We’re an Anonymous Band: How Do You Make a Film About the Residents?
While hundreds of bands will be struggling to emerge from obscurity at SXSW 2015, one set of oddballs will be celebrating a 40-year home there. Theory of Obscurity: A Film About the Residents, a feature-length documentary about the infamously anonymous avant-garde pop group will have its world premiere at the festival on March 14th. Featuring testimonials from famous fans — including Simpsons creator Matt Groening, illusionist Penn Jillette and Primus leader Les Claypool — the film delves deep into the apocrypha and mystery of the one-of-a-kind, dissonance-crazed band that revolutionized D.I.Y., presaged the music video revolution, embraced CD-ROM technology and basically trod a four-decade path of weirdness right into the MoMA’s permanent collection. Working with the band’s management, the Cryptic Corporation, director Don Hardy got full access to the group’s archives, filling the film with tons of footage both familiar and unseen.
So how do you do an authoritative documentary about a group who’s remained nameless and faceless since their 1974 debut? “The one movie we talked about a lot early on was the Banksy film, Exit Through the Gift Shop,” says Hardy. “And how that so beautifully took the idea of celebrity and the creation of art and turned it totally on its head and on the audience’s head. I think the line that Homer Flynn from the Cryptic Corporation said early on was like, ‘I think that to tell this story, we should, at every point we should try to undermine the credibility of it.'”
The film will be showing on three occasions at SXSW and the Residents will play their latest show, Shadowland, as part of an official showcase. We caught up with Hardy to discuss his attempt to document the strange and mysterious world of pop culture’s most dapper eyeballs.
How did you get into the Residents?
It kinda happened by accident, really. I was working on another project with an old colleague. I used to work for NBC news in San Francisco Bay Area. The project was kind of falling apart and so we decided to go out for a drink with another old colleague from NBC. So it’s myself, Barton Bishoff and Josh Keppel. Josh mentioned that he had done some work with the Residents — he helped shoot on their two previous tours. As he mentioned this, I saw Bart, his eyes just kind of got wide, and he said, “You know who the Residents are?” For me, just sort of stepping back from it, I’m like, Wow this is an amazing story. Is anybody documenting this? A couple weeks later we were on the road for their 40th anniversary tour.
Once you got embedded with the Residents, how soon was everything demystified for you?
It happened pretty quickly. I approached it with that sort of wary, yet journalistic eye. I mean that’s my training. . .Once you [get] behind the wall a little bit, its pretty apparent who’s doing what. But I’d say the mystery that’s still there is, you know, I got conflicting stories — ’cause we’re talking about stuff that happened 40 years ago. Filling in those blanks and those gaps, there’s still conflicting reports. There’s been so many different parts of it over the years told by different people and so much of it has just been forgotten, that [it] quickly became apparent to me that I couldn’t tell it like a completely fact-based account. It just wasn’t going to be possible. [Laughs] You can’t talk to the Residents, you can only talk to the people who have collaborated with them over the years and try to tell a story about what it’s like to work with them. Ultimately, what I landed on, is it’s not about the people, it’s about the collective approach to trying to create art.