WELCOME TO THIS HOUSE
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Feature documentary film on the homes and loves of poet Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), about life in the shadows, and the anxiety of art making without full self-disclosure. Hammer filmed in Bishop’s ‘best loved homes’ in the US, Canada, and Brazil believing that buildings and landscapes bear cultural memories. Interviews with poets, friends, and scholars provide “missing documents” of numerous female lovers. Bishop’s intimate poetry is beautifully performed by Kathleen Chalfant and with the creative music composition by Joan La Barbara brings Bishop into our lives with new facts and unexpected details.
BACKGROUND STATEMENT
In 2010 I was thinking about a film on Cape Cod comparing the landscapes around the places I had lived during summer months, the old dune shacks and the modern houses that are being rebuilt. I realized I needed a human figure for physical and emotional scale to populate the architecture and the geography. The poet Elizabeth Bishop had lived both at a girls youth camp in Wellfleet and as a young adult in the Province Lands dune shacks of her friends.
I had always wanted to deeply study only one poet during graduate school but the preplanned nature of universities and their over determined courses of study precluded this from happening. Finally, thanks to the Guggenheim Foundation, I was able to launch a new project. I learned much later that Guggenheim board members also dearly love Bishop’s poetry.
As an artist I believe that the architectural structures in which I live and work influence the art I make. I went in search of Bishop’s homes to explore the buildings and the poetry and paintings she made in them. This quest took me to her childhood home in Nova Scotia, to Camp Chequesset on Cape Cod, to Vassar College where she went to school, and to her homes in Key West, Brazil, Cambridge and Boston.
Bishop was in the closet to the outside world, but she seemed to have as many lovers as she had homes. I globe trotted on her trail and found more and more female lovers emerging from interviews with friends, colleagues, critics and poets. Bishop was a lusty woman and I respect that, but writing openly of these experiences wasn’t possible due to her need for privacy propelled by the homophobia of the times. In addition, and maybe partly responsible for her reticence, was the childhood trauma she experienced of her mother’s breakdown and confinement in an institution. The understanding of this significant loss following the death of her father when she was an infant, and her conflicted need both to stay still and to move brought me to a closer reading of published and unpublished poems where I found intimate disclosures in her poetry.
This film brings together my twin graduate studies in literature and in filmmaking and my undergraduate studies in psychology. As with any biographical film, ellipses are made. I hope I’ve selected the poems, homes and lovers that reveal a relational side of Bishop’s personality while suggesting to the audience the meaning between the structure of an artist’s home and her art.
CREDITS
Producer/Director/Editor: Barbara Hammer
Music Composed by: Joan La Barbara
Sound Design: Barbara Hammer
Director of Photography: Barbara Hammer, Erin Harper, Stephanie Testa
Voice of Elizabeth Bishop: Kathleen Chalfant
Second Camera: Maya Ciarrocchi, Alex H. Auriema
Sound Effects: David Lawrence Goldman
Actors: Linda Dittmar, Barbara Hammer, Erin Miller
Production Assistants: Joe Berg, Lane Brettschneider, Laura Cooper, Carolyn Lieba Francois-Lazard, JiYe Kim, Kika von Klück, Juliana Pamplona, Lisa Wiesdorf
Post Production & Sound Mix: One Glass Video
Thanks to:
Great Village: Sandra Barry, Laurie Gunn, Helen MacLachlan, Robert & Meredith Layton, Patti Sharpe, Allison Totten
Cape Cod: Cherry Aivirett, Barbara Kennedy, Peter McMahon, David Wright
Key West: Marie-Claire Blais, Rosalind Brackenbury, Marie-Claire Blais, Paula Carbonelle, Jackney Drudge, Jack Einhorn, Tom Hambright, Arlo Haskell, Pat C. Johnson, Buddy Johnson, Robert A. Johnson, Lynn Kaufelt, June Klausing, Alison Lurie, Harry Mathews, Alan Meece, Emil Osterling, Edmund White, Carey Winfrey, Anita Woodruff
Brazil: José Carlos Barretto, Walkyria Barreto and Maria Ignez Barretto, Ricardo Correia de Araújo, Joana and Carlos Eduardo dos Santos da Costa, José Alberto and Linda Nemer, Carmen L. Oliveira, Marta Peixoto, Nélida Piñon, Flore Sussekind, Zuleika Borges Torrealba
Cambridge/Boston/New York: David Alexander, Jackie Anderson, John Ashbery, Robert Denby, Elsa Dorfman, Jonathan Galassi, Ken Gaulin, Richard Howard, Carle A. Johnson, Joel Katz, Laura Menidas, Ronald D. Patkus, Barbara Page, Dean M. Rogers, Patrick J. Rogers, Lloyd Schwartz, Kathleen Spivack, Thomas & Elsa Travisiano, Alice Quinn, Rosanna Clark Warren
The Prose and Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop
Courtesy of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux
Voices & Visions: Elizabeth Bishop
Courtesy of New York Center for Visual History and The Annenberg/CPB Project
Aquarela do Brazil
Composed by Ary Barroso
Performed by Silvio Caldas
God Bless The Child
Written by A. Herzog, Jr./Billie Holiday
Performed by Billie Holiday
Samba da Fato
Composed by Cicero Pixinguinha
Performed by Patricio Teixeira and TBT Trio
Archives:
Arcadia University Archive
C-Scape, Dune Shack
Monroe County Library, Key West
Nova Scotia Archives
Rosenbach Museum and Library
Vassar College Rare Book Collections
Wellfleet Historical Society and Museum
Yale Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Funding and Support:
C-Scape, Dune Shack
Cape Cod Modern House Trust
The Frameline Completion Fund
The Elizabeth Bishop House, Great Village
The Guggenheim Foundation
The Studios at Key West
Worcester County Poetry Association
A Very Special Thanks to:
Florrie Burke
© 2015 Barbara Hammer
