Jisu Sheen Photo
Faith Marek has a secret.
It would be uncouth for me to tell you what two movies I saw Thursday night at the monthly gathering of Best Video’s Secret Music Documentary Society.
The group is secret, after all. Their policy is that you can’t ask about previous titles; if you miss a screening, you have to live knowing you may never find out what the group watched in your absence. What happened there was a secret.
Thursday night’s gathering was the latest edition of the monthly society, which Faith Marek and Gorman Bechard founded this January to share unreleased, suppressed, or otherwise underground documentaries about the musicians we know and love. The group meets on the fourth Thursday of every month (except next month’s meeting, which is on Wednesday, April 23) to screen secret films and discuss secret thoughts over pizza and beer. (You can check Best Video’s event calendar for updates.)
Without mentioning any film titles or main characters, I’ll tell you what I can about the sights and sounds of the films playing Thursday evening. The first short film of the night was “compelling, even though it was Barbies,” according to audience member Jeremy Hudson.
Gorman Bechard calming the crowd.
It was a miracle of analog effects and old-school moviemaking techniques, a college film by someone who is now an Oscar award-winning director. The movie followed a New Haven-born singer in her days of superstardom in the 1970s and the eerie pressures leading to her early death.
The director reenacted the events of the story using intricate miniature sets and, yes, Barbie dolls. Scenes of doll puppeteering were cut with actual footage of destruction and doom from the Vietnam War and other sparse pieces of reality.
The dolls provided a surreal humor to the dead-serious themes, sobbing, yelling, and turning dramatically to the camera with their blank faces. Dollhouse-like interiors gave way to hyper-specific settings: the distinctive look of a fancy record label office, a celebrity house party, the White House. Given the fuzzy quality of the analog media, sometimes it wasn’t clear if a scene was real footage or doll footage until the characters started moving.
Many in the audience expressed a previously-held distaste for the singer’s music at the time it was hitting the charts decades ago. It was too mainstream, too indicative of, as one person in the film put it, “a return to reactionary values in the ‘70s.” David Lombardo, one member of the Secret Music Documentary Society, remembers hearing the artist’s songs on the radio while waiting for school cancellations. Safe, sanitized enough for AM radio.
In Bechard’s words, “I would’ve cringed back then.” He continued, “We were all probably young,” as moviegoer Tessa Marquis added, “and punk.”
These days, those same once-haters listen to that voice and think — the crowd at Best Video chimed in to say this — “it’s perfect.” As the film illustrated, through its bizarre doll puppetry and haunting score, artistry is not always the same as how it’s packaged.
The evening’s second movie was, as Bechard described, “directed by its star,” a mega-famous folk-rock musician from the ‘60s.
Though the footage came from award-winning filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker, the subject of the film cut it together as director and editor. He portrays himself in the film as mysterious and human, muttering with a cigarette in his mouth, standing by the road with pink flowers, or hungover in a car as John Lennon talks in his ear, “A few dollars, that’ll get your head up. Come on, come on, money, money!”
Less VH1’s “Behind the Music,” more “Go-Pro attached to a dog, resulting in 50 minutes of squirrels,” the film had beautiful scenes but was edited disastrously. One scene followed the next with little thread to connect them. Certain moments lingered and repeated to excess: an unexplained blonde woman, little dogs on walks, a train. Sprinkled in are some more coherent close-ups: hands playing guitar, a pat of butter on a plate being passed over a dozen hands at a dinner table.
The chaos of the sequencing give it an intimacy. The viewer has to surrender to whatever the artist found interesting, with almost no regard to the narrative arc of the film or a sense of timing that considered the presence of an audience. The movie stops in the middle of a scene of the artist singing in a hotel room, his mouth open, mid-song.
“That’s how it ends,” Bechard told the room, “No joke.”
Bechard and Marek both gave this film a “D‑minus” for editing, with Marek adding, “That was rough.” It was the artist’s directorial debut and was supposed to run on ABC. (The audience at Best Video laughed upon hearing this.) ABC rejected it, calling it an “incomprehensible mess.”
During the talk-back, Marek asked the room what they would think “had [ABC] been crazy enough” to air the film. The crowd, for all their critiques, said they would have loved it.
In creating the Secret Music Documentary Society, Bechard and Marek aimed to provide, in Marek’s words, “a forum for people who love films.” The DVD aspect opens up a whole world of bootleg DVD culture, giving the audience access to films they might never otherwise even know of. And the discussion after each screening gives people a chance to “dictate where they’re going with their thoughts.”
Bechard and Marek aren’t just commenting on the action. They are part of it as well. The two both belong to What Were We Thinking Films, the local, “fiercely independent production company” behind hits like Pizza, A Love Story (2019) and The Matchbox Man (2021). Their upcoming film, a documentary called Best Video, The Movie, follows the rise and return of older media like DVDs and VHS. What they are doing with the Secret Music Documentary Society seems like exactly the kind of thing they aim to document.
Once the movie is out, there’s no doubt they will screen it right at home at Best Video, drawing in a movie-lover crowd and adding back to that wholesome cycle.
“They’re our hero,” Marek said about the video rental store. As the duo holds more screenings and brings more attention to the importance of physical media, Marek says she wants to “make sure the small film community here feels like it’s growing, like it’s worthy.”
Modern Pizza was one of the tasty sponsors for the night's event, along with Best Video, New England Brewing Co, and Taste of New Haven.
The Secret Music Documentary Society holds screenings at Best Video Film & Cultural Center in Hamden on the fourth Thursday of every month, with the exception of their next screening, which will be on Wednesday, April 23. On Tuesday, April 1, the duo will hold a screening of Super Duper Alice Cooper at the Fairfield Theater Company, joined by director Sam Dunn, as part of their less-secret series Docs That Rock.