I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I love fiction but working on docs is one of the ways I love to learn about the world. This Sunday morning I woke at the crack of dawn to meet my friend Maggie Simpson Adams from Decomp Films and Elizabeth Sher to help shoot some b-roll for their documentary Rituals of Remembrance which explores the art of mourning. Maggie and Liz’s mutual interest in grieving and mourning, combined with their frustration with the lack of common rituals and support for many people in the United States during this passage, led the two to collaborating on this documentary. Their footage explores and reviews how other cultures deal with death and grieving. Maggie & Liz aim to create a film series about such rituals and in Part I (this current work), they focus on Victorian mourning practices and Dia de los Muertos; highlighting both the rituals and the arts. These two have been working on this piece for about two or three years now and are currently in post with the intent to release to festivals and the web in 2012.
Maggie's great grandmother's grave (photo taken by Colin Adams)
This morning I had fun trailing Maggie (in her super awesome Victorian red dress) through the graveyard with a steadicam. We shot scenes that artfully re-enacted a few Victorian mourning practices such as: the brushing of a loved one’s head stone, the Victorian mourning portrait, and the laying of flowers at the grave (a sentiment still practiced today). While setting up for the first scene, I shared with Liz some of the stories surrounding the death of my mother. After she was killed in a car accident, I dedicated my artwork to her for an entire year. I still have the chair I re-made in her honor. It sits next to the one I re-made for my grandmother. Coming from a legacy of punk and goth, death isn’t something I’ve ever avoided but as I’ve gotten older my relationship with death has matured and definitely has changed since the death of my parents, most of my aunts and uncles, and now that my own child is now an adult.
Liz reminded of an old koan about a woman who had lost her baby. This woman was so overwhelmed with grief she could barely continue living herself. She went to the village healer and asked him to please help her with this suffering. Could he please make a remedy for her and cure her of her sorrows. The healer told he could do such a thing but he needed one special ingredient to do it – one mustard seed from a house Death had not touched. After searching her villages and those neighboring by, it occurred to her no such house existed. Death touches all.
Maggie and Liz are asking people to share stories of passages of loved ones. The idea is to get enough collected so people begin to see that though this rite of passage can be very personal (even amongst siblings whom share a loss of a parent) we are not alone in the process of grief). If you would like to contribute your story to this project or keep on the progress of the production you can follow along at their facebook page – Rituals of Remembrance the Movie. I encourage folks to share. Never know. It may be what one needs for the healing process …even if it’s decades later.
I love playing with film tools (my favorite toys), love cemeteries (’til the day I die), I had a great time being productive with friends, and again I was still able to learn something new about a subject in which I have always felt well versed. These are the reasons why I continue to make films. Thanks Maggie. Thanks Liz. And Colin, too.
Colin being very helpful on set
Seriously, Colin (Maggie’s husband) busted his ass today helping schlep and shoot all over the cemetery (in the heat mind you). When I found him collapsed under a tree while Maggie was having a costume change, I couldn’t resist. My favorite pics to get on set are when we’re close to the Martini shot and the fatigue begins to show on all the hustlers.
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