Shirts

SHIRTS

– Color, 4 minutes, 16mm, Sound - 1977

<- Alan, Lynda Barry & Roger Junk

While I was working as a Movie Theatre manager in Seattle, my job required me to work till the theatre closed after midnight. On my commute back home at these late hours, I would take time to drive around and explore the late night empty streets. This being in Seattle, the streets and the lights of the city, seem to play off each other, especially the neon signs. On these late night excursions (often to bars before they closed) I started to notice that old buildings and their neon signs that I grew up with, were being torn down to be replaced with new buildings that didn’t call for neon signs. I decided to start taking my Bolex with me and to capture some of the oldest and often broken down neon signs while they were still up and somewhat lit.

After collecting this footage, I then went to my poetry journals and recorded some of my favorites to use as a backdrop to these late night images. During this time in my life, I was in between and bouncing through several relationships with women, so my poetry tended to reflect my state of mind at the time. Most of my poems were short (like my films <grin>) and this is one that I can think of off the top of my head:

                                'I don’t know where you are tonight……..
                                            But I know where you are not!’

That ‘thought poem’ is one of the shortest ones, but you get the idea. Roger Junk wrote and preformed the music for this film on his guitar.

This film was also submitted to the Bellevue Film Festival and didn’t make it into the competition. I also submitted SHIRTS to the San Francisco Poetry Film Festival Work Shop where it went on tour across the nation. A few years later, while I was living in Boston, I found a poster with my film in the list that was shown at one of the local Universities. The Director of the festival had this to say about my film: ‘ Your film ‘SHIRTS’ is one of the best treatments I’ve received…. The mood it conveys comes across beautifully. – Herman Berlandt