The Lives of Hamilton Fish is a “film song” based on true facts about two men with the same name in 1930s Westchester County. On Thursday, it was played live and onscreen to a standing-room-only audience at the Albany Institute of History & Art. The filmmaker, New York City artist and songwriter Rachel Mason, was part of the screening, or perhaps it should be said that the film was part of her performance; either way, it worked seamlessly. The fictional intersection between Hamilton Fish, an assemblyman and U.S. assistant treasurer, with Hamilton Fish, a serial killer and cannibal who was executed for the murder of a child, unfolds like a fever dream—the dream belonging to the editor of the Peekskill Evening Star who in 1936 placed the obituaries of both men on the front page. Mason plays the editor in the film, and on Thursday, she performed live alongside it by narrating through the songs she sings for the film’s characters.
Rachel Mason, photo by Ann Morrow
As Mason sang, the film enveloped the audience into its impressionistic sequence of phantasmagoric events. The editor enters this version of reality (heightened by real-life settings) through newspaper print (“A Distinguished Line”), and onscreen newspaper pages serve as prologue to a story told through images and talismans–not that least of which is the appearance of an apparition called the White Crow (based on a real-life spiritualist). This dreamscape is more about emotion than action, though it does crescendo with the killer’s last words from the electric chair in Sing Sing prison.
The fulcrum between the two men is loss. Hamilton Fish the politician (Albany native Theodore Bouloukos) is mourning the death of his young wife, and Hamilton Fish the serial killer (Bill Weeden) is still obsessed with the young girl he slaughtered and consumed. In one ineffably affecting scene, the politician stares into the camera with the utter calm of total despair, unaware that the killer can be seen through the window behind him. That the story has an abstracted, compassionate take on the killer (who was likely tortured himself while in an orphanage, as alluded to in the powerful “Wild Fish”) is more unnerving than if he had been treated with repugnance.
Later, the extrapolation of real life into the supernatural reaches a poignant interlude with the dead Mrs. Fish and the murdered girl in “Emily’s Daffodil.” The effect of the beautiful and startling images onscreen combined with Mason’s evocative voice (think Tori Amos as a Depression-era folksinger) was spellbinding.
After the screening, Mason, Bouloukos, and Weeden answered questions from the audience, which gave Mason, who has an MFA from Yale, the opportunity to describe how songwriting informs her artwork. Among Thursday’s audience was a great-grandson of Hamilton Fish the assemblyman and he helped to answer questions about the real politician and his family’s genealogy.
The Lives of Hamilton Fish is available as a CD, and is also in the preliminary phase of being produced as a musical for the stage. The upcoming screening/performance schedule includes a showing at the Hudson Opera House on March 14. For more information, .
