Behind the Torchlight

USA | 2015 | 8 min | Super 8 

Behind the Torchlight emerged out of a separate, academic research project about women movie-theater employees in the inter-war period. The project paid special attention to ushers, known as “usherettes” at the time, in part because I was a cinema usher myself in my late teens and early twenties, and also because I was interested in their unique relationship to cinema history as both laborers and spectators in early movie theaters. The film that emerged blends archival text, clips from the romantic comedy The Good Fairy, a newsreel from an “America’s Most Beautiful Usherette” contest, and super 8 film shot at a movie palace in Flatbush, Brooklyn. Associative editing obfuscates the boundaries between found and original materials and offers instead a sense of being and time in flux.