Shared Resources
Tom de Lancy Green on the strange heart of a beautiful film.
For this week’s installment of VOLUME 21: The Creative Nonfiction Film Weekend 2025, Tom de Lancy Green salutes Shared Resources, Jordan Lord’s remarkably bold and fearless film about his family. de Lancy Green is a teacher of film studies, writer and programmer.
You can read the entire issue here.
The obvious protagonist of Jordan Lord’s Shared Resources is their father, Albert: modern-day Zacchaeus and patriarch, an emblem of southern Whiteness, and the strange heart of a beautiful film. We open on a screen of arterial red. Albert’s vision is impaired—we are invited to see his point of view. In fact, we owe it to Albert to see through his eyes, just as Lord’s film owes disabled viewers access: audio description (commentary?) is in abundance, as are subtitles.
Much as it might for the visually impaired, the opening domestic scene plays out aurally. Already: strife. Lord’s mother mentions ‘Columbus Day’; their sister interjects: ‘National Indigenous People’s Day’. National identity is a matter of perspective. So is frailty, apparently. An early scene, revisited many times throughout Shared Resources, has Lord and their parents discussing a rough cut of this very film. Albert thinks the worst of his potential observers, almost as poorly as he thinks of himself as filmed by his own child. He insists that in the footage the audience is seeing, he looks frail. With considerably more import, he worries further that his filmic self will be a metonym for the Real Albert, an otherwise vigorous and esteemed servant of Gulfport, Mississippi, his family, and God above.
As Lord’s mother points out, allaying Albert’s perturbation at looking weak: ‘That is what you were!’ But in Shared Resources, nothing is as it seems. What is the definition of ‘is’? The discourse at play between Lord’s parents acts out a suburban Age of Enlightenment, as Albert insists there is nothing contained within him that is necessarily debilitated, and presenting him as such brands him with these qualities, fixing them to him in perpetuity. There is Hegel everywhere for those with eyes to see.
Albert, despite a gruffly utilitarian manner, is aware of filmmaking’s power of signification—and perhaps of its extractive virulence. Jordan presents their parents at one point with a contract, again covering the very film in question. It places the liability for Shared Resources and its effect on Lord’s parents squarely on Lord themself. This is not a release form but its reversion—or perversion if you’re Albert. For him, the very notion of Jordan’s proposal is self-sabotage, and thus illogical. This is the debt collector’s rationale: the trade is unequal, and cannot be repaid.
You can’t choose your family. Can you understand them? Frequent wide shots—interstitial and, therefore, central to the film’s mode of address—are like casserole-dish daguerreotypes for the white American (hard H, please). Examinations of meta-reminiscence creep in and eventually flood the audio description as Lord’s mother and sister shoulder more of the commentary duties. Uncas Blythe once said, in reference to a far more volatile film than this, Isaiah Medina’s 88:88 (2015), that the family is practically ‘ophthalmic’ at this point—a diseased pair of eyes playing tricks on itself. One wonders, given the Spartan production conditions, whether Lord hasn’t encountered Medina’s work, and those familiar sentiments, before.
Because most potently here, Lord embodies Albert’s mindset as a schema. At multiple junctures, the role of filmmaker is equated with the debt collector. The aforementioned anti-release form is Lord’s experiment at countering the logic of debt and credit; yet, the etymology of being ‘captured’ by the camera is inescapable, or inescapably a fact of art. Back to the daguerreotype, for a moment: in origin myths for the American project, it’s said that Indigenous peoples feared the camera, for it threatened to steal their souls from them. Perhaps Albert Lord shares their unease because he is an unlikely object of fascination—middle-class, white, stoic, a provider, both the structuring absence and the structure itself. Equally, he is forced into a funhouse mirror of his own creation, literally watching the product of his life’s work. I sent my kid to college and all I got was this dumb metatext.
Jordan’s mother told them, in the wake of crippling debt accrued through sending them to college in the first place, that Jordan owed it to their parents to be successful. An odd pathology, one that Lord tries to untangle through the praxis of Shared Resources despite obstruction, from within and without. Albert is uncooperative and the camera cannot get any closer. Lord, aware of this limitation, refuses nonetheless to accept an atom/item-ised world of endless subjectivities. It leads not to a dialectic of understanding, but - far more productively—a document of failure. Or maybe: the Failure of the Document.