ART HOUSED: SPACE COAST

My first encounter with the Brattle’s gem-laden DocYard series was a special occasion for the program itself, a delving into the videotape-strewn vault of vintage indie documentary filmmaking.

There in the darkness awaited Space Coast, a fuzzy, bizarre and fascinating account of the lives and occurrences around Cape Canaveral during the recession of the late 1970s.

Now accomplished filmmakers, Ross McElwee and Michele Negroponte were MIT students just in their 20s when they drove from Cambridge to Cape Canaveral in the summer of 1979, just the two of them and their gear. At the Brattle last Monday night, McElwee and Negroponte took the stage to talk about the thrill of being young filmmakers; how their individual approaches to documentary making have branched out since; and to poke a little fun at each other, thus confirming an ongoing partnership aside the camera.

In their early collaboration Space Coast, we learn that the manic Space Race missions of the 1960s had been a thing of miracle to the people of Cape Canaveral, and they reveled in the glamour and financial boom that briefly came with it. No one seems to embody this era more so than subject Mary Bubb, a veteran local reporter who had covered over 1,600 consecutive shuttle launchings by the time the eager young filmmakers arrived.

Despite her age, Mary’s obsession turns her into a spark plug as she shuffles up and down an observation deck, demanding launch statistics from random giggling personnel who can’t seem to convince her they’re not qualified enough to answer.

At home, Mary shows us a stylish old Newsweek cover where we can see her snapping photos of boarding astronauts like a young and starstruck Hollywood paparazzi. Later in the film as she gazes up at a routine takeoff the rapture that plays on Mary’s face suggests something divine in the massive, billion-dollar rockets blazing over her relatively dull and squalid coastal town.

Indeed, Space Coast tends to point less to the Cape’s redemption than to its degeneration parting from the heyday of the 60s into the late 70s recession. As we’ve recently learned ourselves, exploring outer space isn’t exactly a top priority when Americans are losing their homes, and the Cape Canaveral we rove in Space Coast feels utterly deflated, its NASA construction sites rusted and abandoned like erected junkyards rising over the flat, abysmal Florida horizon.

Also abandoned are the Cape’s sun-beaten residents, who had perhaps become too comfortable in their good fortune of the past.

Space Coast’s next subject ‘Papa’ John Murphy falls haplessly into this category. When the recession hit, like many of his neighbors Papa John was laid off from working construction for NASA, a position that practically grew in groves just a few years previous. Finding himself suddenly jobless, stranded on the Cape’s desolate economic landscape, Papa John began living on food stamps with his wife, daughter and granddaughter in their rickety one-story home.

Pug-faced, mostly toothless and almost always shirtless, the word “character” doesn’t quite do Papa John justice. This scrappy, gun-toting family man is at once a grandfather, preacher’s son, amateur stuntman, and ex-president of The Saints, an appropriately scrappy local motorcycle gang.

He’s also the film’s most complex character. In a rather moving fashion it becomes clear how Papa John would do anything for his girls, yet a history of violence seems to inhabit the rough, slightly unsettling manner in which he shows affection. For instance his playful punching matches and rapid wisecracks provide for some of the funniest moments in the film, but his delivery, whether verbal or physical, often comes as quickly and sharply as a knife fight.

Violence is a certainly a key theme in Space Coast, in manifestations both comical and disturbing.

On stage at the Brattle, McElwee said this stemmed from the Cape’s being an epic hub of American culture, from Papa John showing off his gun collection at the beginning of the film, to a ravenously attended professional wrestling match downtown, to the crude turtle hunting of our final subject Willie Womack, a hard drinking and openly racist local contractor.

Although he ends up being the film’s least complex portrayal, the giant, cackling and country-fried Willie is no less a natural character than Papa John. But where our laughter at Papa John is generally out of fondness, with Willie it’s more due to sheer astonishment, like when he guzzles cheap whiskey before painting his greasy, unshaven face to appear as a huge and terrifying clown on a public access TV show for children, which in the end could easily be an outtake from House of 1,000 Corpses.

Though the filmmakers on stage cringed at scenes like this, finding them unkind and exploitative in retrospect, they didn’t deny that these people, their stories, this place, were perfectly bizarre.

Nor did anyone question how utterly human this film is; not to mention visually stunning. McElwee and Negroponte’s camera, which they took turns operating, is as fluid and confident as it is low-key and independent, thus crowning this dark, surprising, and often humorous early work a worthy gem for the DocYard to have reeled out of the abyss.

Click here to check out more Space Coast info, clips, and DVDS for sale!!!