The Vermont Movie is a sprawling, epic, quirky, and ultimately fascinating journey through more than 250 years of Green Mountain history. It has just completed premier showings throughout the state.
The six volumes of this enormous film were created by more than 30 filmmakers and a score of other creative people, and they cover subjects that range from the discovery of Lake Champlain to such contemporary issues as Vermont Yankee, changing politics, and the future of agriculture here. (Full disclosure requires me to note that I am an occasional presence in a couple of segments of the film.)
The Vermont Movie was created and put together over the past 6 years, and in the words of co-producer Nat Winthrop, it's “...the most in-depth look at Vermont history and culture that’s ever been made.”
However, Winthrop is quick to admit that it is not a comprehensive history. It’s selective, with a strong emphasis on 20th and 21st century Vermont. But, to its credit, The Vermont Movie takes pains to show how Vermont’s past shapes and informs its present.
For example, in the third volume there’s a long segment on mid-20th century communes, which is brilliantly prefaced with a look at a forerunner in the mid-1800s, the Perfectionists – a communal society that was run out of Putney in 1847 for its practice of “multiple marriage” – basically group sex.
Most often, as the Vermont Movie makes clear, 20th century Vermont communards were seeking a way out of a society that they saw as materialistic, conformist, and repressive. Vermont became their refuge at first, and ultimately, for many, their home.
That was the case with Brattleboro poet Verandah Porche, who appears both in historic film clips as a young, determined outsider - and filmed in her 21st century maturity, teaching poetry in Windham County Schools, a dedicated and accepted member of the local historical society and the larger community of which she has become a part.
Many small but important stories like hers are woven through the six volumes of The Vermont Movie. They are among this huge effort’s great strengths, but are related also to what may be its most obvious weakness – its enormous length! It would take a dedicated Vermontophile some 9 hours to sit through the entire six segments. Fortunately, each of those segments stands very coherently on its own.
Nora Jacobson, director and co-producer, says her challenge as editor was “...to find the unity, the common threads in all our stories.” And she’s succeeded strikingly well in that exacting task.
Vermont’s history as a place apart makes us distinctive, even today. That’s one of the truths borne out by The Vermont Movie, and it makes any part of this epic enterprise both important and entertaining.
And the length and scope of this great project? Well, that’s the thing about Vermont – once you start telling this small state’s very large story, it’s hard to stop!
