Dead People
(stills)
Written, Directed and Edited by Roger Deutsch
Photographed by Ed Pinney in 1974
1983 Version 20 minutes 16mm, 2005 Version 18 min 34 sec. 35mm.
San Francisco Art Institute Film and Video Festival 2004 (Juror’s Citation)
Ann Arbor Film Festival 2006 (Juror’s Choice)
Black Maria Film Festival 2006 (Director’s Citation)
Iowa City International Documentary Film Festival 2006 (Juror’s Citation)
Florida Experimental Film/Video Festival (Gainesville) 2006 (Juror’s Citation)
Collective For Living Cinema (NYC) 1985
Raindance Film Festival (London) 2003
bATik Film Festival (Italy) 2003
Cinema Texas 2004
Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin 2004
Annapolis Reel Cinema Festival 2004
Imaginaria Film Festival (Italy) 2005
Chicago Underground Film and Video Festival 2005
Antimatter Film and Video Festival (Victoria, Canada) 2005
The International Experimental Cinema Exposition (Denver) 2005
Full Frame Documentary Film Festival (Durham, NC) 2006
Plymouth Independent Film Festival 2006
Rooftop Films (NYC) 2006
Other Cinema (San Francisco) 2007
Siren International Film Odyssey (Ithaca, NY) 2007
James River Film Festival (Richmond, VA) 2007
Maryland Film Festival 2007
Studio 27 (San Francisco) 2008
Les Inattendus (Lyon, France) 2008
Sioux City Arts Center (Iowa) 08
"…recent films of Roger Deutsch, works that hover over the issues of memory and disappearance and that cannily keep nostalgia at a distance while seeming to be drowning in it. In Dead People Deutsch tells the fictionalized history of “Frank” an elderly black man whom he actually befriended. But since the notion of friendship suggests a certain sort of reciprocity, perhaps it would be accurate to call Frank an object of fascination, a “found object upon which Deutsch could project his own stereotypes
…This kind of self betraying candor is all over Dead People and it functions not as apologetic bluster but as incisive self critique. Deutsch’s adoration of “otherness” and it’s relegation to the position of temporary fancy expose not only the subtler varieties of racism but also shows how time altered his original perspective on the project. …marked by memorable moments filtered through a kind of foggy chiaroscuro. Shots of rambling highways, desolate main streets and a ‘dead’ Frank being shaved for his funeral encircle the film with a black-and-whiteness that functions both literally and metaphorically. It is a melancholy exposition of race, life and death in economically depressed small town America.
…Deutsch's illuminating picturings push close to film's ability to reactivate the feel of that which has disappeared; but rather than lolling in the shelter of the simulative, these films subtly questions their characters' relation to history and to their own deaths. They are portraits that remind us these characters are done, through with, no more: yet at the same time they bring them "to life." They question cinema's ability to formalize, to resuscitate and to re-represent the past."
Barbara Kruger: ARTFORUM 1986
“Dead People is a portrait of Frank Butler, a local character in an economically depressed small town somewhere in America. Frank’s story unfolds slowly, like a lonely message on an answering machine—nearly indecipherable, and yet unique. Shot in gritty black and white 16mm film more than 25 years ago, the filmmaker has since revisited the footage, and his approach to telling Frank’s story. This is perhaps the closest film gets to the blues.”
IOWA CITY DOCUMENTARY FILM FESTIVAL 2006
“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 2004
“In 1974 a filmmaker set out to make a portrait of Jay Frank Butler, an elderly resident of Ellicott City, Maryland. Butler was a town character, frequently drunk and fond of speaking of dead people and crazy people, his two favorite subjects. After abandoning the film for 30 years, the filmmaker, Roger Deutsch, now uses his haunting, grainy black and white footage and Butler's mesmerizing stories to meditate on the power of the documentarian to record the truth and create lies. “
FULL FRAME DOCUMENTARY FILM FESTIVAL 2006
“Begun in 1974, finished in 1983, and re-worked in 2005, Roger Deutsch’s haunting black & white film footage documents his friendship with a poor Ellicott City, Maryland man.”
MARYLAND FILM FESTIVAL
"With scary precision Deutsch anatomizes and illuminates the way we invent the characters we live out, and the people we surround ourselves with. Here is a very young man falling in love with the image of an old man who, by virtue of wrinkles and drunkenness and lively wit and verbal skill and being black, seems to embody an authenticity the young man lacks. And here is the young man grown up, studying the pretenses of his younger days, and of the noble old role-player himself. With images that continue to haunt me, and the sense of the spaces a life lives, he probes for the essences of our invented selves, our devious and glittering accommodations. I keep talking to the film, and have since I first saw it: it is a life invented, dignified and finally demystified. Yet the last stripping away seems itself a marvel of enrichment; the austere images and lushly acerbic music that end the film make, in a direct, filmic, non-discursive way, the realist sense of person: our dramatic behaviors are absurd forgivable turbulence in a sea of presence. Deutsch does the hardest thing: he forgives even the forgiver."
ROBERT KELLY 1985
Over 25 years ago, Roger Deutsch began hanging out with and filming the local eccentric, Frank Butler, as he went on benders and discoursed on his favorite subjects: crazy people and dead people. Slowly, Deutsch's life drifted away from Butler's, and a sense of guilt, a feeling that perhaps he was exploiting the old man, cast a pall on the footage. Years later, Deutsch returns to the material with a new critical distance and self-aware sense of nostalgia. Butler emerges like a ghost—flickering in faded black and white images, chattering through crackling audio—a portent of madness and a warning against judgment
ROOFTOP FILMS 2006
“…the disturbingly intimate film challenges the viewer to ask difficult questions of mourning and race representations. These issues need to be addressed in the context of experimental film and video, a world often dominated by Caucasian male artists practicing from the comfort of the upper classes. “
Elizabeth Block: SOLPIX 2004
"In an era when the work being done in what used to be called the "Independent American Cinema" is too often indistinguishable from-- and perhaps a training ground for--the adolescent posturing and bargain-basement Dada of MTV, Roger Deutsch's work, by contrast, is exemplary in its emotional authenticity and in its eloquence and seriousness of address.
Photographed in elegiac black and white Dead People recounts the life story of, and charts the filmmaker's friendship with, "Frank", an ancient black man, a servant all his life, now dead. Austerely--indeed mathematically--composed, the film resurrects the dead, so to speak, and acknowledges the cruelty of history with considerable formal power.
As an artist, Deutsch is both blunt and at the same time extraordinarily delicate. In Dead People Deutsch talks about (his own) white guilt, and questions, with considerable irony, his motives for befriending this poor black man, and indeed questions his sorrow over Frank's death. As the film ends, however, we transcend all this. As the camera tracks, at twilight, along the streets where Frank no longer walks and as the Faure Requiem rises on the soundtrack, the film becomes an appropriate memorial for Deutsch's friend, and indeed, a great universal lament for the dead. We move beyond guilt, beyond irony, beyond sorrow itself into the healing realm of a fully realized work of art."
STEVEN SIMMONS 1985
Roger Deutsch's startlingly sensitive "Dead People:" A return to a documentary he made in 1983 about a wandering old man named "Frank," the film is simultaneously folksy, melancholic and deeply alive.
CHRISTIAN BRUNO 2006