Dead People (1995) [NR]
Featuring:
Frank J. Butler
Written by:
Roger Deutsch
Directed by:
Roger Deutsch
Release Date:
November 1, 1995
Original Title:
Dead People
Genres:
Documentary
Production Countries:
United States of America
Ratings / Certifications:
US: NR
Runtime: 18
Filmed in 1974 and edited and released in 1983 (and then rereleased by its director in 2005), DEAD PEOPLE purports to document the final years of Frank Butler, a local fixture in the depressed burg of Ellicot City with a particular fondness for drink and tales of the dead. Over hazy 16mm footage two decades later, Deutsch adopted a painfully unsentimental view of his early approach, colored as it was by notions of ethnographic film and an undercurrent of fetishism for a man he considered somehow more "alive" than himself. While it chafes against notions of authenticity in documentary and incisively hints at the complicity of the subject in inventing his own history, DEAD PEOPLE simultaneously oozes nostalgia, transcending its own judgment as a gauzy memorial for the man Deutsch once called a friend.
Like a tormented half-brother of American folklife archivist Alan Lomax, Deutsch revisits the rambling stories of Frank Butler, a subject that he documented more than a quarter century ago. The time gap has offered the filmmaker a chance to confront his younger self's ethnographic process and transcend it to form a more brutally honest portrait of both subject and artist. - Jason Cortlund CinemaTexas
