Footsteps on the Ceiling2013

Starring Bette Davis, Anne Baxter and George Sanders with Thelma Ritter,
Celeste Holm and Marilyn Monroe

Footsteps on the Ceiling is a meditation on ambition and careerism utilizing altered footage from All About Eve, with a soupçon of reflection on the themes of memory, film within gay culture and video image processing.

In the film All About Eve, three plays play a part in the plot: Aged in Wood is the play that features Margo Channing (Bette Davis). Remembrance is the play that Eve Harrington (Anne Baxter) supposedly saw Margo play in San Francisco. Footsteps on the Ceiling is the play for which Eve wins the Sarah Siddons Award.

Footsteps on the Ceiling (the film) is the third part of the All About Eve triptych and ideally would be shown following the other two films, which are 

Aged in Wood – Roger Jacoby (1975) self-processed 16mm, sound, 12 min.

Three friends – Ondine, Sally Dixon and Stephen Koch watch All About Eve. The film is shot from the front of a theater and processed so that there is almost no image, mostly what is seen is film grain. The viewers’ comments and snippets of film dialog rise up out of the projector noise. The viewers must decide for themselves what is happening, what it is about and thus the film becomes a meditation on the cinema watching experience.

Remembrance – Jerry Tartaglia (1990) video, b&w and color, 5 min.

A short remembrance of growing up gay, searching for an identifiable image on the movie screen. This character chose Bette Davis in All About Eve. The film includes clips from Davis' performance and the narrator's childhood home movies.

–Tartaglia plays with a stereotype as old as cinema itself: the connection between movie going and coming out. Jonathan Mandell, New York Newsday

I think that Jerry Tartaglia and I first started talking about making companion pieces to Aged in Wood in the late 70s. He made Remembrance in 1990 and I’ve been trying to figure out how to make Footsteps on the Ceiling since then. So in a sense this triptych is nearly 40 years in the making.