Where is the Sun
Digital Video from 16mm/Work in Progress
Where is the Sun is a portrait of Dr. Sidney Correll, an American missionary and filmmaker, who worked across to the world from the 1930’s to the 1980’s. During this time he founded the United World Mission, now one of the largest Christian missionary organizations in the world. With a 16mm camera, he documented the progress of the Missions from Cuba, Africa, India, to the Philippines with the intent of creating promotional films that would raise money in the United States for future Mission endeavors. In the creation of these films, what he documented was a world amidst change.
Visually, Where is the Sun is set within the world of Dr. Correll’s films. As a filmmaker and grandson, I took up the task of transferring Dr. Correll’s existing 160 reels to high-definition video. Initially my interest was to preserve the films and make them available for viewing, but the world of Dr. Correll began to fascinate me. He was both a witness to and a very active force in the history of the Cold War, but the history he documents does not easily fit into preexisting historical narratives and in fact often resists such a form without internal contradictions. For example, Dr. Correll meets Camillo Cienfuegos on the streets of Havana on January 2nd , 1959, the day Cienfuegos led the guerrilla faction that overtook the presidential palace. The moment is documented with Dr. Correll’s 16mm camera. Dr. Correll and Cienfuegos celebrate together at the end of the Revolution’s bloodshed. Here In this moment a missionary, who constantly vilifies Communism in his films, meets a young rebel leader, and one who was to become the first martyr for a Soviet aligned Cuba only a year later. That same year Dr. Correll’s Mission was expelled from the country by Fidel Castro, a man he called “honest” and “the greatest thing to happen to Cuba” in his ‘1959 Film Report.’
The video, although ostensibly a portrait of Dr. Correll, is an essay on the strange, underrepresented role of the religious imagination during the Cold War. As an essay its form and logic are heretical towards traditional forms and logic. The work exists as a series of episodes with Dr. Correll and his camera as a wandering protagonists. His dreams and his reality are approximated, embellished, and brought to life. His fascination with Communism becomes a fetish. The way in which he films orphans like his own children becomes heroic. He, along with the history of his time, is treated as a myth. The mythology includes ideas of humanism, passion, charity, and order. Excepts from the memoirs of Dr. Correll himself, along with those close to him play an important role in the creation of the myth. The memoirs are often times real, but come mixed with fictional accounts. A single narrator reads these accounts and at times adds historical context.
