Stranded in Canton, by William Eggleston

The Philosophical Research Society’s 7th House Screenings, LA Filmforum, and Whammy present:

Stranded in Canton, by William Eggleston

Monday, September 7, 2026, 7:30 pm doors, 8:00 pm screening

At Whammy, 1200 N. Alvarado St., Los Angeles CA 90026

NOTE THE CHANGE IN DAY AND LOCATION

Full info: https://www.whammyanalog.com/events/sov-sep-william-egglestons-stranded-in-canton-1974-2005-pres-by-7th-house 

Tickets: 10 general admission

https://www.whammyanalog.com/events/sov-sep-william-egglestons-stranded-in-canton-1974-2005-pres-by-7th-house

Basic & Microcinephile members, please log-in to your account at checkout for your discounts to apply.

As part of Whammy’s SOV September, The Philosophical Research Society’s 7th House Screenings & LA Filmforum are proud to present a rare theatrical screening of STRANDED IN CANTON (1974/2005), quintessential American photographer William Eggleston’s mesmerizing, unruly and disarmingly intimate lone foray into filmmaking. Armed with a then-new Sony Porta-Pak, Eggleston spent 1974 plunging headlong into the bars, back rooms and back roads of Memphis, New Orleans and the Mississippi Delta. Friends, family, artists, musicians, night owls and assorted eccentrics drift in and out of view, caught amid the boozy, volatile, freewheeling energy of the ’70s South. Nearly thirty years later, Eggleston and filmmaker Robert Gordon fashioned the long-unseen footage into a strange, hypnotic portrait of a vanished Southern world.

‍In place of the blazing color and immaculate, observational compositions of his iconic photographs, Eggleston gives us wobbly, ghostly, grain-clouded black-and-white video: faces emerge from pitch darkness, the camera pushes within inches of its subjects as drunken monologues, musical performances, eruptions of violence and moments of unexpected tenderness careen around it. The same eye that transformed the everyday American South into some of the most indelible photographs of the last century is unmistakably present, but here everything moves, talks back and threatens to spill out of the frame. Among those caught in its orbit are blues legend Furry Lewis and Big Star’s Alex Chilton, filmed amid the same Memphis scene that gave rise to the band—and in the very year Eggleston’s The Red Ceiling appeared on the cover of their sophomore album Radio City. Decades later, the film so captivated Spiritualized’s J Spaceman and John Coxon that they composed an original score for it in 2015. (Note: this screening features the film’s original soundtrack, not the Spaceman/Coxon score.)

‍Raw, funny, unnerving and at times almost hallucinatory, STRANDED IN CANTON is a startling moving-image counterpart to Eggleston’s photography, rarely seen and returning to a Los Angeles screen for the first time in 16 years.