Theory of Obscurity: A Film About The Residents

Theory of Obscurity: A Film About The Residents is a 2015 documentary film directed by Don Hardy, and produced by Hardy with Josh Keppel and Barton Bishoff. The film interviews all members (past and present) of The Cryptic Corporation, as well as various friends, collaborators and well-known fans from over the band's long history.
The production of the film involved the digitization of The Residents' vast archives of film and sound (on multiple, long-outdated mediums), a massive undertaking which was partly crowdfunded by Don Hardy and The Residents on Indiegogo.
Theory of Obscurity premiered at SXSW Film Festival in March 2015, and was later released on streaming services, DVD and Blu-Ray. A digital-only soundtrack album was released to crowdfund contributors in December 2014. 
==History==
Theory of Obscurity: A Film About The Residents was conceived in 2012 by producers Don Hardy, Barton Bishoff and Josh Keppel. At the time, The Residents were on tour with their 40th Anniversary show The Wonder of Weird; footage from this tour is featured recurrently throughout the film. 
In order to make the documentary, the production team began a detailed and expensive process of digitizing and restoring The Residents' vast archives of sound and visual media, an operation which was partially crowdfunded via a campaign on Indiegogo. Much of the restored footage was taken from second-generation copies on degraded and often long-obsolete video formats; for whatever reason, the filmmakers did not access the original film negatives for most of the Ralph Records video material, which had been donated to the Pacific Film Archive. 
The filmmakers also interviewed a large number of collaborators and fans of The Residents (both past and present), including Matt Groening (fan and creator of The Simpsons), Les Claypool (of Primus), collaborators past and present including Roland Sheehan, Maggie Swaton (the former Peggy Honeydew), Molly Harvey, Nolan Cook, Eric Drew Feldman, and all four founding members of The Cryptic Corporation; Hardy Fox, Homer Flynn, Jay Clem and John Kennedy - the latter two of whom have remained otherwise entirely uninvolved with the activities of Cryptic since they left the company in 1982. 
During production, director Don Hardy also assisted The Residents with production of their own video material, including lead singer Randy Rose's video series In My Room and RandyLand; he would go on to assist the group in shooting early footage for their feature film Triple Trouble, in 2016; Hardy's work on the film was first seen in the "Double Trouble Trailer" released in 2017. The film premiered at the 29th Chicago Underground Film Festival on July 29th 2022. 
===Unreleased material===
The film itself and its promotional campaign revealed some never-before-seen material from the Cryptic archive, including excerpts of outtake footage from the Vileness Fats film (released by Don Hardy on Vimeo in 2013, early in the documentary's production); the release of the film on DVD and Bluray saw the feature accompanied by a bonus "music video" for the song "Melon Collie Lassie", featuring previously unseen film material from the abandoned Duck Stab! film briefly developed by Graeme Whifler and The Residents in the late 1970s.
The documentary is also notable as being the first public release of material from the group's 1970 demo tape Rusty Coathangers for the Doctor, with a short extract of the title track being heard near the beginning of the film. This song was later issued on the vinyl-only compilation Leftovers Again?! in 2021. Another otherwise unreleased demo, a version of the George Gershwin instrumental "Summertime" from the demo The Ballad of Stuffed Trigger, is also briefly heard in the film. 
==Official synopsis==
Theory of Obscurity tells the story of the renegade sound and video collective known as The Residents, a story that spans 40 years and is clouded in mystery. 
The film takes viewers inside this incredibly private group, with unprecedented access to their archives and their then-recent 40th anniversary tour. 
==Interviewees==
* Hardy W. Fox (President of The Cryptic Corporation)
* Penn Jillette (Illusionist, comedian, actor, inventor and best selling author, narrator of The Mole Show)
* Jim Knipfel (Author)
* Les Claypool (Musician - Primus)
* Homer Flynn (Secretary of The Cryptic Corporation)
* John Kennedy (President of The Cryptic Corporation 1976-83)
* Jay Clem (Treasurer of The Cryptic Corporation 1976-82)
* Mickey Melchiondo Jr (Musician - Ween)
* Matt Groening (Creator of The Simpsons)
=== Minor Appearances ===
* Rob Crow (Musician - Pinback)
* Chris Cutler (Musician - Herny Cow)
* Josh Freese (Musician - DEVO, The Vandals)
* Jerry Harrison (Musician - Talking Heads)
* Barbara London (Curator - Museum of Modern Art 1977-2013)
* Joshua Brody (Musician)
* Roland Sheehan (Musician)
* Margaret Swaton (Musician)
* Hein Fokker (Tour manager of The Residents)
* Molly Harvey (Performer, pre-school teacher)
* Michael Nash (Former bigwig at Warner Music Group)
=== Cameos ===
* Jerry Casale (Musician - DEVO)
* Eric Drew Feldman (Musician - Captain Beefheard, Pixies)
* Joe Hasselvander (Musician - Raven)
* Gary Panter (Artist)
* Graeme Whifler (Film director)
* Laurie Amat (Performer)
* Dr. B. Kim Andrews (Residents lab rat)
* Leigh Barbier (Artist)
* Chris Combs (Residents.com contributor)
* Dave Edwardson (Musican, Neurosis) 
* Carla Fabrizio (Musician)
* Paulie Kraynak (Bach is Dead Discography, Pedantic Residents nerd)
* Glenn Max (Concert producer)
* Brian Poole (Musician- Renaldo & The Loaf)
* Ty Roberts (Co-founder of Gracenote)
* Steve Seid (Video curator, Pacific Film Archive)
* Mark Siegel (Creator of the Eyeball)
* Tom Timony (Head of Security for The Mole Show)
* Adam Weller (Artist)
* Nolan Cook (Musician) [Uncredited]
=== Credited but not Featured ===
* Sarah Cahill
* Steven Cerio
* Rayna Christman
* Jon Fishman
* Diane Flynn
* Jim Greene
* Andreas Mathews
* Drenn McDonald
* Chris McGregor
* Lorrie Murray
* Jon Sanborn
* V. Vale
==Soundtrack==
The Theory of Obscurity Soundtrack was one of the rewards offered exclusively to donors on the crowdfunding page and was provided as a single 51-minute digital MP3 file featuring a "concentrate" mix of tracks featured in the film. 
The soundtrack notably does not include any excerpts of the early demos "Rusty Coathangers for the Doctor" or "Summertime", despite being heard early in the film; "Rusty Coathangers" would eventually be officially released on the 2021 vinyl-only compilation album Leftovers Again?!.
== Reception==
Theory of Obscurity: A Film About The Residents includes footage shot by the group's former collaborator Graeme Whifler, the director of Residents videos including "Hello Skinny" and "One Minute Movies". Whifler (who was not otherwise involved in the making of Theory of Obscurity) has since publicly stated that he feels he was not appropriately credited for his work featured in the film, and that director Don Hardy was trying to take credit for Whifler's work with The Residents.
Upon watching the documentary, Peter Conheim (a video archivist and member of sound collage group Negativland) found himself "horrified by the quality of the... transfers of their films", and, "appalled by the color fading" in particular, he was driven to transfer the videos from their original film elements, as he knew The Residents had donated them to the Pacific Film Archive where Conheim had previously worked."I had to do it, I felt... and I'm still sitting on these precious elements which belong to the Pacific Film Archive. They were donated by The Residents to the PFA, and I have them at the moment on loan in my vault getting ready to be transferred... But... I just felt like I had to do them, because if people are only going to see those films through Theory of Obscurity, that documentary indefinitely, it's not a true representation of how the work is. I mean, the color was so wrong. They were brown, and... they just, they're awful. They're awful. And I just knew they didn't look like that. I couldn't take it, I couldn't stand it, I had to do something." - Peter Conheim, interviewed by Lisa Doop, May 18th 2021 Conheim sought and received permission from Homer Flynn of The Cryptic Corporation to create high definition transfers of most of the Ralph Records music videos in 2019,"I watched the documentary... and I was so horrified by the quality of the... transfers of their films, of their legendary films, in it. I was so appalled by the color fading... in particular, just... I knew what they were supposed to look like, because I had known those films for years, and I just thought, like, what the hell happened?... I know what these are, why do these transfers not represent what these movies are? And furthermore, this is the way they're always going to be seen by people, this cannot stand! And I already had... Homer's email address from something, I forget why, and I reached out to him, and I said 'what happened?'... And he said... 'well, I don't know,'... actually I don't even remember exactly why they wound up that way... in the world of documentary filmmaking... when you're compiling sources to make a documentary, you know, obviously you try to go for the best source you have. In the case of The Residents... their films, which were made, you know, in the 70s and 80s, were shot on film, transferred to old video formats, right, and then this documentary was made in an HD video format. And so it was decided to re-transfer the films to HD. Well, there were no non-faded prints, okay?... All the color film prints had deteriorated over time. The only thing that still had color were either the old videotapes, which are old resolution, and... what you would see if you bought the VHS back in the day... or the DVD that was out, which was sort of mid-resolution, or something like that. The only way to get the actual color is to go back to the original negative of the thing, and basically put it back together again, the film element. And those filmmakers either didn't want to, or didn't know where the material was, or it was just too big of a project, I mean, I can't really blame them. But in any case, they didn't, and I said, I will do that. And furthermore, I know where the material is, because I used to work at the archive where they were stored. And I just basically said, 'Homer, I'll do this,' and I have a source for funding to do this from a person that I was working with, and he said 'Great!' And so I just... basically got his permission and went ahead and did it. And that's why there's new versions of them now, which are now in the permanent collection at MoMA. And I just... went through and did all the ones that I could." - Peter Conheim, interviewed by Lisa Doop, May 18th 2021 with the co-operation of Graeme Whifler and funding from the Cinema Preservation Alliance. 
==See also==
* Theory of Obscurity Soundtrack
*Don Hardy
*In My Room
*RandyLand
*Vileness Fats
*"Rusty Coathangers for the Doctor"
*The Eyes Scream: A History of The Residents
==External links and references==
*Official website
*Indiegogo campaign
*Theory of Obscurity: A Film About The Residents at IMDb
*Theory of Obscurity: A Film About The Residents at Discogs
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