Trailer Trash - A Film Masterpiece
Director Ramirez, director, with editor David Wanger
Don Diego Ramirez,a native of eastern West Virginia, has created a masterpiece work of art with his first feature documentary, “Trailer Trash - A Film Journal.”It has entered the pantheon of other great films about lost West Virginia souls including Robert Gates’ “Communication from Weber” and Jacob Young’s “Dancing Outlaw.” Hopefully millions of people around the world will get to see it - either at local film festivals, or perhaps on PBS’s great series “P.O.V.” Just like with “Weber” and “Dancing,” I was stunned by the film’s intensity and marveled at the great art work shown, combining the perfect image with the perfect sound. Bravo!
I received the film in the mail last night and couldn’t wait to watch it based on the excellent reviews written by Violet Glaze for Baltimore’s City Paper. As soon as I ate dinner, watched the news, walked the dog, I sat down and watched the 55 minute film. BAM! He shows some of the most touching scenes I have ever seen about his heroic grandmother, dying from cancer. I am sure that Susan Sontag would have really appreciated this film’s sensitivity as well as its naked honesty given her life-long concern about authenticity and health. BAM! His first born daughter is born with an awful condition and has to be rushed to Johns Hopkins. BAM - his sister is charged with a brutal murder - of his Louisiana grandfather, driving from there to eastern WV, and burying him in a shallow grave.
There are also some great positive scenes in the film, especially the honorary horse race done in honor of their grandfather who was a Mexican jockey who rode in the first race at the Charles Town race track. Throughout the film the director talks about his great love for his family members including the sister charged with murdering his grandfather. She and her boyfriend killed him, went and bought drugs, and drove to WV with the body in the back of their rental truck. ( The film tells us at the end that she was taken to Louisiana but her trail still had not taken place by the time the film was complete.)
While watching the film I kept on thinking of one of my favorite TV shows, “America’s Most Wanted.” I once was watching it only to see the best friend of a good friend shown on the show. He had been murdered also in Louisiana just before heading for home in WV. I have made my own Altzheimer’s mother from Texas watch the show with me once, perhaps the last time I will see her alive. I have found that many people find the show too uncomfortable to watch.
It is definitely one of the most intense films I have ever seen - and Ramirez makes great use of different styles of imagery using Super 8, video, black and white, grainy, colorized, etc. to illustrate his emotions. He truly has distilled three years of hell into a work of the highest art.
The director studied art at Shepherd University and has been a working artist for more than 20 years. If there is anyone in human history who has been saved from his awful family situation by art, it is Don Diego. When he introduces the viewer to his extended family, including his mother who died from drugs in 1999, his nephews and nieces in various relations to legal authorities, one can only be amazed at how calm he stays.
Ever since “An American Family” in 1973 was aired on PBS, the world saw a new way of looking at reality. Millions of people including myself learned from the series how to use film as both a shield and a link to the painful realities all of us live. This film does this as well as any I have seen. Other films I would compare it to is “Tarnation” (2003) that won Sundance Awards and was a commercially successful art-house film.
After watching it with my wife, who was equally amazed by its honesty and documentary beauty, I took a break and watched the perfect second film, “The Dead Girl.”Just as Ramirez says at the end of his film, showing the demolition of the local race track that was so important in his family’s history, bad things can lead to hope. ”Dead Girl” film was obviously directed by a women, Karen Moncrieff, who tells five stories all linked by a dead girl found during the opening segment. The lives of women in our modern age of 20,000 murders each year (as Ramirez says in his film) is illustrated with true sensitivity without the use of exploitative violence. Tyrannical mothers, lost teenage daughters, determined shrews, and other various forms of female survival are portrayed with some of the finest acting in years.
Here is his recent autobiography -
Don Diego Ramirez, a West Virginia native, who has been active in the arts region surrounding the Shepherdstown area, including the cities of Frederick, Baltimore and
Washington, D.C., since 1988.An often controversial and out spoken art figure; his photographs have been review twice by the Washington Post. In 2001 the art critic of the Washington Post called his photography “compelling”. In 2003 the art critic referred to his notorious artist life as one of, “legendary debauchery.” His critically acclaimed photography has received extensive regional media attention, including multiple magazines and newspaper stories, television / radio coverage. His Fine Art Photography has been exhibited at nationally recognized and prestigious art venues : Rockville Arts Place, The Millennium Art Center, The Washington Center for Photography, Maryland Art Place, the Tartt Gallery of DuPont Circle, Shepherd University, Western Maryland State College, Frederick Community College, District of Columbia Art Center, Howard Co. Community College, Carroll Co. Community College, The Weinberg Center for The Arts, The Delaplaine Visual Art Center and during Contemporary American Theatre Festival.Don Diego Ramirez attended classes as a full time student at
Shepherd
College from 1986 to 1990. He majored in Psychology eventually completing a Regents of Bachelors of Arts and an associate’s degree in Photography. His photography was first exhibited at the
Corcoran
School of the Visual Arts in 1998. His photography received an honorable mention in
Shepherd
College’s Annual Juried Student Art Exhibition in 1989 and won “Best of Show” in 1990. He began the practice (as an undergraduate) of self organizing and self promoting alternative art exhibitions and art venues that has continued though out his art career. As an undergraduate his organizing of alternative art exhibitions and “underground” multi media performances, including punk rock concerts soon embroiled him in a local media controversial frenzy inaccurately, falsely linking his Fine Art Photography and other art works with allegations of Satanism and involvement in satanic cults (“only in West Virginia could a photograph of a nude woman get such attention!”). Capitalizing on the free publicity (once arranging a protest against his own art show) to publicize his art endeavors, until the attention eventually got him expelled from Shepherd College, waiting five years for the controversy to dissipate before applying for and receiving his degree.After leaving Shepherdstown, Don founded The Calvin Diego Fine Art Gallery, parting with abstract painter Calvin Edward Ramsburg in late 1991.The fine art gallery was located in the Avant Grade music store MEGA PHONE MUSIC owned by musician Jason Willett, located in down town Frederick, Maryland. The gallery was very popular and successful. Calvin Diego Fine Art Gallery was the first gallery in Frederick Maryland to feature strictly contemporary modernist artist in solo exhibitions displaying a body of work as opposed to the “salon style” of multiple artists displaying one piece or a few pieces in a group art show that seems to dominate community art centers. It became affectionately known as the “ the art school gallery at home” as it tended to feature graduates from art majors of universities / colleges such as Maryland Institute College of Art and Design, or the Corcoran School of Art. The Calvin Diego Fine Art Gallery displayed such regional artists as: Michelle Lolli, Lloyd Wolfe, Michael Norhtrup, Darrow Montgomery, Michael Mendez, James Tabor, Deborah Kaufman, Maria Barbosa, Kirsten D’ Andrea, Scott Hollander, Jonathan Haugh, and Josef Schutzenhofer.Having moved to Baltimore Maryland in the early nineties to study 16mm film production and the history of Avant Garde American Film at U. M. B. C. and advance photography at Maryland Institute College of Art and Design; Don Ramirez (while living in an artist studio co operative in Fells Point), became involved in the underground film movement in Baltimore. In
Baltimore; Don learned Super 8 MM filmmaking directly from Craig Smith (Psychedelic Glue Sniffing’ Hillbillies) and was introduced to Skizz Cyczk. Skizz was the founder of THE MANSION THEATRE and later MICROCINEFEST. Craig Smith was the projectionist for the Mansion screenings and Skizz the organizing, driving force behind the monthly open film screening that was very popular with
Baltimore’s film community.“I learned more in
Baltimore than in all my college and formal education put together. I was saturated with great modern art and with living breathing, producing, driven artists. People that I had never heard of but that didn’t really matter they were producing art work so radical in its approach it would take years to digest. What minds, what great fucking minds. Now almost 15 years later my art is the result of all I was exposed to in Baltimore, both in content and techniques. The exposure to the serious and mature artist (I don’t mean by age!) with their profound bodies of work, it was like nothing I could have imagined, but everything I had hoped for when I moved to the big city. Now I am still processing that experience and creating my own bodies of art work.”
Don Ramirez Moving back to Fredrick Maryland in 1995, Don Ramirez began teaching Super 8mm Filmmaking work shops at the
Delaplaine in
Visual
Art
Center. The classes 10 weeks in length were extremely popular.
Several high school students would go on to complete degrees in art program at Colleges and Universities citing Don’s course as the reason why they pursued art careers, most notably Kelly Cornelius, Emily Rook and Erin Williams who completed her B.F.A. at the University of Pennsylvania and is currently pursuing a career in fashion photography in New York City. In 1996 into 1997, Don Ramirez spent several months backpack touring and photographically documenting his travels through the Mayan Ruins in the Central American countries of Mexico, Belize and
Guatemala. One his most ambitious and successful art undertaking, Don made over 1,000 black-n-white photographs during his Mayan journey. Completing a critically acclaimed photographic documentary series entitled ‘Tierra De La Maya’ (four years from concept to completion) it was first displayed at
Frederick’s The Artist Gallery in November 1998. Selected photographs have been published in several magazines and newspapers including The Frederick News Post and The Herald Mail.Don Diego Ramirez (who began using his full name after his Central American experience) became involved with THE BLUE ELEPHANT ART CENTER in August 1998. The
Blue
Elephant
Art
Center (located
4 A West 5th street
Frederick, Maryland) was created by artist Kevin Slagle, Brian Slagle and Jason Swafford, the three artists spent a year renovating and designing the 3,500 square foot privately owned art center. The renovated artist’s loft space was a former bakery, now the space is a unique gallery with enough studio space to accommodate a co operative of a dozen visual artists. Don was part of a core group of art leaders emerging from the co op dedicated to high lighting the diversity of modern art being made in
Frederick and its surrounding region. Don Ramirez remained an active studio artist with the Blue Elephant Art Center co op for five years leaving in August 2003.
Shepherd
University in
West Virginia, where he teaches the popular special topics art course: Survey of Avant Garde American Film.
