Creative Collaboration

I love my neighborhood for many reasons, but one of the major ones is the Riverview movie theater that is just three short blocks away. Not only can you see Ocean's 13 for just $3 (the right price for this movie), but they also show all the Oscar nominated short films in the spring and if one of our sports teams makes it to the play-offs, they open the theater up for free and you can watch the game on the big screen with your neighbors. Plus they put real butter on their popcorn.
This weekend they hosted a special showing of a documentary film on the creative relationship between photographer Edward Weston and his muse/wife Charis Wilson. "My Eloquent Nude" was done on a shoestring by a couple of friends who rounded up a number of friend/volunteers and, with passion and persistence, ended up creating an extraordinary film. The producer and director were there to introduce the documentary and take questions afterwards. Ostensibly the story is about the relationship between Weston and Wilson, but Charis is still alive and it is her voice that steals the show. (Director Ian McCluskey admitted to having a crush on Charis, but it was not hard to have a crush on Ian himself, he is so devoted to the project!) Charis' voice and image is beautifully interwoven with Edward's photos and interviews with her daughter and generous experts on Edward's work and life. But perhaps the most haunting part of the story is the reenactments the producers made of Edward and Charis' travel through the American West in the mid-30's. Filmed in black and white on a Super-8 camera picked up at a garage sale, the producers screened the footage on a wall and rerecorded it in video for editing. The scenes of Charis rolling down sandhills in the nude are simply breathtaking. As Ian said in the question and answer period, there were no special effects done...the production was as simple as it could possibly be.
Perhaps the greatest compliment to the producers came when they showed the film to Charis (now 93) in her living room. With tears in her eyes, she said that they'd told her life in much the same way she'd lived it with Edward...a creative collaboration that made the lives richer of anyone who had seen their work.
The producers are still looking for a distributor (family connections brought them to the Twin Cities) but a DVD is available soon from their web site.