Doxology for Ella May Wiggins
Runtime: 4:55
Director - Jonathan Furnell, Rachel Pittman
Jonathan Furnell is a media artist, experimental filmmaker and musician. Jonathan's work explores environment and the supernatural, the Appalachian South, and the space between sight and sound. His work aims to create a kind of “bluegrass” film, drawing on hillbilly histories and cultures of Appalachia.
He holds a bachelor’s degree in Media Arts from the University of South Carolina and an MFA in Filmmaking from the University of North Carolina Wilmington.
His work has appeared in the Athens International Film and Video Festival, the Cucalorus Film Festival, Cosmic Rays Experimental Film Festival, Sidewalk Film Festival, Indie Grits Film Festival and other venues.
He is passionate about Appalachian media, archival/lost media as well as analog, experimental and collaborative film culture. He is currently based in Los Angeles but his home is the southern Blue Ridge Mountains.
Rachel Pittman is a writer and film scholar based in Los Angeles where she is currently a PhD student in the Cinema and Media Studies Department at the University of Southern California. She holds a B.A. in Multimedia Journalism from the University of South Carolina and an M.A. in Film Studies from the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Her research deals with experimental, avant-garde, D.I.Y. cinemas, media production histories, and aesthetics and politics. Other research interests include Appalachian moving image media and punk visual culture.
Directors Statment
In Doxology for Ella May Wiggins, essayistic thoughts on Appalachian landscape and labor and dizzying images of a foremother’s handmade quilts interanimate one another, all while the buzz of various textile machinery ceaselessly churns underneath. Drawing together work by cultural theorists Denis Cosgrove, Raymond Williams, and bell hooks, the film acknowledges the attenuating force of acts of landscaping upon a place’s lived-in collectivity, labor, creativity, and resistant power. Titled for the Appalachian union organizer, songwriter, and mother Ella May Wiggins, Doxology is an anarchic eschewal of the touristic gaze, keeping time instead to the suffocating, urgent rhythms of being inside.
The film was created in Hayesville, North Carolina, where the quilts depicted within were originally stitched. Only cast-off materials and supplies—including cameras, film stock, and regional photographic and textile ephemera—were used in its creation.