William Eggleston: Stranded in Canton

Hardcover | 25.4 x 1.27 x 17.78 cm | 48 pp

Twin Palms Publishers | 2009 | 9781931885713

Includes DVD

William Eggleston's pioneering video work, Stranded In Canton (1973) was restored and released in 2005. This book contains forty frame enlargements from the digital remaster, an appreciation by filmmaker Gus Van Sant.

DVD of the seventy-seven-minute film itself, along with more than thirty minutes of bonus footage and an interview with Mr. Eggleston conducted at the 2005 Toronto Film Festival.

This film is the product of an invention, the Sony Portapak, an early (or the first) small home video unit, which became so common, but at the time didn't exist. It is suggested that the people in the film don't really know what it is and because of that their characters are that much more vibrant, and maybe part of that is true. It is a beautiful thing when you are watching a movie that is powered solely by the strength of its characters and their surroundings. There is a certain peculiar thing that seems always to be going on when you hang with the people of this area of the world, the
western Tennessee Mississippi area, they are aways in the midst of trying to go one step beyond into a sort of put-on play about the futility of life, a southern surreal passion play, that certain put-on that seems like Tennessee Williams captured so well, southern lives put into funny strange plots. Perhaps that's why Tennessee took his name to begin with. 

These lives William Eggleston has captured in the raw. The quality of the close-ups is so wonderful, as if we are in a sweaty dream, it looks like a lot of the film was made in the middle of the night, which adds to the intensity. It is a film that has so much
Memphis regionalism. Even Elvis makes an appearance. Gus Van Sant