Compare and Contrast: Montgomery vs. Porterfield

Matthew Porterfield's film "Hamilton" is about an interracial family and a young single mother's quest to find her daughter's delinquent father and let him know that she is leaving for the summer. Jennifer Montgomery's "Notes on the Death of Kodachrome" , according to Montgomery, "...purports to be about the discontinuation of the much-loved format, Kodachrome, and with it the further endangerment of super-8 film. It begins with a short, experimental s-8 film made in 1986, which makes prophetic assertions about the future of artistic expression and the dangers of bodily intimacy. From there, the film jumps to 2005, and to digital video. The filmmaker tracks down three old friends who borrowed, and never returned, pieces of super-8 equipment."


After watching "Hamilton", the most obvious contrast between his film and "Notes on the Death of Kodachrome" is dialogue. "Hamilton" relies on very little of it, and therefore it hard to fully establish ties between the family members and their true roles in film. However on "Notes" dialouge is abundant, in which most cases Montgomery has her subjects speaking directly in the camera as they tell their stories about her equipment and their personal life. Because of this, the audience isn't given the conventional means of characterization with "Hamilton", but "Notes" shows and tells the personal and professional struggles and conflicts each subject has (such as speaking about a battle of AIDS).


The second contrast between the two films is emotion. "Notes" offers up extreme facial and body expressions, lively characters, laughter, ect. "Hamilton", on the other hand, has no drama of any sorts--there is subtle facial expressions, a sort of robotic boredom to the verbal interaction amongst the characters and very little dramatic body movement. While in "Notes" it is clear that life is an adventure worth living, "Hamilton" proves that for some life is merely routine. A trademark theme amongst Montgomery's films is her provocative, in-your-face, very political scenes that tell tons of the feminist movement and her personal beliefs and quests. And the only controversial thing in "Hamilton" is the older mother isn't married and she has both white and biracial children.

In the end, "Notes" is a work of closure. Montgomery finds her equipment, reunites with old friends, revisits footage from the 70s and gets ready to enter a new field of work. Ironically, "Hamilton" is almost the complete opposite. Although the delinquent young father is found and given the message, we're left with the scene of the father and a random neighborhood boy riding off in the distance, leaving us with new questions and confusion. Both films, however, each explore unconventional ways to tell us a story.