CHISHOLM

The implied story of Chisholm begins with a group of kids who rent a motel room the night of their high school graduation to make a super-8 porno movie. The fantasy soon crumbles as it’s revealed that the footage is something else entirely.

Of course, no such thing actually happened. As a filmmaker, I wanted to have the experience of shooting something explicit - so I arranged for 7 or 8 people to meet at a friend’s apartment to make a porno. During the course of the evening, I shot 10 or 11 rolls of super-8 film.

Chisholm reflects the years of my mid-20’s - a time filled with bizarre sexual experimentation and frequent random explorations of suburban Massachusetts. The implied narrative of the film is woven from the explicit rolls shot that night, footage of motels and suburban landscapes, and sounds recorded at my high school graduation. The Chisholm Motel is just one of the many motels I photographed during that time and never actually appears in this movie.

The attempt to create a fictional narrative out of the footage was a blatant attempt to reinvent my high school years - a time of excessive innocence, fear of trying new things, and torturous virginity. Similar to The Tanti-Man, made roughly at the same time, Chisholm reflects the deep personal frustrations I had with my own sexuality.

Chisholm was shot on super-8 film, transferred to video from a small hand-crank viewer and edited on the Avid at low-resolution before being transferred to 16mm film. The low-quality, brash look of the film mirrors my failed attempt at re-inventing my past. Voice-overs performed by an actress are left unedited with directions and cues audible in the background.

In the end, Chisholm became a film about unquenched sexual desire revealing how the camera simultaneously makes fantasies into reality and intimacy into fiction.