Running Stumbled

John Maringouin’s grim family portrait is another addition to the fascinating, ever-expanding sub-genre of auto-archive documentary: work founded in footage created by its subject (who is often also its author), such as ‘Tarnation’, ‘Grizzly Man’ or, in pastiche form, last week’s ICA release ‘Buy it Now’. ‘Running Stumbled’ is compiled from DV material that Maringouin shot in 2002, when he returned to his Louisiana family home for the first time in 25 years. He finds his estranged father, Johnny Roe – a painter once charged with the attempted murder of John, his mother and grandmother following a car crash – holed up with his partner Marie in enervating inertia, surrounded by the detritus of their derailed lives and fuelled by booze, pills and resentful, self-recriminating co-dependence. ‘You don’t see any problem with a chainsaw in the kitchen,’ Marie complains; ‘you always tell me you’re dying but you never do,’ Johnny moans. Divided into chapters, the film develops a kind of narrative, a terribly funny and sad amalgam of ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’, ‘Grey Gardens’ and ‘Capturing the Friedmans’.