Claire Burch moved to the Bay Area in 1978 from Brooklyn, which she tells me from her Craftsman home in Berkeley, California. Her home holds a cavern of video tapes that fills floor to ceiling bookshelves, hard to reach cubbies, and extra cupboards and storage space in the kitchen and back laundry room, making Burch’s home a living archive of Berkeley history. The city and university library have yet to do something with these tapes which hold twenty-five years of Christmas and Thanksgiving gatherings at People’s Park, (home of the historic “Bloody Thursday” and peace gatherings), free concerts by Country Joe McDonald, and countless hours of footage for the extensive cultural documentaries that she has made.
Burch’s body, as well as her interest in the complexities of life as an artist, reminds me of my favorite film character, Maude, from the seventies cult classic, Harold and Maude. After our meeting, I searched for one of my favorite Maude lines.
Maude: You see, Harold, I feel that much of the world’s sorrow comes from people who are this [she points to a daisy] yet allow themselves be treated as that [she gestures to a field of daises].
Burch could have easily said the above quote about any of her homeless friends, which she filmed endlessly for four years in order to make sense of their lives.
Burch, who has become legally blind from glaucoma, speaks about her recent documentary, California Chronicles of Medical Marijuana, from her production company, Art and Education Media. While friends and a college student assistant help edit the documentary in the other room, I ask what has been her favorite work to date, which she says is her work with the homeless. Her mission started on a personal note, when one of her adopted daughters who had substance abuse problems was diagnosed as schizophrenic.
“We’d try this treatment and that treatment, and Laurie (her daughter) would go from SRO (single room occupancy hotel) to different places,” Burch says, seated next to me in her dimly lit living room. “I’d get her an apartment, it would last three months. She would have an episode, friends would come, and they’d trash the place and get thrown out. Her friends were all in the same boat. None of them wanted to go to the shelters since many people are dumped at shelters from psych units and have nowhere to go. They are frightened and find the shelters dangerous. What was happening to her was happening to [other] young people.”
Many blame the amount of mentally ill homeless in California on former governor Ronald Reagan. In the 70s, Reagan started closing down mental hospitals, and then, in 1980, while Congress proposed new legislation (PL 96-398) called the Community Mental Health Systems Act, the newly elected President Reagan killed the bill. This halted the federal community mental health centers program, as well as its funding, and pushed mentally ill people onto the streets.
When Laurie took to the streets and later died in 1993, Burch was already deep into her work of turning her camera onto the homeless. She edited those four years of tape into three documentary films entitled, Street Survivors, More Street Survivors, and History of a Street Survivor. The films follow the lives of homeless men and woman in Oakland and Berkeley, while Burch asks them the very questions that go through our own minds when we refuse to spare our change and pass similar people on the streets. Pam, the main character of Burch’s films, oscillates between moments of clarity and public outbursts regarding her mental illness in their initial meeting.
“I happened to be there with the camera and turned to film her thinking she would object, but she really wanted to be documented,” Burch says.
Claire keeps her focus on Pam, who over time became a sort of surrogate daughter, a Laurie substitute, for Burch.
