Yesterday independent filmmaker Sally Heckel visited St. Mary’s and showed us her most recent film, Unspeakable. Sally is most known for Jury of Her Peers, which was an Oscar nominee in the dramatic live-action short category. As powerful as Jury of Her Peers is, I like Unspeakable even better.
The film is about the suicide of her father, who was an obstetrician in Rochester, New York when she was growing up in the 1950’s. To better understand what happened and how it impacted her and her siblings, Sally explores artifacts from the time, including photographs, family home movies, and paintings and self portraits produced by her and her sister. She talks to patients and colleagues who knew her father. The film is shaped by her search.
Although there is a narrative connected with Unspeakable, it is more like a lyric poem, relying on images (often of nature) to articulate an event that is unspeakable: unspeakable because it is so horrifying, unspeakable because people don’t want to speak about it. In the course of making the film, Sally discovers just how much the event affected her. As a result, she is able to break some of the hold that it has over her.
It took Sally 20 years to make the film, which shows how unimaginably difficult the journey was. The images provide Sally a way to articulate a reality that resists words. For example, she tries to find visual equivalents of dreams that she had about her father. And when she talks about the difficulty of returning to her childhood home—how at first she could only drive by it—she gives us multiple shots of driving by the home before she eventually stops and enters it.
Trees, which Sally finds to be grounding and life affirming, are a particularly important visual theme. For example, there are two rows of poplars, planted by her grandfather, and the road between them gives one a sense both of her father’s journey to death and her own search for meaning. Sometimes the director is shown as a young girl (played by an actor) finding refuge in trees as an escape from her increasingly distant father. Sometimes the trees in the film are in blossom and give a sense of hope. At other times they are beset by snow and wind and capture the struggles of an individual trying to survive.
This lyric film brought out my own lyric impulses. Fragments of poems kept coming to me as I watched. I recalled the passage at the end of T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” It seemed as though Sally, caught up in the emotionally devastating wake of her father’s decision, is trying to grab onto fragments and then put those fragments together in a film to find some kind of meaning in the unspeakable. The Wasteland naturally came to mind because Sally is describing a process of closing down, of becoming a desert. At the end of the film, life reasserts itself. We see water flowing and her sister’s premature baby struggling for life and making human contact.
For me, however, the most powerful moment of the film occurs earlier when Sally discovers a new piece to the puzzle. Her father was a researcher as well as obstetrician and believed he had discovered a drug that would lessen some of the effects of severe PMS. He experimented with the drug upon himself, which may have contributed to his depression. Sally did not know this when she started the film and she describes how the revelation hits with seismic impact.
Suddenly she realizes that she wasn’t the cause of her father’s withdrawal from her, that she isn’t the person that she thought she was. But if she isn’t, then who is she? She has to find a new identity for herself. The author’s voice-over describing the discovery is accompanied by a wintry scene where snow-covered trees are battered by the wind.
Two poems came to mind when I saw the image. The first was Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” When I thought about Frost’s poem further, however, I saw that it doesn’t do justice to Sally’s drama. There’s an element of acceptance of the lovely dark and deep woods in “Stopping by Woods.” Sally, by contrast, wants to break through to warmth.
So my mind moved to a second poem, Wallace Stevens’ “The Snow Man.” Here it is:
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
I won’t go deeply into this evocative but challenging poem, which among other things touches on the way that we find meaning in the world that we observe. Our ability to hear something human in even the most desolate of scenarios means that we don’t, in the end, have a desolate, wintry mind. Likewise, Sally’s ability to look at these barren trees and find her struggling self within them is momentous. She may feel like “nothing herself” at this moment, but it is a nothing that is pregnant with possibility, a recording eye that effaces self and thus can see. She beholds nothing that is not there—she is determined to see only the truth and not be sidetracked by what she wishes were the case—and captures “the nothing that is,” the emptiness of her father’s life. Imagination redeems a desolate interior landscape.
And if winter comes, can spring be far behind? Percy Shelley asks this in “Ode to the West Wind.” Sally reassures us, in ways that we can believe, that it’s on the way.