  After about an hour and a half, the crew was ready to leave, but someone had noticed a woman come out of one of the shacks and go to the common well to draw some water, and she was asked to repeat the action for filming. As that last shot was being completed, a woman drove up and told the filmmakers that the man who owned the property was coming to throw them off of it. Then she drove away. A couple of minutes later, another car arrived, and a man - a thin, bald man - leaped out. He was holding a pistol. "Get off my property!" he shouted again and again. Then he fired twice. No one was hit. 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 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.
Calvin Trillin
"A Stranger with a Camera"
The New Yorker, April 29, 1969
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Hugh O'Connor, Richard Black (L-R) |
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STRANGER WITH A CAMERA investigates the circumstances surrounding a swift, cold-blooded murder that shocked America. In 1967 noted Canadian filmmaker Hugh O'Connor was hired by New York producer Francis Thompson to direct a segment of a film titled US, depicting the breadth of the American experience. The film was commissioned by the United States Department of Commerce to screen in the USA pavilion at Hemisfair '68. It was intended to provide a survey of American life - its many achievements, as well as its troubled communities. O'Connor was drawn to Letcher County in eastern Kentucky, where President Johnson had declared a "War on Poverty" in a massive program of economic and social reform launched in 1964.
At that point in American history, eastern Kentucky's Appalachian region had become a metaphor for all that was wrong with the American Dream. In 1963 the publication of Night Comes to the Cumberlands, by Kentucky lawyer Harry M. Caudill, eloquently described the poverty and economic exploitation of the southern Appalachian region, a region supported primarily by coal mining. His book shocked and galvanized citizens, politicians and journalists nationwide. Soon reporters from national newspapers swarmed into the region, followed by international film crews, network TV journalists, magazine reporters, politicians such as President Lyndon Johnson and Bobby Kennedy, and hundreds of young and idealistic VISTA volunteers.
While many of the area's residents were thankful for the attention, many others-both rich and poor-were not. Many local merchants, businessmen and professionals were angered by the media's portrayal of their world as one of backward ignorance. They resented the armies of do-gooders out to "save" them, regarding them as dangerous outsiders and agitators. Among those enraged by the media attention was an eccentric elderly landlord, Hobart Ison, who took strong exception to the media's presence on his land. When Hugh O'Connor filmed mining families living in shacks on Ison's land, Ison became enraged and shot and killed him.
In STRANGER WITH A CAMERA, filmmaker Elizabeth Barret, who was born and raised in the region, explores the tensions that led to the murder, and the issues that linger still, a generation later. Barret narrates the film, describing her childhood and teenage memories growing up in a middle-class home in eastern Kentucky. By her own account, her teenage memories of high school fun and family vacations stood in stark contrast to the hunger and poverty depicted in the national media. The story of Hugh O'Connor and Hobart Ison would acquire additional significance for Elizabeth Barret when she began to study filmmaking at Appalshop, a regional media arts center whose mission was to teach local people to film and document their own culture.
STRANGER WITH A CAMERA probes the tragic encounter between a mountain man and a filmmaker to explore today's unresolved questions concerning media images and the individual's lack of power to define oneself within the American landscape. Eloquent interviews representing multiple, conflicting perspectives shed new light on the creation and consumption of media images in society. STRANGER WITH A CAMERA combines a fascinating look at a complexly motivated crime with an insightful exploration of how the media affects the communities it chronicles.
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Coal miner, Mason Eldridge - now and then |
Persons appearing in the film include the coal miner who was filmed by Hugh O'Connor, the crew and producers of US, the local lawyer who defended Ison, longtime Letcher County residents and local journalists. Footage of Calvin Trillin reading passages from his 1969 New Yorker magazine account of the murder and 1960s War on Poverty film clips lend an additional richness to the film.
At its core STRANGER WITH A CAMERA is a meditation on the power of the media and how that power affects the people it portrays, for both good and bad-sometimes doing both simultaneously. As Barret says in the film, "Can filmmakers show poverty without shaming the people we portray? I came to see that there was a complex relationship between social action and social embarrassment. As a filmmaker, I live every day with the implications of what happened."
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