Editor’s Note: The following story contains mentions of self-harm. If you or someone you know is struggling, call or text 988 or visit 988lifeline.org to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.
There is a specific feeling, easy to recognize emotionally but hard to elucidate in words, about trying to power through the numbness of depression to simply live your everyday life. I’m writing these words amidst such a period. Artist, filmmaker, and critic Fred Camper sought to capture that feeling with Suicide Note, which he describes as “born out of an intense personal despair, and a desire to depict a failure of the self.”
He shot the footage mainly in New York from 1976 to 1984, and since its completion, it’s been exhibited only a handful of times. The Chicago Film Society’s restoration of the film — still on 16mm rather than transferred to digital — showed at this year’s New York Film Festival, pulling it out of its quasi-cryptid past and giving new audiences a chance to experience it. Because the film's few previous showings were on workprints, this year’s NYFF was technically its true premiere, half a century after Camper started work on it.
Suicide Note came from Camper’s grief over his stepfather’s death by suicide, his own struggle with depression, and what he saw as the broader symbolic suicide of the human race.
