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Behind the Scenes with Nora
Harrington, producer of Little Black Train
Nora Harrington is a recent graduate of Hampshire College where
she studied cultural anthropology, written ethnography and radio documentary. Little
Black Train is her first full-length feature documentary. She doesn't
plan to continue in radio for the time being, and will probably be learning
about farming for the next six months. She recently moved from her home in
Amherst, Massachusetts to her mom's house near Seattle, Washington.
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> Little Black Train
was produced for a course you're taking, right? Why was audio your preference
in tackling the subject of death, rather than print or photography?
Little Black Train was part of my senior project at Hampshire College.
It took me five months, or two academic semesters, to complete it.
I spent most of my career at Hampshire studying written ethnography. I switched
to radio in the hopes that the medium would help me to more adequately express
the fascination I felt during my interviews. Written ethnography can be pretty
boring pretty easily. In radio, it is easier to share the richness of my
interactions with the interviewees, although it is more difficult to remind the
audience that what they are hearing is a three minute bite of a very long
interview (life).
> Did you interview anybody besides those who ended up in the piece? How
did you choose who to include?
I recorded 16 interviews for the project and used five of them. The selection
process was pretty easy, actually. First of all, some of the first interviewees
were not elders and when I decided that elders would be the population that I
featured in the piece, it was easy to let those first interviews walk the
plank. After that, it was a matter of sifting through my interviews and finding
the parts that were most interesting to me. I knew I wanted to include my mom
as a way to structure the piece. The other four voices just kind of emerged as
the people who both held my attention and didn't repeat each other too much.
Two weeks before the premier, I cut a wonderful interviewee named Gigi. She had
astounding things to say about her experiences with death, but transitioning
into her interview was too difficult. That was the only tough omission for me.
> For a story about such a serious topic, there's a good amount of light
humor and laughter in LBT, especially between you and your mom. What's the role
of humor in this conversation?
That's a great question and I have wondered a lot about it. For one thing, my
mom is person who recognizes the humor in dark places. I think that's part of
it. At times in the interview, both my mom and I used humor to talk about
things that were too dark to talk about seriously. But I didn't include any of
that in the documentary. The parts that are funny in the documentary are just a
reflection of how we talk about anything. There's no "this is a serious
subject" and this is a light one. Its just us talking about something and
letting our humor arise as much as it would in almost any conversation. I think
there is probably some deep philosophy or psychology here that I'm too close
to, to see, but that's how I feel about the conversation when I conjure it up
in my memory.
> Did conducting these interviews without a camera allow you to ask more
intimate/personal questions about death?
I don't think my grandfather or Daphne would have been interviewed if there had
been a visual component. My mom might have had a hard time with it too. I have
found that interviewees tend to share more if they can forget that they are
being recorded. As long as I was using a table stand, my interviewees didn't
take long to forget the microphone. I imagine it is more difficult to achieve
that with film. Don't you have to adjust your shots?
I can say also that sometimes it is helpful in an interview to look away from
the person when they are explaining something vulnerable--it allows the
interviewee to sink into their reaction to the question a little more because
they are not being watched. If you're filming them, they're always being
watched. So, one could assume that they might not feel good about being as
vulnerable and might not respond as deeply to the tough questions. But I've
never worked with film.
> Did you talk with anyone your age about death, as part of the project?
Many friends helped me at the beginning stages of the project with determining
my questions and determining the viability of the project. In these
conversations we talked about death and about their questions/ concerns on the
subject. But I never recorded them. I wanted to interview elders because I
think it's sad that we don't ask for their advice more often. They have been
here longer! As Daphne points out, it's pretty ridiculous. So, although it
would have been interesting to contrast youth and elder perspectives on the
topic, I didn't focus on it. My voice is in there a lot of course and touches
into some of that contrast.
> Has your responsibility toward/relationship with the people you
interviewed changed, as a result of 'Documenting' their thoughts about death?
Well, big question. I wrote a big paper on that. (You eager ethnography
enthusiasts in the audience can read it here.)
It is hard to represent other people. It's a hard process to take somebody
else's story, to take three to five minutes of it in fact, and to make it part
of your point. All of them were brave and kind to participate and their
participation vested me with a certain responsibility. I had a responsibilty to
make myself as vulnerable as I made them and to calibrate my representation of
them as accurately as possible against my memory of what they really said. At
the end of the day, the ethnographer has a lot of power, and that can be
something to struggle against or something to accept and work with. I tried to
work with it.
In terms of changing relationships, yes and no. I didn't have a relationship
with Art or Daphne before the project and I still don't. I think it was helpful
for me to hear about death from my mother. My grandpa and my relationship
didn't change per se. Neither did my relationship to Ruth, who is still a good
friend. A conversation like that certainly opens two people up to one another
however, and that probably has lasting affects on all three of those
relationships that I maintain.
> You struck out to 'familiarize' yourself with death, to comprehend it
better, through talking to friends and family about death. Did this happen, and
what did you learn about yourself during the process?
Another version of the ending narration begins: "Death is more familiar to me
now." That's true. It doesn't feel like such a black hole anymore. Like I say
in the documentary, though, I am not sure that it will be any less surprising
next time it comes around.
Its funny, too--I never talk about it anymore. That's ironic of course because
in the last line of the documentary I say that "death is a conversation to keep
having." Its a hard one to bring up though.
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