Pioneering Spirit: An Interview with Ellen Spiro
For a decade, videomaker Ellen Spiro has been exploring the lives of unusual American pioneers, including men and women who live openly gay lives in the rural Deep South (Greetings from Out Here, 1993) and elderly wanderers of the southwestern United States who forge new ways of confronting aging and death (Roam Sweet Home, 1996).1 Using high spirits and low-tech equipment, she has learned to create videos that are revealing, politically provocative, visually inventive, and sometimes even visionary—without a trace of cynicism.
Spiro’s most recent video, Atomic Ed & the Black Hole, tells the story of Ed Grothus, a former Los Alamos National Laboratory machinist turned atomic junk collector. Nearly thirty years ago “Atomic Ed,” as he is known, had a change of heart and quit his job helping to make “better” atomic bombs. Rather than leave his small company town, however, Atomic Ed began collecting “nuclear waste” —nonradioactive high-tech surplus—and serving as the self-appointed curator of an unofficial, haphazard museum of the nuclear age he named The Black Hole. The Black Hole documents a chilling history of gargantuan, high-tech government wastefulness.
I have programmed Spiro’s videos for a wide range of audiences since the beginning of her career, and I have recently written about her work. When I heard Spiro was finishing Atomic Ed & the Black Hole, I agreed to talk with her about this project, and her unusual approach to videomaking, for Public Culture. Spiro and I conversed by both phone and e-mail during February 2002.
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Notes
- I discuss Roam Sweet Home in my book The Garden in the Machine: A Field Guide to Independent Films about Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), chap. 8. I argue that Spiro’s remarkable video offers an engaging, thoughtful re-visioning of the American West, in which aging itself becomes the New Frontier.