Omer Fast

Godville Portraits Ten Illustrated Short Stories

Godville is a two-channel video by Omer Fast edited together from a series of interviews with several eighteenth-century character interpreters in Colonial Williamsburg, a living-history museum in Virginia. The museum is actually part of the historical town it recreates, occupying and preserving the town’s buildings and grounds, while training and paying its residents to act out colonial American life. The ten people interviewed in costume represent a cross-section of Williamsburg’s resident actors. The interviews begin in the past and in-character, but deliberately jump to the present, turning the focus to their real lives. Cutting, pasting, and remixing the interviews, the two biographies of each speaker are blended into a rambling whole–intentionally making it difficult for the viewer to follow which of the interviewees’ personality or time period is being discussed. Subsequently, Fast produced a series of portraits of the interviewees, titled Godville Portraits, and illustrated short stories based on the encounters with the ten characters interviewed for the video. The work portrays the story of a town whose residents are unmoored, floating somewhere between the past and the present, between reenactment, fiction, and reality.