Barkwill 1

T.J. Barkwill

11.29.13

Approaching The Truth

The issues facing the documentarian are multifarious. Such issues are, at their core, the

same as those which become apparent in any attempt to investigate, interrogate or

explicate a subject: What can be considered an appropriate approach? How best to

account for the investigator, as well as the investigated? What lines, what boundaries,

might be crossed and what harm might such transgression entail? What responsibility is

due to the subject and what due to any presupposed standard of practice? Indeed, what

are such standards and to what extent is it possible to adhere to them and still be

committed to the goal of the investigation? And how is that goal even to be determined? 1

In the face of such obstacles, the very possibility of communication is thrown into

question. Accounting for both the “speaking subject” and the “object of analysis”

becomes perilous. Embracing the various milieus that inform and instruct is tantamount

to opening out the space of expression to countless voices, each competing with the

others, welcoming the cacophony while attempting to comprehend each voice in its own

right, refusing to afford privilege to the loudest, to the most strident, in the same way that

the seemingly obvious is submitted to ceaseless questioning. All the while, points of view

surface, new angles announce themselves revealing the hitherto unforeseen, and the story

that is to be told becomes not one, but many.

A man named Hugh O’Connor, a Canadian documentarian, was shot and killed by

a man named Hobart Ison, in the Fall of 1967, in the town of Jeremiah Kentucky.

O’Connor had been filming a miner, Mason Eldridge, who was sitting on the porch of his
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home. The home and the land around it were owned and rented out by Ison. Mason had

agreed to be filmed, but Ison took exception to the intrusion of the documentary crew on

his land. In response to what he considered a threat, Ison took his gun and fired on the

crew. As Eldridge later said, “Well, it had to be murder… Had to be.”

Though there is a story to be told simply in recounting the incident, simply in

explaining the facts and following the tale through the two court cases that followed, the

exposition of the “truth,” that goal to which any attempt at investigation must aim, would

remain elusive. For this peculiar, tragic, and profoundly affecting tale can only be

revealed with any sense of honesty by a deeper, more personal, involvement with the

subject than any attempt at objectivity would permit. To say as much is to call for an

approach that is contrary to all sense of journalistic ethics. It is, in fact, to already admit

the impossibility of objectivity and to suggest, instead, that subjectivity, when mediated

by a sensitive pen or lens, might present us with our only access to the truths. For this

admission is that same acknowledgement of the multiplicity of truth which is necessary

in order for understanding to become a possibility.

As Stranger With A Camera (2000) opens, the audience is confronted by a series

of tiles, fading in and out, some still images, most film clips, showing varied, sometimes

related (the baptismal photographer and the group being photographed), sometimes

unrelated, visions. Depicted in these tiles are people of different races captured,

apparently, at different historical moments (both black and white and color footage are

seen as well as modern and vintage cameras). There is no clue provided as to how these

images might relate to what follows. Instead, filmmaker Elizabeth Barret allows the

understated power of the images and the haunting guitar strings plucked by Scott
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Nygaard to place the audience within that very milieu into which Barret must enter and of

which she must take account. Barret’s work in the investigation of the shooting of Hugh

O’Connor will, ultimately, offer the opportunity to understand what has happened, to find

answers as to why it happened, and to appreciate the sensitivity that allows the truth to be

approached.

The opening sequence, seemingly just a background for the titles, is far more than

this alone. The tiles are approximations of the multiple screens and projections that Hugh

O’Connor once pioneered to great effect in Labyrinthe (1967), which played at the

Montreal Expo (International and Universal Exposition) and inspired the creation of

IMAX. Barret mixes footage in this sequence from some of O’Connor’s work, together

with her own. The sequence ends with the screen split into thirds, with a close-up of a

figure to the right, a wider shot of the same figure sitting on a porch in the center, and

another wide angle revealing the nearby cabin and surrounding land on the left. The

figure is that of Mason, the miner. The images Barret displays could easily be paintings.

Their soft colors, caught in the fading light, would lend themselves to any nostalgic

depiction of Americana. But as Barret then digitally zooms into the center frame,

allowing O’Connor’s footage of Mason with his child to play, the voice-over narration

provided by Mason propels us into the document. And quickly, other testimony is

introduced: Begie “Moose” Breeding, Jr (a relative of Hobart’s), describes Hobart’s

arrival at the scene, Richard Black (Assistant Cameraman on O’Connor’s crew), relates

the events as they unfolded once Hobart had arrived on the scene, and Calvin Trillin

reads from his article in the New Yorker, describing the shooting:
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The filmmakers kept moving their equipment toward their cars across the

road while trying to tell the man that they were leaving. One of them said

that the man must be shooting blanks. "Get off my property!" he kept

screaming. Hugh O'Connor, who was lugging a heavy battery across the

highway, turned to say that they were going. The man held the pistol in

both hands and pulled the trigger again. "Mr. O'Connor briefly looked

down in amazement, and I saw a hole in his chest," Holcomb [the

associate producer of the film] later testified in court. "He saw it and he

looked up in despair and said, 'Why did you have to do that?' and, with

blood coming from his mouth, he fell to the ground." (64)

Barret allows the voices that will construct the narrative to speak. Some of these

voices represent eyewitnesses; some are recollections from those within the community;

some are reflections upon the event. Each view offered moves the audience closer to the

subject, to Barret’s goal. Once the scene has been set, Barret turns the focus of the

narrative upon herself. She is not simply a documentarian who has an interest in this

strange tale. She is a local. She grew up in Kentucky, a few towns over from where the

shooting took place. She recalls the shooting and the effect it had upon the community,

though only as a backdrop to the childhood she was living. To school days and the

important events of her own life. As Barret introduces the audience to her own complicity

in the community, she allows the camera, her camera, to linger on the deep green of the

forested mountainside. She frames the road that trails between the woods. She captures

the mist that clings to the trees. Accusations of manipulation could be leveled.

Undoubtedly, these images are imbued with a sense of the beauty of the land. However, it
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would be worth recalling that, today, such images are most likely to be seen portrayed not

to glorify nature and the natural, but rather to confront us with terror. These are the same

rural woods that are populated with cannibalistic hillbillies (Wrong Turn [2003]) and the

vacant stares of the banjo strumming children whose relatives will make you squeal like a

pig if you venture too far from the river (Deliverance [1972]). Is Barret, then, consciously

attempting to reframe our understanding of the locale? And, if so, to what end?

To understand Barret’s work it is necessary to follow the path upon which she

embarks, to comprehend the history of the region, to listen to the voices that recall the

events of O’Connor’s death, and to question the role of the filmmaker in reporting the

truth.

The Color of That Other Land 2

Hobart Ison was a son of the Kentucky hills. Those same hills among which Elizabeth

Barret was raised, the filmmaker who would try to tell Hobart’s story and the story of her

community in Stranger With A Camera. Ison’s confrontation with O’Connor and his film

crew resulted neither from any animosity borne toward O’Connor nor, in reality, from

any idea that O’Connor was trespassing3, but rather it resulted from a seed of resentment

that had been planted years before. As Barret recounts, following the publication of Harry

Caudill’s account of the history of the Appalachian people and the reasons why they had

sunk into poverty, in Night Comes To The Cumberlands, the plight of the region became

popularized. Through the investigative journalism of the New York Times,

documentaries by companies ranging from the BBC (The Crusader [1967]) to CBC (All

Is Right [1967]) and CBS (Christmas In Appalachia [1964]), the desperation of

Appalachia became front-page news. So widespread was such publicity that it inspired
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Lyndon Johnson’s “War Against Poverty” campaign. Though all of these efforts to call

attention to and combat poverty may have been prompted by the best of intentions, the

portrait painted of the region was based on a generalization. The poverty that resulted

from the mechanization of the mines was undeniable but it would be inaccurate to

characterize all of the towns in the region as being equally afflicted. In her narration,

Barret ponders how those people from Eastern Kentucky whose images were being

captured, televised and published, might have felt.4 She recalls how her own childhood,

lived in a neighboring town, seemed very remote from any such images, as though they

bore no relation to the Kentucky she knew. In effect, then, Hobart Ison felt compelled to

protect his property from the continuing invasion of privacy and misrepresentation of the

community that the inquiring pens and lenses of the outside world represented.5 He was

not shooting Hugh O’Connor, he was trying to resist the damage that was being inflicted

on the land which he loved.

Yet, the history of Appalachia had continually been marked by rural poverty and

the region had for decades been the subject of outside interest and a victim of

misrepresentation. Griffin and Thompson refer back to the government fact finding

missions of the 1930’s, which framed the poverty of the South according to its

dependence on outside capital which was, historically, either colonial or provided by the

North (297). Since then, Appalachia and the south have developed within the American

mind as a separate nation. It has been argued that they have been used

to serve as (i) America's “other” or “opposite other,” a cathartic, dialectal

counterpoint coexisting alongside and always shadowing the self-idealized

America and, often by contrast, thereby highlighting and deepening

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American identity, (ii) a mirror reflecting in a starkly condensed,

inescapable fashion the nation's problems of racism,

disunity/disintegration, or poverty, (iii) “projections” of, and sometimes

scapegoats for, an America unwilling to acknowledge openly its own ills

and hence national repositories for them, and (iv) even the nation's

redemptive possibility […] in an effort to make the Appalachian or

Southern "realities" closer to the American ideal and thereby remove the

dissonance and the deviance caused by the regional “other(s)” (Griffin and

Thompson 297-98)

For these reasons, Allen Batteau has suggested that "Appalachia is a creature of

the urban imagination." (qtd in Griffin and Thompson, 298).

Investigating the historical origins of this otherness, Anglin makes note of the

development of the local color narrative during the late 1800’s, when “the region of the

Blue Ridge was discovered by travel writers, missionaries and robber barons” (“A

Question…” 106). According to Anglin, the Appalachian region became recounted as a

“place of incredible beauty and innocence, untouched by the forces of war or industry,”

while the people who inhabited this wilderness were called peculiar and strange (“A

Question…” 106). Yet, these were the descendants of those same pioneers who

exemplified Thomas Jefferson’s ideal of the independent yeoman:

[L]iving on his plot of land, possessing the frontier virtues of "self-respect,

freedom, hospitality, pride, endurance, and regard for standards of conduct

and propriety." The social organization which produced him was based on

the self-sufficient small farm which provided for all the physical needs of
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the family. Supplementing it was a network of kin located in close

proximity along the streams and up the hollows who provided mutual

assistance and sociability. (Powers 246)

These people lived in a society in which communal bonds were strong. Powers

suggests that “as late as the beginning of World War II there is evidence that a good

portion of the Appalachian's independence and self-respect based on the strength of the

family structure survived to set him apart from other poor whites who lived in similar

economic and social conditions” (247). Though it served the purpose of writers like Mary

Noailles Murfree (a popular novelist who wrote under the pen name Charles Egbert

Craddock) to color the Appalachian people as denizens of a land that time forgot (Anglin,

“A Question…” 106), their communities were far from primitive.

According to Bell, the major dimensions of social capital have been identified by

the likes of Coleman, Putnam, and Silverman as being comprised of: “Social trust,

networks, and social norms or values, such as reciprocity and civic engagement” (635).

Social trust is here defined as equating to that ingredient in society which “eliminates the

need for third-party insurers or enforcers” (Paxton qtd in Bell 635). In other words, the

community takes care of itself. Such a sense of communal independence is reinforced by

the extended networks of familial ties within the community and the shared sense of

common values. Indeed, Bell goes on to cite Onyx and Bullen: “In communities with

strong reciprocity, individuals are concerned with the well-being of others and act on

those concerns” (636). Hobart Ison, one of those yeoman who was tied to his land and his

community, acted on his concern regarding the threat being posed to that land and that

community.6
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Even so, can Ison’s use of deadly force, be considered an acceptable response to a

perceived threat?

Clearly Mason Eldridge didn’t believe so. He makes no qualms about defining

Ison’s act as murder. But the fact that a mistrial7 had to be declared when the first jury

was hung at the first trial, and that the second trial had to be moved to another location

because of the powerful local support Ison received, would indicate that Eldridge was

among the minority. The image of the “strange and peculiar” mountain man reappears,

exemplar of a people who lived by another code. Investigating the origins of feudal

violence in the region, Otterbein links this code to Fischer's "borderer theory,” which is

described by Nisbett and Cohen:

We believe the southern culture of honor derives from the herding

economy brought to the region by the earliest settlers and practiced by

them for many decades thereafter....The herdsman continually faces the

possibility of losing his animals through the actions of others. The issue of

protection is therefore a very serious one and the herdsman cultivates an

acquaintance with violence and weapons to deter those who would prey on

him. The sensitivity to insult is secondary. Its purpose is to preserve the

individual’s reputation for being willing and able to carry out violence if

needed. (qtd in Otterbein 234).

The history of the region, lived in the blood of its sons and daughters, led to the

creation of Hobart Ison. In his actions can be seen the ties to the community, the fierce

independence, the feudal unwillingness to brook insult, and the socially acceptable

response to the invasion of property.8

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The True and the Camera.

From the outset, Barret makes clear her purpose in making Stranger With A Camera

together with her own involvement with the subject matter.9 This film is not an attempt to

explain Eastern Kentucky to the outside world, though insight is provided. It is not an

attempt to provide mitigating circumstance that might influence an audience to offer

Hobart Ison the collective forgiveness of history. As Barret says,

I knew what had happened, but I wanted to go beneath the surface to find

out why it happened […] What brought these two men, Hobart Ison with

his gun and Hugh O’Connor with his camera, face to face in September of

1967 […] to Hobart Ison, Hugh O’Connor was a stranger with a camera.

Here, in this place, I became a neighbor, a wife and a mother with a

camera. (Stranger)

Is this “beneath the surface” and desire to discover the “why” of the incident, not the

same as to offer an explanation, framed, necessarily, by the bias of the filmmaker?

Barret’s film balances Ison’s history with O’Connor’s. She ensures that we

understand O’Connor’s background, his bravery,10 and his qualities as a documentarian.

One of O’Connor’s associates, Colin Low offers this description of him: “Hugh had the

capacity to go out and talk. It was his great talent.. People. He was a great raconteur, a

really excellent storyteller. He had instant rapport with most people” (Stranger).

Moreover, by including clips from his most impressive work, Labyrinthe, Barret allows

us to see O’Connor’s talent made manifest before our eyes. The accompanying testimony

of O’Connor’s crew members on that fateful day (Alexander “Sasha” Hammid,

cinematographer and Richard Black, the assistant cameraman), together with footage
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from an interview with O’Connor’s daughter, Ann O’Connor McGoey, lend considerable

power to the portrait painted of O’Connor and confirm the absolute innocence of the man

on the day. As, Hammid, Black and Eldridge all confirm, after Ison arrived shouting out

demands for the filmmakers to leave, they were in the process of doing just this. There

was no argument, no attempt to continue filming, they were in the process of moving

their equipment back to their vehicle when the shots were fired that killed O’Connor.

It is impossible to watch Barret’s account without being overwhelmed by the

sense of loss that all those who knew O’Connor shared at his death.11 More than this, to

feel the deflation that comes with the loss of a talent that wanted to make a difference to

the world, a talent that tried to pioneer new approaches to documentary filmmaking.

Yet, in that moment of empathy, there is the realization that O’Connor has

continued to make a difference and change the form of the documentary by virtue of

Barret’s work. For this film, Stranger With A Camera, is not a simple record, nor an

explanation. This film is what Nichols has described as one of the “new self-reflexive

documentaries”12 which

mix observational passages with interviews, the voice-over of the film-

maker with inter-titles making patently clear what has been implicit all

along: documentaries always were forms of re-presentation, never clear

windows onto "reality"; the film-maker was always a participant-witness

and an active fabricator of meaning, a producer of cinematic discourse

rather than a neutral or all-knowing reporter of the way things truly are.

[I]t especially behooves the documentary film-maker to

acknowledge what she/he is actually doing. Not in order to be accepted as

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modernist for the sake of being modernist, but to fashion documentaries

that may more closely correspond to a contemporary understanding of our

position within the world so that effective political/formal strategies for

describing and challenging that position can emerge. (“The Voice…”18)

It is, in other words, the filmmaking that a pioneer such as O’Connor would have wished

to see pursued. Offering multiple perspectives, attempting to delve deep into the subject

matter. Always seeking the truth, always asking, “Why?”

The truth is not a commodity that can be easily packaged and then displayed and

consumed. “On the one hand, truth is produced, induced, and extended according to the

regime in power. On the other, truth lies in between all regimes of truth.” (Minh-Ha 77).

In other words, any attempt to relate the passage of events must be cognizant of all those

factors that historically, socially, and culturally have brought weight to bear upon those

events. The truth, the aim of the documentarian, therefore, cannot simply be reduced to

“objectivity,” or to Blumberg’s call to “most closely show events as they ‘actually’

occurred” (19). For the very issue of truth becomes clouded once a unitary presentation

of that truth is effected: “[W]hat is put forth as truth is often nothing more than a

meaning. And what persists between the meaning of something and its truth is the

interval, a break without which meaning would be fixed and truth congealed. This is

perhaps why it is so difficult to talk about it, the interval” (Minh-Ha 77). Minh-Ha’s

interval echoes the “the intervening space 'beyond'” (7) which leads Homi Bhabha to

uncover the “emergence of the interstices--the overlap and displacement of domains of

difference” within cultures (2). These are the unspoken spaces, the spaces that cannot be
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spoken, which exist between those representations of “reality” that form the “truth”

which it is possible to express within the framework of language and culture.

It is into these intervals, that Barret journeys with her camera. Rather than

providing answers to the questions it raises, Barret’s film instead uncovers the hardest

truth of all to bear: this film provides no answers because there are no answers to be

provided, there are only multiple approaches to the truth, multiple truths, an endless

suspension of conclusion that demands involvement and, most importantly, an attempt at

understanding.

An Echo Through Time

As Strange With A Camera comes to a close, we are left with Barret’s words over

images of the peaceful countryside, of a church by the roadside, trucks rolling over the

asphalt, two men walking a path alongside the road, the curve of the road as it heads

toward mist-shrouded trees beneath a cold sun. She speaks of O’Connor’s daughter,

Anne, telling us: “She had come to a place of resolution, but I had not.” For Barret, there

can be no end to this film, just as there could never have been any single truth that might

emerge which would make sense of O’Connor’s death. Barret, as a filmmaker, as a

daughter of Applachia, has to “live everyday with the implications of what happened.”

She re-iterates what has been obvious from the very beginning of the film and what has,

perhaps, only by virtue of her search come to light: “Hobart Ison was wrong to kill Hugh

O’Connor, but saying that is not enough for me.”

O’Connor’s daughter (Anne O’Connor McGoey) tells Barret that revisiting her

father’s death as a result of Barret’s interviews, has been strangely therapeutic as she

tried to “understand what was going on in Hobart Ison’s head and how he felt he was
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being ridiculed.” She continues, “There’s some resolution to my understanding and

perhaps to my grief as well, And there’s certainly forgiveness, which I hadn’t really

thought of before. But I think there’s—it’s a terrible thing to have happened, but Hobart

was a man of his times, of his culture and of his place…”

During the second trial, Ison would plead guilty to manslaughter. He served one

year before being released and died a year later.

This was never going to be a story about justice. Nor would it even be possible to

conceive of such within this context. It is a reflection on the past revealing how that past

shapes us as human beings and how it calls to us, demanding continual investigation and

reconsideration, in order that we might both preserve the moments that pass from us and

learn from them.

“You know, I asked those men yesterday morning if they were happy with the

outcome,” the clerk said. “And they said, ‘Yes.’ And I said, ‘Well, you know, us hillbillies

is a queer breed. We are. I'm not offering any apologies when I say that. Us hillbillies are

a queer breed, and I'm just as proud as punch to be one.’”

“Not all of us are like that,” the other woman said, “Mean like that.”

“Well, I wouldn't say that man is mean,” the clerk said. “I don't guess he ever

harmed anybody in his life. They were very nice people. I think it was strictly a case of

misunderstanding. I think that the old man thought they were laughing and making fun of

him, and it was more than he could take. I know this: a person isolated in these hills, they

often grow old and eccentric, which I think they have a right to do.”

“But he didn't have a right to kill,” the other woman said.

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“Well, no,” the clerk said. “But us hillbillies, we don't bother nobody. We go out

of our way to help people. But we don't want nobody pushin' us around. Now, that's the

code of the hills. And he felt lik—-that old man felt like—he was being pushed around.

You know, it's like I told those men: ‘I wouldn't have gone on that old man's land to pick

me a mess of wild greens without I'd asked him.’ They said, ‘We didn't know all this.’ I

said, ‘I bet you know it now. I bet you know it now.’” (Trillin 63)
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Endnotes
1
Blumenberg sets out some of those decisions that face “both the filmmaker and the
observer”:
(1) The choice of subject matter. The general subject matter a
documentary filmmaker decides to deal with may frequently be influenced
by what the filmmaker thinks the public already has seen or knows, as
well as by a desire to give legitimacy and significance to people, events,
actions, or circumstances that otherwise would not be made available to
other people.
(2) The selection of action from action occur ring around it. This process
of abstraction can appear to be spontaneous in terms of reaction of the
camera to the events it shows, sometimes even showing the selection
taking place by zooming, travelling in, panning, and other camera
manipulations. The reaction of the camera to the actions it photographs
may seem artibrary and hence give a false feeling of authenticity to the
event by making it appear spontaneous. The isolation of actions, however
spontaneous they may be in actuality, provide material that is structured
by editing and therefore is given a further imposed sense by the shots with
which it is associated.
(3) The public showing of private events. The decision to penetrate the
layers of protective devices (i.e., dress, job, behavior, and many others) to
show the private moment is an ethical decision of great moment. In a
moral context, attempts to achieve authenticity here may not have so much
effect as shock. In an ethical sense, a subject's psychological need to
protect his or her individuality may take precedence over showing a
private moment that adds only shock or humor to content not needing it
for purposes of authenticity.
(4) The creation of legitimacy or significance by means of editing, sound,
selective focus, and other similar cinematographic manipulations.
Decisions in this area evolve from considerations of using cinematic
contrivance to distort or dilute authenticity to the point where only action
signifies the actual event. Finding the action through the distortion may be
a difficult part of assessing its authenticity.
(5) The a priori or imposed judgment of the filmmaker on the events
shown. In this case, any filming and / or editing manipulation further
influences interpretation and forms a film which can be more polemic than
authentic.
(6) What Hazel Barnes, in another context, calls "playing to the group"
can seriously impair or firmly negate any notion of authenticity. When
documentary filmmakers make films to be played (either for acceptance or
for controversy) to a group with set ideas, then the film must be viewed as
not authentic. (20)
Wanda Bershen also covers similar ground in addressing the ethics of the choices made
by the documentarian in “A Question of Ethics: The Relationship between Filmmaker
 Barkwill 17

and Subject” (http://www.documentary.org/magazine/question-ethics-relationship-

between-filmmaker-and-subject).
2
The prosecution’s psychiatrist at Ison’s first trial would argue that:
Some of Ison's ideas did have "paranoid coloring," she said, but that could
be traced to his being a mountaineer, since people in isolated mountain
pockets normally had a suspicion of strangers and even of each other.
(Trillin 62)
3
Though this would be presented, at Ison’s trial, as a partial basis for his defense.
4
Bill Nichols addresses precisely these concerns in relation to the practice of
documentary filmmaking:
What to do with people? Put differently, the question becomes, 'What
responsibility do filmmakers have for the effect of their acts on the lives of
those filmed?" Most of us think of the invitation to act in a film as a
desirable, even enviable, opportunity. But what the invitation is not to act
in a film but to be in a film, to be yourself in a film? What will others
think of you; how will they judge you? What aspects of your life may
stand revealed that you had not anticipated? What pressures, subtly
implied or bluntly asserted, come into play to modify your conduct, and
with what consequences? These questions have various answers,
according to the situation, but they are of a different order from those
posed by most fictions. They place a different burden of responsibility on
filmmakers who set out to represent others rather than to portray
characters of their own invention. These issues add a level of ethical
consideration to documentary that is much less prominent in fiction
filmmaking. (Introduction 6)
5
Barret includes a clip from Appalachia: Rich Land, Poor People (1968) in which
members of the Pikeville, Kentucky, Chamber of Commerce are filmed after a meeting.
The film crew’s intrusion meets with the ire of the members of the Chamber, with one
gentleman proclaiming: “You don’t need to come in here to impress us with boots and
fuzzy faces. No, my friend. You’re in the wrong damn place, believe you me. You come
to us like human beings and we’ll treat you like a human being. You come to us like a
damn bunch of beatniks and we’ll treat you like beatniks. Now, my friend, you better
believe it. You’re treading on damn dangerous ground.” (Stranger).
6
The number of recorded homicides in Harlan County is as few as five per year:
The murders that do occur in mountain counties like Harlan and Letcher
often seem to occur while someone is in a drunken rage, and often among
members of the same family - a father shooting a son over something
trivial, one member of a family mowing down another who is breaking
down the door trying to get at a third. "We got people in this county today
who would kill you as quick as look at you," [Daniel Boone] Smith
 Barkwill 18

[commonwealth attorney for Harlan County] has said. "But most of 'em
are the type that don't bother you if you leave them alone." (Trillin 62).
7
It should be noted that:
The jury was eleven to one for conviction, but the one held out. Some
people were surprised that Ison had come that close to being convicted,
although it was generally agreed that the prosecution's psychiatrist had
outtalked the psychiatrist who testified for the defense. Smith believed that
his case had been greatly strengthened by the fact that the filmmakers had
been respectful, soft-spoken witnesses—not at all smart-alecky. "If there
was anything bigheaded about them," he said, "it didn't show." (Trillin 63)
8
At the first trial:
The prosecution's psychiatrist—an impressive woman from the University
of Kentucky who had been retained by Francis Thompson, Inc.—said that
Ison had grown up at a time when it was common practice to run people
off of property with a gun, and, because he had lived with aging parents or
alone ever since childhood, he still followed that practice. (Trillin 63).
9
By virtue of her status as filmmaker, Barret is distanced by the lens and by a
commitment to reveal rather than to tell, but she is nonetheless intimately tied to the
communities of Appalachia through a life spent there as a child and then as an adult. She
is precariously balanced between Heinz Kohut’s concepts of the "experience-near" and
"experience-distant," to which Geertz makes reference:
An experience-near concept is, roughly, one that someone—a patient, a
subject, in our case an informant—might himself naturally and effortlessly
use to define what he or his fellows see, feel, think, imagine, and so on,
and which he would readily understand when similarly applied by others.
An experience-distant concept is one that specialists of one sort or
another—an analyst, an experimenter, an ethnographer, even a priest or an
ideologist—employ to forward their scientific, philosophical, or practical
aims. (57)
10
In Barret’s interview, Colin Low, of the National Film Board of Canada, says, “I can’t
imagine Hugh seeking out danger, but I don’t think he would’ve been afraid to go
anywhere” (Stranger).
11
Julie Salamon’s review highlights the “heartwrenching acuity” of Barret’s work,
12
Minh-Ha expands on this approach to filmmaking:
The bringing of the self into play necessarily exceeds the concern for
human errors, for it cannot but involve as well the problem inherent in
representation and communication. Radically plural in its scope,
reflexivity is thus not a mere question of rectifying and justifying
(subjectivizing). What is set in motion in its praxis are the self-generating
links between different forms of reflexivity. Thus, a subject who points to
 Barkwill 19

him or herself as subject-in-process, a work that displays its own formal

properties or its own constitution as work, is bound to upset one's sense of
identity-the familiar distinction between the Same and the Other since the
latter is no longer kept in a recognizable relation of dependence,
derivation, or appropriation. The process of self-constitution is also that in
which the self vacillates and loses its assurance. The paradox of such a
process lies in its fundamental instability; an instability that brings forth
the disorder inherent in every order. (95)
 Barkwill 20

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