Suicide Note (1976)
Directed by Fred Camper
110 minutes
Shot largely in New York in the late 1970s, and seldom screened publicly, this rare film from critic and artist Fred Camper is a fragmentary, diaristic work, capturing a cluttered and melancholic world on Super 8 reversal film. Haunted by its title, the film is at once intimate and opaque, rhapsodic and withdrawn, as its tremulous images attempt to reckon with the fleeting beauty of crowds, shop windows, domestic interiors, art exhibitions, and a panoptic view of New York City taken from the South Tower of the World Trade Center. Each screening of the film, which unfolds across 10 sections, is different from the last: the reels that make up its eighth section are determined by way of a chance operation performed before each projection. Previously known as _SN_, the film has now been given its full title (conceived after Camper’s stepfather took his own life and left no note), to coincide with this essential new restoration.