Letters to Dad, 1979
11 min 44 s, Fichier numérique (Apple ProRes 422 HQ), 4/3, couleur, son, anglais
Beth B and Scott B—also known as Beth & Scott B or The Bs—were among the best-known No Wave underground filmmakers in New York in the late 1970s and early 80s. They funded their Super 8 films at that time and had them screened in artists bars, pop-up projection spaces, and clubs like CBGB, Max’s Kansas City, the Mudd Club, and 8BC. Their choice of Super 8, which creates “grainy images with acidic colours , giving films an unpolished look,” [1] provided an alternative to mainstream US culture. The two filmmakers wanted their works to represent the decadence of the Lower East Side and its darkest aspects—torture, psychological manipulation, cult deviations—and thus align with the No Wave scene’s subversive aspect, breaking away from the contemporary art circuits and the music industry through the deconstruction of certain artistic practices.
In Letters to Dad, Beth B and Scott B explore the theme of control embodied by a cult leader, reinforcing the intentions of the No Wave movement, which rejected the icons of the rock and New Wave music world of the time. This short film brings together key figures of the No Wave movement, who read out letters written by members of the Peoples Temple cult run by the American pastor Jim Jones, shortly before they committed suicide en masse in 1978. The film begins with the story of a man who, after packing his suitcase to join Jones’s community in Jonestown in Guyana, forgets to bring his pajamas and underwear, and upon arrival, feels excluded as the other members have all their belongings. The absurdity of this personal story, recited with full seriousness by the actor, plunges the viewer into a strange and grotesque world. The film continues with stories about love, death, belonging, mental illness, sex, and suicide—among other themes referred to in the letters of the cult’s former devotees. The viewer finds himself or herself with the role of “dad”—and thus unwittingly takes on the role of Jim Jones—while listening to the extracts read out by musicians Don Christensen of The Contortions, Laura Kennedy and Pat Place of Bush Tetras, and Arto Lindsay of DNA, as well as filmmaker Vivienne Dick, actor Bill Rice, and sculptors John Ahearn and Tom Otterness, among others.
Like the other films made by Beth B and Scott B, Letters to Dad was made before the emergence of Nick Zedd’s ‘Cinema of Transgression,’ formulated in 1985. The film assembled a variety of artistic profiles that matched the open-minded, do-it-yourself spirit of the No Wave scene, where dance, opera, music, and the visual arts intersect. This hybridization harmonizes with the choice made by Beth B’s decision, taken after studying at the School of Visual Arts in New York City (SVA NYC), to embrace moving images so as to reach a broader audience. As she put it, “Film seemed so much more expansive and all-inclusive in terms of the arts. Someone could pay, at that time, $5 to go see a film. I felt that this would ensure a larger—and more diverse—audience.” [2] This transition to experimental cinema allowed the artist to work outside institutional art circuits while exploring the subjects that run through her work: mental control, criminality, psychological torture, and sex-positive feminism.
Nicolas Ballet, December 2024
Translated by Timothy Stroud
[1] Marc Masters, No Wave (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2007), p. 143.
[2] Beth B cited by Jack Sargeant in Deathtripping: The Cinema of Transgression (London: Creation Books, 1995), p. 13.