The Consequences of Filmmaking: an Interview with Elizabeth Barret 2003
Tom Rankin, director of the Center for Documentary Studies, talked with Elizabeth Barret about her work as a filmmaker in her native Appalachia and the making of Stranger with a Camera. This interview took place in 2003 and is reprinted from The Oral History Review.
RANKIN: When did you first have the idea for the film that became Stranger with a Camera?
BARRET: I thought of making the film a long time after the murder happened, which was in 1967. It was long after that I started pursuing a documentary about what the murder meant. There were several different contact points for me with the event. The first one was that I was in high school when it happened. I was over in the neighboring county (Perry County, Kentucky) and heard about it, but it didn't really have any meaning for me. Then I went to the University of Kentucky, and about the time I was getting out, I read a book called Appalachia in the '60s: Decade of Reawakening (A Compilation of Articles) and one of the articles was Calvin Trillin's New Yorker article about the Hobart Ison and Hugh O'Connor encounter. This was illuminating for me, reading Trillin's article. The murder had a lot of significance for me — just how you are seeing something about your locale and it's a national writer and he had such a great way of writing and said so much in that article. Then I came up here to Appal- shop and got involved in a training program where you learned to make films, and of course the Ison/O'Connor encounter was the story that you heard whenever you went out to do any filmmaking. People in the area would talk about this filmmaker who got shot and killed here in Letcher County.
Another incident that happened was the assistant cameraman, Richard Black, came back to Whitesburg. He appears in the film. Appalshop had a little storefront operation on Main Street, and one day he wandered in. A lot of people wandered in, from the "town drunk" to anybody else. One day he wandered in, and I happened to be there. He started talking about how he had to come back to this place, he had been here when O'Connor was killed, he had returned during the trial. He was just drawn back here.
His visit had a big impact. (Of course he was so freaked out about the incident.) He was very quiet and unassuming, hadn't told anybody he was coming, just talked about telling us his view of it and being on the other end of the gun. And seeing the gun go off and then what he felt was intended for him- the bullets that would have hit him- instead went into the camera. He was kind of standing, hiding, behind the camera when Hobart Ison came. He was twenty-one when it happened, the youngest member of the crew working with this experienced cinematographer.
That was the first time I had any firsthand dealings with anybody who had a connection to Hugh O'Connor. It made me start thinking about how I had heard the story from the community's point of view; I had heard the local side of this. But the local side didn't know about Hugh. He was sort of unknown -- nobody ever saw the film. He was the ultimate outsider; he was Canadian. This was the first time there was someone who represented Hugh, and he came right into our film workshop.
I also had other moments and times when certain things happened to make connections with this story. Eventually I knew this was the next film that I wanted to make. The idea percolated and grew over twenty years or more, from when it happened to when we started doing the film.
RANKIN: Did people around Whitesburg talk about the murder often?
BARRET:Yeah, people talked about it to us, saying things like "a guy got killed here just down the road for making films." This was a story that got told to visitors to Appalshop. The story had a lot of different functions. People told it as a sort of cautionary tale. And then people told us so it wouldn't be forgotten. I think we always felt that such a thing would never really happen to us. I think the story is a way for people to relate to you the kind of seriousness of what you are doing when making documentary films. It was symbolic in a lot of ways, and we heard it with a different set of ears as we matured. But as young people, it was always out there, and you knew that people really cared about their image and how they were portrayed, and you knew people were serious if they didn't want their picture taken. It was like Hugh O'Connor and what happened to him was always present with us; it was always there for those of us at Appalshop.
RANKIN: What brought you to Appalshop in the first place?
BARRET: I graduated from college and came to Appalshop the next day. I had written Appalshop during my senior year. I wasn't sure what I was going to do. I heard they were going to make a feature film based on a novel by Gurney Norman. I didn't know anything about filmmaking. I just wrote about a summer job working on this feature film, and they wrote back and said, "Guess what, we are not going to do that film because we never got the money. But we have this National Endowment for the Humanities money for a training program. You don't have to know anything about film; you just have to be from the region."
So I qualified and came up during my spring break and met everybody. Trainees got a stipend of $43 a week, so I came up and started learning. I had studied journalism and sociology at UK. I had a double major. I had taken a photography course my senior year. I also took a course on the sociology of the Southern Appalachians, the first time any curriculum had been introduced at UK about the eastern part of the state. They had invited Appalshop Films to the Student Center my junior year. They were starting to do more Appalachian studies at UK within sociology. I thought I would just leave the region. Several of us wanted to go to Colorado and find jobs out there, so everything was pretty vague - what I would really do after school. Then I got interested in this and decided I would try it for a while, not knowing if it would be for a summer or what, but then I stayed. I have been at Appalshop since May of '73.
RANKIN: How do you view the concept of "strangers” in Appalachia?
This whole concept of strangers for me begins growing up in Hazard, Kentucky, which is about thirty-five miles from Whitesburg, where Appalshop is located. Hazard is a bigger town, and my Dad was a lawyer. So I was living within a real poverty-stricken area, yet my family was not poverty-stricken. I think I always had this dual identity, being part of this place but also different or separate from it. The whole time growing up there I had a real strong attachment to Hazard and small- town life, but there was also that feeling of there is nothing to do here and I want to get away, and I don't like it. It is ironic that I ended up staying here my whole adult life, because the whole time I was in high school was about how to go elsewhere. It was a dream.
Because of income differences and background or whatever, the differences were really apparent from those within my hometown to folks out in the county coming into Hazard as the county seat. You had real "country people." I didn't identify myself: "country person." You had in Hazard a larger African American population than you did in Whitesburg or Letcher County. I think from very early on I had a foot in this world of Appalachia and a foot out of this world too.
RANKIN:What was the first step in making Stranger with a Camera?
BARRET: The first thing I did was go to New York to film the producer of the film Hugh was hired to work on, the guy who hired Hugh. He is the one who had gotten the contract. The film had been commissioned by the American government. This guy was in New York and his cinematographer was also in New York. They were about eighty. I thought I better talk to them since they were the last people who worked with Hugh, that I should go ahead and film the interview with each of them. So that was the first thing I shot in '91, and that is when the film took off. The first thing I had was this footage. Then the next thing I did was go to the National Archives because the original film had been commissioned by the Department of Commerce to be shown at HemisFair. The footage belonged to the American people. I went to see this footage Hugh had shot and started getting working copies of footage that had been shot in Letcher County in 1967. So that was the beginning.
I tried to write a few proposals to get the film off the ground, and that was a long process. We got a little bit of start-up money, then we started running into not getting any funding. We kept getting turned down left and right. Then the National Endowment for the Humanities came in for pre-production. We were able to do more re- search and some preliminary interviews and work with scholars and a team of advisors, so it got more serious at that point and had some momentum behind it.
RANKIN:What about the evolution of deciding that the memoir approach would be a part of this film, that you would adopt this new approach to your filmmaking?
BARRET: The scholars we hooked up with, required by the National Endowment for the Humanities, brought a lot to the whole project. It was Erik Barnouw who summed it up. He would listen, listen, listen in meetings, then he would speak and generally be right on in a real succinct way. He said, "This is not just a film about Hobart Ison. You know this, don't you? This is a film about you, and you have to be in this film."
Of course he was dead serious. So we talked about why, how this approach might work. It made a lot of sense to me from that moment on. He was exactly right. I was in this unique position because I was from the region, and also I was a media maker. That was a real interesting part of the story and would become my quest. It ended up not being so much of a quest as a meditation or reflection. Figuring out how to do that was much harder. What my role would be a lot of it was trial and error. We filmed me with people who I was interviewing; we kept working on what the voiceover would be. That was the longest part of this and the most work. We were doing it right up to the very end. The personal aspect was the toughest part.
