Attention or Exploitation?

The Clampetts. A coal miner's daughter. Children eating dirt. Dueling banjos. These are images of Appalachia you won't find in the new documentary Stranger With a Camera.

Many of these stereotypical images were cultivated during the early 1960s, when a huge wave of government and social service agencies shone a spotlight on Appalachia's level of poverty and unjust economic systems, along with an influx of filmmakers and journalists wanting to bring greater attention to the struggle. There also were those looking for a hot story. Says Stranger's director, Elizabeth Barret, "The same [economic] system that brought prosperity to some, impoverished others. Some filmmakers wanted to show the contrast to bring about social change. Others mined the images the way companies mined the coal."

No matter what the motivation, photos of hollers and barefoot children were plastered on televisions, front pages, and newsreels across the country. For many non-Appalachian viewers, these images remain the single impression of a region's people and culture.

In 1967, the tension between this media attention and what some saw as media exploitation erupted in a confrontation in eastern Kentucky between landowner Hobart Ison and Canadian filmmaker Hugh O'Connor. O'Connor and his crew were in the region filming the last sequence of a film about the struggle for justice in depressed areas of the United States. As they were leaving, they stopped to film Mason Eldridge, a coal miner sitting with his family on their porch after a day in the mines - in a house owned by Ison. Ison learned of O'Connor's presence, drove to Eldridge's home, and shot O'Connor dead.

Barret steers the viewer through the stories of Ison and O'Connor, Ison's trial, and the multilayered tensions between locals and outsiders, which included news media, filmmakers, and VISTA volunteers. She also incorporates a chronology of filmmaking of the region that ranges from Charles Kuralt's "Christmas in Appalachia" - political coverage of the war on poverty - to foreign news films from the early '60s. Barret also covers O'Connor's film career and her own history as a filmmaker.

WHILE THE CONFRONTATION between Ison and O'Connor is the central event of Stranger With a Camera, the documentary is much more about the consequences of filmmaking and the media's responsibilities and responses to a region plagued with poverty.

Barret is well equipped to tell this story. She's a native of the same county as Ison - Letcher County, Kentucky - and also a filmmaker. "I grew up knowing what happened, but now I want to know why. What brought Ison, with a gun, and O'Connor, with a camera, face to face in September of 1967? What can I learn now that I've stood on both sides of the camera?" Her steady flow of questions throughout the film serves as a compass; she doesn't allow the viewer to fall into the mire of stereotypes and preconceptions.

Interviewees in her film make clear that O'Connor was deliberate in the respect he paid to the region, its people, and the circumstances under which he filmed. That Ison was so threatened by a stranger with a camera as to shoot O'Connor without even a verbal argument leads to greater questions regarding the power and use of images. Says Colin Law, of the National Film Board of Canada and a colleague of O'Connor, "A camera is...invasive, exploitive in terms of mass media, and it is not always true. It can be editorially manipulated into anything the maker wants to say about a place."

Barret incorporates O'Connor's murder, its circumstances, and her personal reflections as a member of Ison's community and as a fellow filmmaker into her own story. And she seems to have settled on some understanding of at least her role as a filmmaker: "I live every day with the implications of what happened. Hobart Ison was wrong to kill Hugh O'Connor, but that is not enough for me. As a filmmaker it's my job to tell fairly what I see and to be true to the experience of Hugh O'Connor and Hobart Ison and, in the end, to trust that that is enough."

ELIZABETH NEWBERRY is editorial assistant of Sojourners.

Stranger With a Camera. Newberry, Elizabeth. Appalshop Films, Inc., 07/01/00.