Rockport Film Festival 2008

THIS AMERICAN GOTHIC weaves together a cultural history of one of the most famous paintings in the world with a quirky portrait of Eldon, Iowa, population 998, site of the house that inspired it. The film follows local boosters over two years as they work towards their dream of a Gothic House Visitor Center to attract tourists and save their dying small town. On the single main street through town, yellow banners commemorating the Gothic House flap proudly in the wind, but the one restaurant in Eldon, called Jones' Gothic Room, stands shuttered and closed. THIS AMERICAN GOTHIC explores the poignant irony of a rural America abandoned to economic hardship trying to rebuild itself through tourism that glorifies a happier, if largely imaginary, country past.THIS AMERICAN GOTHIC is both a portrait and about a portrait. Stylistically, the film uses interviews, direct cinema, animation and moving image portraiture to explore the deeply satirical nature of Wood’s painting, and to meditate upon surveillance, self-presentation and representation on multiple levels, in painting, photography, history, and the documentary impulse itself. The ongoing fascination with the painting "American Gothic" suggests a hunger for stories from rural America that THIS AMERICAN GOTHIC both taps into and exposes. What do these stories and images from the heartland symbolize? Why are they still so powerful, even in parody or myth? THIS AMERICAN GOTHIC takes viewers on an curious journey of discovery in pursuit of the answers.