Suicide Note

In 1975, artist and critic Fred Camper’s stepfather leapt from the fifteenth-floor window of the family’s apartment without so much as a note. Haunted by the annihilating void of a wordless suicide, Camper began cataloging the world left behind on rolls of silent Super 8 film. Over the next eight years, he would record and organize diaristic dispatches from New York City: street scenes in Herald Square, a fireworks show over New York Harbor, a record of the first art installation at PS1, lateral views from the World Trade Center. Stitching together overlapping strands of personal, architectural, and ecological concern, Suicide Note would function for Camper as “a portrait of Manhattan’s constricted spaces, and more generally of the way humans occupy space.” The result is a vivid tapestry of a society on the brink. (Fred Camper, USA, 1976-1984, approx. 105 minutes, 16mm)

Restored by Chicago Film Society with the support of the National Film Preservation Foundation and Big Creek Cooperative. Introduction and post-screening discussion with filmmaker, artist, and critic Fred Camper.

Film Studies Center events are free and open to the public. Doors open thirty minutes prior to showtime.