On Tuesday evening, Circuit Arts presented a 50th-anniversary screening of Susanna Styron’s documentary “Suspended Sentence,” about off-season life on Martha’s Vineyard in 1976.
The black-and-white 25-minute doc, filmed less than two years after “Jaws” came out, depicts the bleak beauty of the natural world and the reality of Island life. Without chyrons or subtitles, the piece is cinema verité, immersive, and — for the majority of Tuesday’s audience — full of familiar faces, from Everett Poole (of Poole’s Fish Market) to CB Stark to Hugh Taylor to musician Walter Robinson to Charlie Blair to (now attorney) George Brush. After opening with newcomers who speak gratefully of the Vineyard for providing safety, community, peace, and natural beauty, the perspective gradually expands to include other realities of the Island in winter: unemployment lines, depression, boredom, excessive drinking, and poverty.
Visually, the scene is familiar and yet unfamiliar: Leslie’s Drugstore was still there in Vineyard Haven, as was the Lamppost in Oak Bluffs; CB Stark Silversmith was, in that era, housed in a garage that was contiguous with the Black Dog Bakery.
One significant setting in the film is gone entirely: a repurposed garage, leased from James Taylor by a collection of two dozen artisans, artists, boatbuilders and metalworkers, called the Art Workers Guild. This was on State Road in Tisbury, just up-Island of SBS. (The building later became Helios restaurant, where Styron had her first waitressing job.
After the screening, Styron discussed the documentary with NPR journalist Mara Liasson. This was a coming-full-circle for them; as an intern at the Vineyard Gazette, Liasson’s first front-page article was a piece she wrote on the premiere of “Suspended Sentence.” Liasson, who is on the The Times’ advisory board, had been staying at the Styron household that summer. “It’s like a home movie for the two of us,” she said, “Just with an audience.”
Styron had grown up summering on the Vineyard; she left college and began to spend a winter here, which convinced her to finish her time at Yale, where she was allowed to essentially create a film major for herself, with “Suspended Sentence” as her senior project.
“Do you feel it is pessimistic or optimistic?” Liasson asked Stryon, who replied, “Here’s how I knew it was successful: For people who loved being here, they would say, ‘I love your film because it shows how great the Vineyard is,’ and people who were struggling with being here would say, ‘I love your film so much, it reveals how tough and terrible it is being here.’”
She went on: “I was definitely focusing on my generation, because that’s the generation that was coming here looking for something … I knew these people, [illustrator] Jackie Entwistle, Walter Robinson; I knew Everett [Poole] would be the voice of the older generation and of the rooted Vineyarders, watching these weird young people come from all over the place.”
When asked if she would consider making a sequel, Styron replied, “I don’t think this is there anymore. I don’t think our economy or our political world allow for this anymore … Now it would be how people who work here can’t actually live here.”
