Jane Gillooly: Lost lives, found objects

Two new films have their origins in chance finds. In one, a love affair lives again through audio tapes found in a suitcase, while Vivian Maier's life is retraced through her long-lost photographs
Vivian Maier's pioneering street photography

'You listen to one of those tapes and you already know how it ends," says Jane Gillooly. "The story is so predictable. But some of them really were so heartbreaking. Sometimes I got so disturbed by what I was hearing I would hide around the corner from the tape recorder."

Gillooly, 55, a director based in Boston, is explaining the peculiar process of working backwards to create her documentary Suitcase of Love and Shame. The film details the course of a long affair between a woman named Jeannie and her married lover, Tom, in the American midwest in the 1960s. Its story is told through the contents of a suitcase Gillooly bought on eBay: slides, photographs, letters and, crucially, a collection of audio tapes recorded and exchanged by the lovers themselves, which detail every aspect of their affair, from the mundane to the explicit, via mad love and despair. "There was 60 hours of material," says Gillooly. "Listening to the tapes the first time and not knowing what I would hear was where I had my most visceral responses. They felt so present. You actually felt it was happening in the room."

Source: http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/mar/27/jane-gillooly-vivian-maier-suitcase-film

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