Tracing Footsteps; Biography and the Archive
Award winning film-maker Matt Wolf joins Cynthia Carr, author of the recently published and critically acclaimed Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar, to examine the role of world-building in the creation of biography. Wolf is currently completing a multi part documentary on Paul Reubens and his alter ego Pee-wee Herman. What breadcrumbs does a biographer choose to collect on the many intersecting and sometimes contradictory paths of their subject's story?
Film still of Candy Darling from Der Tod Der Maria Braun
Cynthia Carr
Cynthia Carr was a columnist and arts reporter for the Village Voice from 1984 to 2003. Writing under the byline C. Carr, she specialized in experimental and cutting-edge art, especially performance art. Some of these pieces are now collected in On Edge: Performance at the End of the Twentieth Century. She is also the author of Our Town: A Heartland Lynching, A Haunted Town, and the Hidden History of White America and Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Artforum, Bookforum, Modern Painters, The Drama Review, and other publications. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007. Carr lives in New York.
Matt Wolf
Matt Wolf is a filmmaker in New York. His documentary feature films include Wild Combination about the musician Arthur Russell, Teenage about the birth of youth culture, Recorder about the activist Marion Stokes who recorded television 24 hours a day for 30 years, and Spaceship Earth about a controversial experiment where 8 people lived quarantined in a replica of the planet. The Criterion Channel recently presented a survey of Matt’s films, and he is completing a multipart film about Paul Rebuens and his alter ego Pee-wee Herman for HBO. He is a Guggenheim Fellow.