First she had the idea to track down the girl in the photograph — Mary Ann Vecchio. Meadow could easily imagine her as a compelling subject. Here was one moment in her life, a moment of anguish, and then it comes to define her life. She is kneeling in the quad by a dead college student, crying out to the world. She is a runaway, a flower child in pursuit of a college boy she liked, Jeffrey Miller. Her face has anguish, yes, but also, with her arms outstretched, an expression of disbelief, almost a plea. Mary Ann can’t believe this happened, students shot for protesting, right in front of her, in the United States. This was supposed to happen in other countries and on TV. We were supposed to watch and say tsk tsk, should we help these poor people? Instead the whole world watched us. Everyone felt that way, and so the photograph became a pieta for American purity. But the next morning she is just a girl again. She is fourteen, and this will be the thing people note about her for the rest of her life. Not because she was there, but because she was photographed. The photo will win a Pulitzer Prize. Because of the photograph, Jeffrey Miller is the most famous of the four dead students at Kent State. The photo is carried in papers around the world. Governor Claude Kirk of Florida will label the girl a Communist sympathizer. She is pictured on her knees, in her genuine anguish, on t-shirts. Her parents will sue people for a share of the proceeds. She will try to move on, but the photo will affect her life for years to come. Not to her face, but at the edges of her. When she leaves her kid’s PTA meeting, a parent will lean over to another parent and whisper, “You know who she is, don’t you?”
The parent shakes her head.
“She is the girl in the photograph at Kent State. The girl on her knees, the crying girl.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Crazy, huh?” And they will smile in awe: a piece of history right in their lives with them. Maybe eventually Mary Ann will decide not to tell anyone about the photograph. She will keep it a secret from the people in her life. She is not ashamed, but she doesn’t want it to be so important, so defining. She wants room for other ideas about her, other selves. She remembers the day vividly, though. She loved the boy who was killed. You don’t forget seeing someone shot right in front of you, and then die as you kneel over him. They are there, protesting the invasion of Cambodia, doing what they think is right, and then, instead of going off to smoke a joint and make out in his dorm room, Jeffrey is bleeding on the pavement, a facedown deadness all over him. The event — not the photo of the event — did change who she was, did mark her for years to come.
Meadow wanted to track down and interview the girl in the famous photograph, but she discovered that it already had been done. Some TV show had the idea — the obvious, ordinary idea — to get the girl and the photographer together for a reunion.
Meadow decided to interview other people about the day. She wanted students, but she also wanted the National Guardsmen — the young men the same age as the students — who fired into the crowd.
Meadow would interview everyone in a plain room, a static space. She hated documentaries that showed people in their living rooms. Your thoughts became about interior design and psychology. She wanted eyes on faces, and she wanted a deliberate frame. A sameness, a feeling of isolation. After shooting some interviews, she realized that Deke was unusual; looking directly into the lens of a camera felt unnatural to some people. They needed a face. If she stood next to the camera, they seemed to look shiftily off to the side. Her solution came from Tokyo Story, the Yasujirō Ozu film she had watched at the Nuart. Ozu used a “tatami shot” in which he filmed his actors from a low angle, looking up from a fixed camera. She tried it, and she stood behind and slightly above the camera as she listened to the interviewees. This gave the approximate illusion of a direct gaze, although the seated people often appeared to look into a space just above camera, which made everyone look thoughtful rather than shifty.
Meadow used a tiny crew, including Kyle, who had begun as her assistant and then almost immediately became her boyfriend. He was a student in the film program at Columbia, and Meadow thought he was brilliant. He looked like a younger, Bengali version of Deke: black hair worn long, lean-muscled and small of stature, sharp angles to cheeks and jaw. When Kyle smiled or laughed, Meadow always felt distracted by his sudden flash of white straight teeth and she wanted to make him laugh even more.
She took her tiny crew to various locales after she phoned and wrote to witnesses and participants. That was what she called them, participants. She had to admit she was drawn to the National Guardsmen — young men on the wrong side of history even before that day. When a group of soldiers fire, everyone in the group must feel guilty yet no one is responsible. That is the point, clearly, of firing as a group. She wondered how that wore as the years went by. She wanted to prick them a little in a room and film them spilling their secrets out. She imagined it might be good for them, cathartic. She started in the Gloversville library with the microfiche, getting the names of the people there. The student witnesses were quoted in the papers.
“Can I film you telling your experience of that day?” and sometimes they said yes. Other times she would have to gently persuade them. As she expected, the National Guard people were the most reluctant. They were the shooters, after all.
“I just want to hear all sides of the story. How it felt to be so frightened. The danger, the rocks thrown.”
“But I don’t feel that way. I can’t believe we shot. There was an order to fire, or at least we thought there was. We all did it, but I can’t believe it. Those dead kids,” he said. He was spilling already. This was no good. She wanted that on film, not on the phone.
“Okay, so let me film you and you can tell me, okay?” she said, holding him off. “Just tell me the story so we know some National Guardsmen feel pain about it. Regret.” And she knew he would. He would be glad to because there is a particular joy in telling the darkest truth about what you did. In letting yourself say out loud, “I did this terrible thing.” It is out of you and in the world. We are all desperate to get it out of us instead of waiting for it to be discovered. The waiting contaminates a life, wakes a man in the middle of the night. Meadow knew everyone had in them this compulsion to confess, was born with it: guilt and the need to tell all. She shot hours of footage. She let people digress, tell their life stories, even sit speechless for minutes. She was shooting blind, discovering things as she went along.
But unlike the filming of Deke, there was sometimes something inert about these people talking to the camera. Some people’s faces, no matter what they are saying, are inert. Maybe it was the tone of voice? They often had a rehearsed feel, as though they had practiced in the shower for this very moment. They had been asked these questions many times before. They’d had years to make a narrative of what happened. What could she do to make it feel less distant? She went through archived footage for things to show during some of the stories and in between some of the talking. Meadow considered reenactments. Brief moments from the past, a cinematic séance conjured by speech. She did not want the feeling of cheesy tabloid docudramas, the “dramatic reenactments” of Paul Revere’s ride that she remembered from educational TV. And if she just showed photographs as people spoke, zooming in and out, she thought it would look like third-grade film strips. But she kind of liked film strips and the way they made you dwell on a photo until it almost moved. There were plenty of photographs from before and after and during. She could, maybe, animate the photos somehow. She could use stop-action animation to take elements in the photos and alter them slightly until people in the photographs seemed to move. It was enactment, and it was not real. It was a manipulation. She fudged it further by taking a camera on campus and meticulously re-creating — in grainy Super 8, amateur film — the feeling of campus that day. Meadow even used actors, but only very briefly and only in flickers. An arm moving, a person kneeling to shoot in a uniform. It wasn’t, of course, re-creating that day in 1970. The “real” feeling came from using film that reminded us of that day. So her reenactments used the materials — the look — of the collective memory. The photographs had long overwritten the feeling of 1970 in people’s minds. It was what you saw looking at photos in Life magazine. She had the grainy Super 8 blown up to 16 mm. She took close-ups of maps of the campus, of rifles being fired in a kind of dreamily lit studio space, as if the film were showing the consciousness of each speaker as he spoke. And, in very short glimpses, she used the manipulated photo animations. When she edited it all together, it added great drama and reality to what was being said by the participants. It came to life.