Home When You Return

A double exposure, a portrait of a body, a house that oscillates between its narrative past and its literal presence. The melodramatic, 1950s films of amateur filmmaker Joan Thurber Baldwin are psychically projected onto the house in which my grandmother raised seven kids as it is cleaned out and put up for sale after she passed away. Upholding the narrative structures of melodrama that often center around men, even when the films are about women, the film asks the viewer, as Thurber says in her introduction, to pay attention to the peripheries. (Carl Elsaesser)

Carl Elsaesser graduated from Hampshire College and the University of Iowa. He lives and works between mid-coast and interior Maine and Brooklyn. He has made several short films which have screened at festivals in New York, Michigan, Amsterdam, and Busan, among others. In his work, Elsaesser mixes genres and materials to produce work that “critically investigates the overarching presence of the historical without losing sight of individual experiences of human connection.”

Production Carl Elsaesser. Production company Carl Elsaesser (Brooklyn, USA). Director Carl Elsaesser. Sound design Alex Inglizian. With Joan Thurber Baldwin (Joan), Mary Patricia Wuest (Patricia), Edith Reverley (Edith), Christine Erperom (Christine). 

Films

2014: Project Gasbuggy (7 min.). 2015: Vague Images at the Beginning and End of the Day (8 min.). 2016: The Misbehaving Image (13 min.). 2020: Itinerary of Surfaces (8 min.). 2021: Home When You Return.