DOC NYC 2014: Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere, by Chris Barsanti for Pop Matters
It can be a dangerous thing to give authors too much screen time. Either they demonstrate why they spend most of their days and nights behind their keyboards or they too clearly fall in love with the sound of their own voices. Poe Ballantine (the pen name for Ed Hughes) is a writer who neatly sidesteps both of those concerns.
As our guide to the mystery that lurks beneath the idiosyncratic documentary Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere, Ballantine is just about everything you might want in an author on screen. He’s plainspoken yet vividly descriptive, confident and self-effacing, possessed of a sure-handed grasp of the place and events in question and yet utterly baffled by the sometimes banal and sometimes poetic weirdnesses of life. Those oddities are delivered in plenty by Dave Jannetta’s superb film, screening at DOC NYC 2014.
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