Home Video Hovel: Spring Night Summer Night, by David Bax

Authenticity is basically impossibly to achieve in art; I mean, artifice is inherent to the whole thing, right? It’s also damned near impossible to prove; how am I ever know whether a movie that takes place in late-1960s Appalachia is authentic? So all I can talk about is how honest Joseph L. Anderson’s Spring Night Summer Night feels. There are a million little things I could point to but what I’ll settle on is the diegetic music. It’s nothing I recognize but it’s all great and absolutely the kind of thing I’d imagine people dancing and drinking to in a small town bar on a Saturday night.

Anderson’s truly independent and recently restored film feels like a miracle of a discovery. It’s stunning in its detailed account of a time and place, eliciting tangible emotions from unknown actors in its tale of an incestuous pregnancy but also filmed with seeming abandon, as loose and dangerous as the characters careening up and down hilly backroads on a motorcycle. It seems too rare to have lasted but here we are.

Spring Night Summer Night is precariously positioned between being a snapshot of a moment (set in a former boomtown in rural Ohio where the older generation still remembers the main street’s 1940s heyday) and a portrait of a way of life that goes back more than a century. In the latter mode, the film explores the way that religion and family values calcify into restrictions rather than motivations.

Of course, the term “family values” takes on another meaning when we’re discussing a movie about incest. Spring Night Summer Night is not out to sensationalize, shock or titillate, though. It’s an earnest, sometimes heartbreaking look at kinship as a connection as well as a curse. It’s more than blood and marriage that makes family different than other people but those bonds can torture as much as they can nurture. These characters look around at their blighted town and their parents’ failing marriage and don’t see many options outside of each other. And it’s not like they could cut it in a big city like Columbus even if they tried.

Flicker Alley’s new Blu-ray release of Spring Night Summer Night looks great, with crisp images that, along with Anderson’s expert use of shallow focus, make the film feel younger than its 50 plus years of age. It comes with quite a backstory, too. Initially, the movie was taken away from Anderson and recut with new footage, fashioned into a trashy sexploitation flick under a different title. But its fortunate rescue was made possible with funding from Nicolas Winding Refn’s company byNWR.

Special features include three short films by Anderson; a comparison between the movie and its schlocky re-edit; a featurette on the film’s locations as they stand today; a collection of behind the scenes footage; new interviews with the cast and crew; and a booklet with essays by Ian Mantgani, Glenn Litton and Peter Conheim.