles Kuralt's "Christmas in Appalachia" from a 1964 CBS broadcast. Juxtaposed with Kuralt's gritty black-and- white program is color home-movie footage of Elizabeth Barret and her family sledding down a hill in Hazard, Kentucky. While the Appalachian children in Kuralt's piece look innocently into the camera singing "Silent Night," Appalachian Barret hides behind her red snow saucer after a spin down the hill, refusing to show her face to the camera. One scene seems the result of the "outside" media, the other a form of "community" documentation from within eastern Kentucky. However, as Stranger with a Camera so eloquently depicts, the "inside/outside" differences are not so neat and easy. Barret's voiceover explains- and her home-movie footage demonstrates-that the county seat of Hazard is far removed from the realities and images found in the hills and hollows out in the county. While she often felt uneasy and even angry with the relentless characterizations of eastern Kentucky as an impoverished frontier, it was some of these "outside" portrayals that also shed a different light on her own place.
Deciding to wrestle with the complexities of position and power of the camera is a grand accomplishment of this film, and Barret grounds all of her exploration through the specifics of the Hobart Ison/Hugh O'Connor story. Three main stories are woven together: those of Hobart Ison, Hugh O'Connor, and Elizabeth Barret. Compelling interviews drive the narrative and present diverse viewpoints with careful respect. Some locals and some family members defend Ison's acts -just as they did in 1967- while others could never condone what he did. Tom and Pat Gish, long-time newspaper publishers and Appalachian activists; Richard Black, the assistant cameraman on the Canadian film crew; Anne Caudill, widow of writer Harry Caudill; and Ann O'Connor McGoey, daughter of Hugh O'Connor, are among many engaging interviewees in the film. Mason Eldridge, who was the miner being filmed on his porch when Ison shot O'Connor, provides a vivid recol- lection and analysis of the event. Calvin Trillin, who covered the Hobart Ison trial for The New Yorker in the 1960s, reads from his article in a poetic use of another voice recounting and commenting on the murder. Ann O'Connor, who as a child witnessed her father come and go as he made films around the world, acknowledges that the process of participating in the film brought about a kind of closure, a kind of resolution for her. But for Barret -and I think powerfully for any attentive viewer- resolution doesn't come, for the questions are far too complex. In Stranger with a Camera Elizabeth Barret has made a film, as she says in the narration, about "the mountains I come from in eastern Kentucky" and about a peculiar and tragic murder story. But she has also made a film about documentary work everywhere, about just what it means to portray others, whether in our own home place or somewhere far, far away.
Review by Tom Rankin Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University
