Hot Docs 2011: Chaos and Control
Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then
By Nicole Armour
Brent Green’s seventies-set tinkerer-inventor documentary Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then employs hand-drawn and live action, stop-motion animation to tell the true-life love story of Kentucky residents Mary and hardware store clerk Leonard. They first meet when their cars crash, causing Leonard to fly through his windshield and land in the passenger seat of Mary’s car. Their connection defies physics from the start and continues in an unholy mist of magic and calamity. When Mary is diagnosed with cancer two years into their relationship, Leonard begins to build a house he envisions as a “healing machine.” Its mostly improvised construction, consisting of irregularly-tiered levels and a tower centrepiece that reaches perilously for the heavens, fills Leonard’s thoughts. In narration, we’re told each nail represents a problem that he strikes to make disappear. Still, they accumulate and, while shingling, they pour out of Leonard’s pockets, stream down the roof and accumulate in impossible numbers in the rain gutter. The house fails to save his wife. But after her death, he continues his project unabated for another fifteen years.
Green had the good fortune to visit the healing house before it was razed to the ground, after which he built a version on his property in rural Pennsylvania based on blueprints scrawled on cardboard that were found amongst Leonard’s effects. Green then surrounded it with several other buildings, fabricating a small town cum movie set, and also designed a handmade, working piano like the instrument Leonard used to play hymns. (Leonard’s fervent religiosity grew in direct proportion to Mary’s weakness and his own sense of loss.) Green directed and narrated the film, and wrote the script and musical score with collaborators. He also tours the film as a live performance during which he and other musicians, such as Fugazi’s Brendan Canty, play along in accompaniment. Through Green’s activities both on and off screen he conflates himself with Leonard, embodying a comparable fanaticism. When Leonard found that he lacked control of his life, he re-asserted that control by choosing a project and dedicating himself to its completion. Through live action stop motion animation, Green orchestrates his actors’ halting movements like a puppeteer.
