In a coup for longtime fans, he conducted interviews with Cryptic co-founders John Kennedy and Jay Clem, who broke with the band following the financially disastrous Mole Show tour. Hardy was only vaguely familiar with the Residents when he was connected with the band, but rapidly became fascinated with their work and gained the trust of the Cryptic Corporation.

I don’t think the Residents have ever or will ever think about things in those terms.” I think we’re so driven in our culture by the end result, which could be winning an Academy Award or getting a million hits on YouTube. Especially in the early days, there was a sense of fun and, as Homer Flynn says in the film, naïveté, where they didn’t know what they couldn’t do. “They tinker with technology and sound and visuals, and it very much is a collective approach where there’s no bad ideas. “They’re almost like scientists,” Hardy posits. They’ve been early experimenters of technologies ranging from videotape to laserdisc to CD-ROM, often undertaking ambitious projects doomed to the rapid obscurity of their formats. Over the next 40-odd years, they recorded mutated pop songs ( The Commercial Album), deconstructed rock and roll ( The Third Reich ‘n Roll, The American Composers Series), created an imaginary folk music ( Eskimo) and a multi-part opera about warring cultures and their pop idols ( The Mole Trilogy). Hardy digs up archival footage showing the band’s irreverent invasions of folk-club open mic nights, already sporting aliases and disguises. What is known about the Residents is that they originally hail from Shreveport, Louisiana, and that they struck out for the Bay Area in the late ‘60s in thrall to such idiosyncratic creators as Captain Beefheart and Harry Partch. It’s more about a collective spirit that I gravitated toward.” “The further I dug into the archives and interviewed the people that they’ve worked with for all these years, it became clear pretty quickly that who they are isn’t really all that important. “I never really thought that would be something I’d want to do,” Hardy says about revealing the Residents’ identities. The true story of the reclusive creators is left to be glimpsed between the lines of their ever-evolving mythology. As always, the band is spoken for by Homer Flynn and Hardy Fox, co-founders of the Cryptic Corporation, friends of the band who’ve managed their careers and maintained their public faces from the beginning. 27, doesn’t go so far as to put faces and names to the Residents. It’s not really spoiling anything to reveal that Theory of Obscurity, which will have its Philly premiere at International House for a single screening on Wednesday, Jan. was inevitably asked whenever he told people that he was working on a documentary about the legendarily mysterious Residents was, “You’re going to reveal their identities, right?” In most minds, any film purporting to tell the four-decade story of the anonymous Bay Area weirdoes had only one possible ending: the unmasking of those top-hatted eyeball heads.

The first question that filmmaker Don Hardy, Jr. Both celebs ( Penn Jillette, Talking Head Jerry Harrison, and punk-comix pioneer Gary Panter) and ordinary fans offer their perspectives without taking too much time from those with first-hand experience.Theory of Obscurity poster | designed by Casey Howard We hear about personnel shakeups over the years, disagreements over money, and come to understand that many part-time Residents have come and gone in their chaotic late career. That unlikely and amusing story is fleshed out with ample footage of early live shows and nutty filmmaking projects (the group is described as “failed filmmakers” who managed to make music a career), some of which, miraculously, were actually shown on MTV. While some viewers may grow irked by this devotion to the band’s “theory of obscurity” - which holds that artists do their best work before fame changes their lives, thus a successful but never-famous artist can remain vital - it does allow the film to present a reasonable narrative of The Residents’ early (and to a lesser extent their more recent) career. All speak of the group’s past by saying “they” did this, “they” believed that. We meet those Louisiana pranksters, and many of the friends who have collaborated with them over the years (whether onstage or behind the scenes), but they uniformly refuse to admit the obvious.

The residents theory of obscurity