From the ages of 18 to 23 I worked as the part-time manager of a small secondhand DVD shop. Located in one of the more deprived areas of Brighton, the shop was a repository for the material detritus of local street drinkers, young mums and decrepit old men, who would exchange stacks of fag smoke infused DVDs for hard cash. There was little of much cultural value amongst the mountains of merchandise we bought except for a once a week haul of illicitly gained back-of-the-truck new releases. Once in a while though a customer (usually the same elderly man on his monthly excursion) would come in with a selection of art-house rarities, dubious exploitation films from Hong Kong or soft-core European erotica. One day the aforementioned customer arrived with a selection to sell and amongst them was a crudely constructed compilation tape of gruesome caught on camera incidents, akin to the controversial Faces of Death series of the 1970s & 80s. The blurb suggested a shock and awe filled rollercoaster of death squad executions, daredevil stunts gone wrong, bank robberies gone awry, car crashes, accidents and suicides. Given that this was before the pervasive aura of You Tube and it’s never ending compendium of bloody mayhem and additionally that I was a 20 year old with a strong impulsive streak and an ill-defined moral compass, I took the DVD for myself.

For years after watching that DVD one segment in particular remained lodged in my head. It was of a young woman with dark hair calmly reading the news before pulling out a gun and shooting herself in the head live on air. Whereas all the other clips dispelled any tension through the setup’s pre-determined conclusion; cops surrounding a building say, or a stuntman testing out his new Rocket Bike. The impact from this was derived from the sudden switch from serene composure to her body hitting the desk in front of her. R. Budd Dwyer waved the gun around for a good ten to fifteen seconds before he blew a hole in the roof of his head at a press conference back in 1987. This, on the other hand, was efficient, as if someone had jump-cut the offending half a second from the footage. In a word, I remembered it vividly. Though her name was crucially missing.

Cut to two years ago. It was being reported that Antonio Campos and the documentarian Robert Greene were by coincidence both turning their attentions to the story of Christine Chubbuck, a Florida TV newsreader who in 1974 had been the first person to commit suicide live on air, and to this date the only woman to have done so. Reigniting my memory of the on-air suicide I started to research but I soon discovered that the tape of her demise doesn’t appear to exist. It was broadcast live and although the event was recorded (at Christine’s insistence), the tape has never officially been screened again; in fact no one knows what happened to the footage, whether it was stored, lost or erased. Though one suggestion made in Greene’s Kate Plays Christine is that the TV station owner Bob Nelson’s wife has the original recording. Amongst the ‘Death Hags’ those that have dedicated their lives searching for real life death videos, the Christine Chubbuck suicide tape aS the ‘holy grail’ of missing footage.

Christine Chubbuck

So where did my memory this suicide come from? Could I have mistaken her for altogether different newsreader who killed herself life on air, possibly, but my research suggests Chubbuck is unique in this respect. Is there a chance that in the pre-You Tube era, someone somehow managed to slip it onto a low-rent, limited run compilation reel only for it to be forgotten? Or did I dream of Christine Chubbuck before I knew she actually existed?

What we know of Chubbuck’s life is limited to anecdotal evidence with a few concrete facts. She had frequently suffered from depression and had had a nervous breakdown a few years before which had led her to move back to Sarasota, Florida to live with her mother. The year before she killed herself she’d been diagnosed with an ovarian cyst that would prevent her from having children once it was removed. She was in love with a fellow TV presenter called George who rebuffed her advances. Additionally her humane, sensitive human-interest stories were at odds with the sensationalist pieces the station was prioritising. She directly referenced this point in her pre-suicide address to the audience.

“‘In keeping with Channel 40’s policy of bringing you the latest in blood and guts and in living colour. You are going to see another first: an attempted suicide.’

The sad irony of Christine Chubbuck is that none of this; the mystery surrounding the tape, these two films and the newly awakened interest in her life, would exist if it wasn’t for the morbid mind-set that she fought against in her own editorial work.

Both Antonio Campos’ Christine and Robert Greene’s Kate Plays Christine take two very different singular approaches to Chubbuck’s life. The former is a play by play account of the events leading up to her final broadcast, faithfully recreating the milieu of 1970s newsrooms with pastel coloured décor and primitive reel to reel technology. Greene however approaches Christine through a docu-fiction prism, focusing on the actress Kate Lyn Sheil as she prepares to play Christine in a hypothetical film project. With very little concrete information, Kate struggles with the character; she grows more despondent and frustrated at her own biases and the vague insights from the people she talks to. Soon her portrayal of Christine begins to bleed back out into her real-world interactions. The lines between the two become so blurred that not only is Kate playing Christine, she is also Kate playing Christine playing Kate. Greene has stated, with minor reservations, that ultimately this is a work of fiction, a fictionalised account of a real actress playing herself as she prepares for a fictitious role about a real-life person. Whilst through doing so suggesting the impossibility of being able to portray Christine with any true psychological conviction due to the limited resources on offer. If both of their films weren’t being made at the same time, there’s the lingering impression that Greene’s film is very much a snide retort to Campos’, or that Campos is taking up Greene’s ‘impossible’ challenge.

Personally I side with the latter, that Christine renders Kate’s postmodern provocations as a little dull and unfounded. Even though the storytelling and visual language is incredibly fluent and slick, bubbling underneath is a very direct rebuttal to Kate’s representational predicament. Firstly, Rebecca Hall’s portrayal of Christine is purposely erratic and inconsistent; it’s an incredible performance, a mixture of passive aggressive anger, abject sadness, but also witty and at times sweet. It takes all of the different reported on facets of her character and filters them through the prism of her manic-depression and in doing so creates a wonderfully realised portrait that is both familiar yet distinctly unknowable. Additionally, Hall is supported by an excellent cast, especially Tracy Letts as the station manager Mike Nelson, who could easily have been portrayed as a one-dimensional villain standing in the way to Christine’s success, but whose motives are portrayed with a sympathetic mix of exasperation and concern. Also Maria Dizzia’s performance as co-worker Jean is a beautifully expressed portrait of empathy and kindness.

Christine

What Greene trades in is an ironic incompetence, where everything is pointedly half-hearted. Even the casting of Sheil, who looks nothing like Christine feels like a deliberate attempt to offset the project from the very beginning. We watch as purchases an ill-fitting wig, gets contact lens and decorates her room in pink frilly things as Christine would have done, whilst constantly nodding to the audience about how terribly superficial this all this. The preparation is for a Hallmark TV movie of the week type production, with banal clichés and ham-fisted performances, which again feels archly smug in its take down of biographical clichés. All my problems with Kate can be summed up by its didacticism. For all its endless questions and inquiries into the ethics of representation you end up feeling like you’ve been lectured for two hours. It’s all very cynical, manipulative and ultimately boring.

Kate Plays Christine

At the end an attempt is made to reconstruct Christine’s suicide, but Kate struggles with the morality of doing so. As she gets more frustrated she turns the gun on the camera and berates the filmmakers and us for only being interested in her death, that this is all the audience wants; to gain some taste of what the infamous video must actually be like; ‘blood and guts’ all over again. It’s a wholly smug ending. A patronising, sarcastic fuck you to the audience. There was hope that the ending was going to offer some prism that would reframe its hall-of-mirror construction in a new light, instead it felt like I’d been trolled. Christine too ends with a reconstruction of her suicide, but instead Campos emphasises the abject sadness and hollowness of the event itself. Although I had initially felt my heart racing in the moments leading up to Christine’s death, I felt empty the moment it had passed. Campos’ success is that he questions this as ‘entertainment’ anticipating the audiences blood lust and then presents what is a blunt, mechanical act and he does so without finger pointing and button pushing; it’s similar to Greene’s intentions but without the sense of self-satisfied superiority.