Welch (film) - 1972

16 mm motion picture with sound
Duration: 1 hour 27 minutes
Digitally transferred and mastered to DVD

Edited from 16mm home movies 1927 to 1972

Review(s) on Welch (film), 1972

Welch is fascinated by rootedness as a phenomenon, the interiorization of the tribe within its members. Generations repeat each other and the same people return to the same places, but nothing is ever really quite the same. Cycles of birth, begetting and death occur within the slower life of houses, towns and cities, each with its own rate of decay, replacement and growth.
Amy Golden, “The Post-Perceptual Portrait”, Art in America, Jan.-Feb. 1975

The film contains all the elements of the American Dream: the middle-class family in the suburbs, the succession of new cars, the summer home, the councilman father, the clergyman brother, the tradition of attending Colgate and, like the Dream, it changes very slowly if at all. The tone is remarkably straightforward. There is none of the self-conscious embarrassment that one might expect from a New York artist with such a background - only a clear, well-put-together document that probably tells more about us as a nation than all of the editorial speculation in the New York Times since the re-election of Richard Nixon.
William Dyckes, ArtsMagazine, February 1973