Content area
Full Text
Christina LaneUniversity of Miami, clane[commat]miami.edu
Selected Films from the Double Take Documentary Film Festival (May, 2001)
Where do the nomadic carnival workers settle in each year after months of spreading circus thrills from town to town? For those who mn the carnival out of Gibsonton, Florida, home is ''Gibtown,'' a rural repository for roller coaster rides, rare animals, and the rows of trailers that house them during the off-season. As one ''carnie'' puts it, ''Gibtown is not a real place. It's a state of mind.'' Filmmaker Melissa Shachat has set out to capture this state of mind in her first feature, Gibtown (2000), distributed by Decoy Films.
This documentary's main goal is to record the final glimpses of a dying history, the performance art of traveling show people. It pays particular attention to the carnival's roots in vaudeville, giving voice to the lamentations of its subjects, for whom television and film have resulted in jaded audiences. These are the days, they suggest, when patrons have ''seen it all.'' Shachat does an exceptional job of...