About

New York City filmmaker, artist and writer Richard C. Ledes, has directed as well as written and produced a body of work that returns to a richly elaborated set of themes. His 2008 film The Caller, starring Frank Langella, Eliott Gould and Laura Haring, won the Made In New York Prize at the Tribeca Film Festival and the BFI (British Film Institute) selected his 2012 film Fred Won’t Move Out one of ten essential films of the actor Elliott Gould. His films often draw on experiences within his own family of mental illness and forced immigration. For Ledes these have a relation to stigma and racism that needs to be reimagined in order to be remembered rather than assigned to oblivion. His visual style is further shaped by his experience-driven research into theories of ideology as well as into theories of individual and collective forms of madness.

His films frequently have attracted the collaboration of some of the most notable names in independent cinema, including Michelle Williams, Michael Imperioli, Wendell Pierce, David Patrick Kelly, Frank Langella, Laura Harring, Elliott Gould and—in his forthcoming film V13—Alan Cumming.

His background directing experimental plays in Paris led to writing on performance art for Artforum. His first feature film A Hole In One, set in 1953, starring Michelle Williams, about a woman who wants a lobotomy, originated in a piece of performance art. Ledes based the performance on the psychiatric records of his mother’s brother, a WW2 veteran who suffered a psychotic break upon his return to civilian life.

Ledes holds a doctorate in comparative literature from NYU, where he wrote a dissertation on the rise of mental healthcare in the U.S. after WWII. The rise was premised on the needs of returning veterans. This in turn transformed the place of mental healthcare in popular American literature and culture of the period. During his research he volunteered at an outpatient center for people living with a severe and chronic mental illness. At the center he became the assistant-director of their theater program and founded a group where they read aloud the stories of Poe, Hawthorne and Melville. This combination of a personal connection to a film’s theme with research into its broader social significance remains an important hallmark of his work.

Psychoanalysis, particularly the work of Jacques Lacan, first entered his work when he was researching the themes of madness and mental healthcare in the US for his first film and has remained a significant influence. His recent film, ADIEU LACAN, tells the story of an analysis conducted by Jacques Lacan in the 1970s. In addition to his feature films Ledes continues to make short and essay films as well as continuing to write in a variety of forms, including screenplays and essays.

Artist’s Statement

Although I grew up in an ostensibly uncomplicated “white American family,” it was in fact riven with issues of race and class that were further complicated by beliefs that mental illness is transmitted by blood. The issues of race have to do with categories that are largely dormant today but continued to play a role in my family. My father’s parents were Pontian Greeks from Asia Minor who immigrated to the States in 1924 when the Christian population was expelled from Turkey and Greece expelled its Muslim population. They were poor and immigrated into a Greek community in the Bronx. The early 1920s was also the time when the Klu Klux Klan reached its peak popularity in the United States and part of their animosity was aimed at new immigrants from Southern Europe, including Greeks. My mother’s family from Baltimore Maryland belonged to what was known as the “Social Register,” a list of reputedly elite families of the city. Their politics were what was known as “Nativists,” opposing the immigration of families like my father’s. Her family’s inclusion in this apparent castle of privilege–into which my father who graduated from Yale wanted entry–was undermined in two ways that haunted my mother. Her family had lost its financial security and her brother was hospitalized as a schizophrenic for ten years in a veterans hospital after WW2 until he was hit by a train near the hospital, either accidentally or intentionally. According to the racial theories of eugenics that were widely popular at the time and were believed by her family, my mother’s brother’s illness meant she carried schizophrenia in her blood and could transmit it to her offspring. Her schizophrenic brother's name was the one that was his father’s and that I was given, Richard.

Alongside the importance for me of any political or social issues has been a focus on aesthetics, on losing myself in creating art that is absorbing for the viewer. Two of the feature fiction films I have made, Adieu Lacan and V13, have been based on the writings of Lacanian psychoanalysts analyzed by Jacques Lacan, one of the leading intellectual figures of the 20th century. As my prolonged interest and engagement with psychoanalysis might suggest, I have been interested in the role of chance and irrational connections based on affinities of light, sound or movement, on following these out and seeing where they lead. Only through the deepest respect for these irrational elements am I able to complete my works.

July 3rd, 2024 Athens.