The Anatomy of Melancholy

1999 • Directed by

Brian L. Frye

Sometime in the 1960s, a chiropractor from Kansas City made a short film called "A Portrait of Fear." The film consisted of several tableau shots of amateur actors standing in a field at night reciting painfully overwrought dialogue, apparently lit by the headlights of a car. I assume the cinematographer used an Auricon, as the sound was recorded directly on the B&W reversal original. In 1998, he sold me the outtakes, strung together just like you see them.