by Jarrod Jones. I Didn’t See You There is about movement. Transit. Getting where we need to be and going nowhere in particular. Living. People in the way, always in the way. “Head’s up.” I Didn’t See You There is about perspective: ours, everyone else’s, Reid’s.
That’s Reid Davenport, a filmmaker based in Oakland, California, whose documentary follows uneventful moments in his otherwise active life. He’s always on the move, hooking up with friends for lunch, going to museums, wending through city streets, soaring across the country to hang out with his family. His camera’s always shooting.
I Didn’t See You There is shot from Davenport’s view, always looking outward, showing us how he sees the world and, more crucially, how people see him. He’s a disabled person, but I Didn’t See You There is less a film about disability than it is the casual, often dismissive perception of it. The strangers seen in this film, when they’re not actively ignoring him, express annoyance, embarrassment, effusive kindness, and sometimes an unclassifiable mixture of the three. One stroll through Oakland results in two random people asking him if he needs help getting around on two occasions. He’s just trying to live, but there’s a spotlight on him wherever he goes.
Early in the going, Davenport remarks on a recently-erected circus tent, which can be seen from the front door of his building. It reminds him of his hometown: Bethel, Connecticut, home of P.T. Barnum, world-famous purveyor of carnival entertainments and, perhaps more infamously, the sideshow attractions referred to as “freak shows.” Davenport has opinions about Barnum, and his home, where people built a statue in his honor. Most aspiring filmmakers beeline to the West Coast to embrace the creative freedom blunted by their provincial hometowns. Reid moved for personal reasons: to find a place to move around more freely, to get out from under Barnum’s shadow.
“I think of [Bethel] as a town that wants to be a suburb but is really stuck in purgatory,” he says. On the other hand, Oakland exists in a state of “ethical purgatory.” In the city, Reid has freedom of movement with efficient public transportation and continuous sidewalks, making it one of the few spaces he can live. It’s a compromise that symbolically keeps him in place. So, yeah, he’s very aware of where he can go and where he’s welcome. When the people milling around him are careless with his space or dismissive of it, like people blocking access to a crosswalk with their convertible or some dude who’s obstructed Reid’s entry to his building with a tautly pulled extension cord, it’s maddening to watch. Spare a thought for Reid.
And he can’t lose it on these people; it wouldn’t be productive, and he’d draw all sorts of unwanted attention to himself, more than he already gets. A lose-lose. So, when we follow him home after witnessing him dealing with careless, dismissive people all day, his anger is cathartic.
Davenport’s not here for sympathy. He’s made his film to get people to be more present when they’re out in the world. Like Fran Lebowitz might say, “Pretend it’s a city.” He’s young, and a regular fellow besides; he screens messages from his parents, unwinds with a drink and a smoke, scans dating apps but doesn’t make a big thing about settling down. He pals around with friends. He probably stays inside his head too often. “I wonder if I feel more than other people,” he says at one point. That’s a normal thing to mull over when the world is made to make you feel alone.
Reid hits many roadblocks in his film, most of them with embarrassed looks on their faces. Nobody says, “I didn’t see you there” in his movie, but you can imagine he hears it a lot. That non-apology said on autopilot. This obliviousness doesn’t come from rarely considering people in wheelchairs or their disabilities but from how non-disabled people react when they’re confronted by these things. (Usually poorly.) Eons viewing people like Reid like they’re different has conditioned people to treat people like Reid differently.
Conditioning is hard to break, but I Didn’t See You There is a good place to start. “If this film makes my so-called unique perspective a little more common, a little more nuanced, a little more boring even,” Davenport says in press materials, “Then I will have chipped away at the corrosive legacy of the Freak Show.”
I want to talk quickly about the look of his film. The way it’s shot, first-person, often at unlikely angles, generates a transcendent buzz when these images are set to the electronic music of Mary Lattimore, Walt McClements, and Troy Herion. At times, the music speeds alongside Davenport, like in one scene where he shows us how he can match pace with a subway train, if for one fleeting moment.
The sounds and images are locomotive. The hum of wheels on pavement, the percussion keeping time, the camera capturing cracks in the sidewalk at a shuttering rate not unlike that of film pulled from a reel, I Didn’t See You There blends abstraction with the realities of its subject. On shooting this way, Davenport tells us, “It allowed me to be more spontaneous and look for shapes and patterns without worrying about meaning and words.” Freedom and significance. Watch out.
7 / 10
I Didn’t See You There will be able to stream on VOD February 20.
Directed by Reid Davenport.
Cinematography by Reid Davenport.
Edited by Todd Chandler.
Produced by Keith Wilson, Alysa Nahmias, Bryn Mooser, Kathryn Everett, Andy Hsieh, Dawn Bonder, and Marci Wiseman.
Not rated.
More DoomRocket Reviews:
Madame Web, reviewed: Wait, what?
Oguri’s The Sting of Death tells a story of two lives disintegrating as one
August Underground’s Penance is for splatter completionists only
