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Vice Blog

STRANDED IN CANTON IN LA

Throughout 1974 William Eggleston travelled from Memphis to New Orleans shooting footage of bar flys, friends, and musicians with a Sony Portapak. The footage, released a couple of years ago and edited by Eggleston and Robert Gordon, was turned into a rare, black and white, drunken look at the South in the 70s called Stranded in Canton.

The musicians in the film range from people like Alex Chilton to the Delta blues god Furry Lewis, with footage of them performing late at night and slightly out of focus.

Tonight Cinefamily in Los Angeles is screening the film, which marks the first time we've ever been sad to be in New York instead of LA. Here's their pitch:

Legendary photographer William Eggleston, working with filmmaker Robert Gordon, recently edited thirty hours of video footage he'd shot in 1974 of friends, family, and eclectic characters encountered in the bars and back roads of his hometown of Memphis, as well as New Orleans and the Delta region. The hypnotic result is Stranded in Canton, a film that consistently teeters on the edge of dream and nightmare states. Its nocturnal visions of bar denizens, musicians (including Furry Lewis), transvestites and a variety of semi-crazies comes off like a Cassavetes all-nighter filmed by David Lynch at his most unsettling: faces loom out of darkness, shot in infrared, displaying pale glowing skin and deep black eyes. There's even a real-life geek-off (yes, the type with chickens)! And it's mesmerizing, partly thanks to the outsized characters who fill the screen, and partly because Eggleston turns the "home movie" into art -- Father of Modern Color Photography he may be, but he kicks just as much ass in eerie B&W, wrenching glorious images out of the early Sony Porta-Pak to conjure a febrile, desperate atmosphere that captures the Southern Gothic with an extraordinarily raw and rambling intimacy.

Below are a few clips from the film. You should go to this. Really.

Stranded in Canton
Cinefamily, 611 Fairfax Ave.
Los Angeles, CA
8pm