Film fest entry probes American icon
By Jim Phillips
Athens NEWS Senior Writer
April 24, 2008
At first blush, the subject matter of “This American Gothic” might not seem to merit an hour-long documentary.
The film, which will be shown next Tuesday during the Athens International Film & Video Festival, bills itself as a “quirky portrait” of the town of Eldon, Iowa.
This tiny Midwestern hamlet, home to fewer than 1,000 people, is clearly on the skids economically – one resident frankly admits on camera that it’s been going downhill for at least 35 years.
Eldon does, however, have one perceptible claim to fame – it contains the imposing old farmhouse that artist Grant Wood used as backdrop to his now über-famous painting, “American Gothic.”
Director Sasha Waters Freyer builds her film around a campaign by Eldon residents to start a “Gothic House” historical center, which they hope will pull in tourism dollars to their fading village. Amongst this material, Freyer injects historical clips, and commentary by art critics and historians, to examine – we quote here from the DVD box – the “hunger for stories from rural America.”
Much of the footage on the “Gothic House” campaign is enervating and sad. We get to see one more crumbling community grasping at tourism straws, holding endless bean dinners and T-shirt sales to raise match money for a government grant, in hopes of eventually exploiting a local site of marginal historic interest to pump up sales of snack food and gasoline. (Eldon has no motels.)
The interviews with Eldon’s “ordinary folk” are simply painful at times – lots of teeth-grinding optimism and rote civic pride, seasoned with a fair amount of pointless chattering.
Even more grueling are the shots that contain local people just staring into the camera, saying nothing for, oh, 20 seconds at a time. The parallel with the couple portrayed in “American Gothic” is obvious, but that’s a painting – movies are called “movies” (and “talkies”) for a reason.
As the film proceeds, however, it pulls you in like a curious day-tripper, with its investigation of “American Gothic” as a visual landmark in the country’s psychic landscape. Wood’s painting is to American art what the Mona Lisa is to world art – an image everyone knows, even if he’s never laid eyes on the original.
As “This American Gothic” portrays, Wood’s painting has been endlessly cloned and transformed, as parody (think Eddie Albert and Eva Gabor in “Green Acres”), tribute, social commentary, and – most frequently – advertisement.
This reviewer’s favorite moment in the movie was reliving a cherished moment from his youth – a “Country Corn Flakes” TV commercial, in which two dead ringers for the stolid man and woman in “American Gothic” harmonize the virtues of breakfast cereal over stomping quasi-bluegrass music.
Viewers of the film can also learn some fascinating facts about Wood, his famous painting, and the varying responses it has triggered in art fans and critics over the years.
Did Wood intend to satirize that dour farm couple? Were they meant to be man and wife, or – as Wood insisted – father and daughter? If the latter, where is the wife hiding, and why? And, as one deep-thinking critic inquires ominously: “What about that pitchfork?”
You may not know that while Wood was praised for his realistic, folksy painting style in the 1930s, art historian H.W. Janson – a refugee from Hitler’s Germany – once suggested that Wood’s emphasis on wholesome, healthy rural subjects bore an uncomfortable resemblance to the Volk-sy aesthetic standards of the Nazis. What? Fascist tendencies in the heartland? You take that back.
By the time the credits roll, you may not have learned much about “observation, self-presentation and representation,” as the movie box promises. You will, however, have learned a bit about a still-fascinating work of art, and the value of tourism as an economic development strategy.
“This American Gothic” screens at 4 p.m. Tuesday, at the Athena Cinema. It shares a bill with another documentary, “Soda Can Love.”
The Athens International Film and Video Festival runs this Friday through next Thursday. Go to www.athensfest.org for complete details and schedule.
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