SUITCASE OF LOVE AND SHAME (2013) 70m
A forbidden love story played out in a decade that would soon spawn the sexual revolution, Suitcase of Love and Shame reconstructs a mesmerizing and erotic narrative from 60 hours of reel-to-reel audiotape discovered in a suitcase purchased on eBay.
In 1964, the couple, Tom and Jeannie, lived in different cities. Long distance phone calls were risky (Tom was married) and cost prohibitive, so instead they recorded audio letters to one another and sent them discreetly in the mail. The recordings were raw, intimate, and candid; innermost thoughts and desires, sexual indiscretions, juxtaposed with observations on the banality of their work and daily lives. They recorded everything. When they would meet in hotel rooms on business trips, they recorded themselves making love. The tapes memorialized their affair. They also captured all that was happening around them, the rich textural sounds of life in the Midwest in the 1960s: thunderstorms, telephones ringing, barking dogs, intercoms, even Bert Parks announcing the winner of the Miss America Pageant of 1965. Using vivid archival and present-day imagery to supplement the recordings, this fascinating documentary addresses the morals laws of 1960’s America, the devastation of divorce, the effects of institutionalized sexism and the clandestine lives many adult Americans were forced to lead.
In today’s social media environment, where recording and sharing one’s most personal and private moments is commonplace, it is striking to confront such a salacious and candid media example from a half a century ago. In the early 1960’s, most people were not thinking about the impact and dissemination of recorded media, yet Tom and Jeannie documented their lives for the same reasons we do today. Quite unlike any other documentary, Suitcase of Love and Shame opens a remarkably rich dialogue about confession, exhibitionism, privacy and voyeurism.
Producer/Director, Jane Gillooly
Cinematography, Beth Cloutier, Kamal Bilal
Editors, Jane Gillooly, Pam Larson
Distributed by Cinema Guild — STREAM on Amazon
* Official Selection, Visions du Reel
* Official Selection, The Art of the Real, Film Society of Lincoln Center
* Best International Film, Images Festival, Toronto
* Official Selection, Full Frame Documentary Film Festival
* Official Selection, Traverse City Film Festival
* Official Selection, CPH:DOX Film Festival
* Official Selection, RIDM, Montreal Documentary Film Festival
* Official Selection, Ann Arbor Film Festival
JEANNIE AND TOM (2017) Podcast Co-Producer
Feature length sound adaptation of the film Suitcase of Love and Shame.
Coproduced with Steven Jackson for Love + Radio. Released as a podcast, July 24, 2017
AUDIENCE OF LOVE AND SHAME (2015)
Concept/Director: Jane Gillooly
Camera and Producer: Jeff Reichert and Farihah Zaman
A filmed document of an audience. An unattended camera observes members of the consenting public listening and watching Suitcase of Love and Shame – a film that privileges sound over image and compels the spectator to invent much of the visual. In the installed work, viewers observe another audience watching, listening, and in their own minds completing a film.
Commissioned and filmed at the Museum of the Moving Image as The installed video was presented as part of First Look 2015. AUDIENCE was filmed during the opening weekend of the festival and installed on the closing weekend.