Tony Ganz & Rhody Streeter only made films together over a couple of years in the early 1970s. A few of their documentary shorts aired on the syndicated PBS series The Great American Dream Machine, which was simpatico with their collaborations’ wryly humorous portrait of the nation. Otherwise, their catalog of shorts remained unseen by a wide public audience until their recent exhibitions in New York City, now collected under the anthology title America: Everything You’ve Ever Dreamed Of. Because of that spotty history of distribution & scholarship, there wasn’t much context for what Gap Tooth‘s weekly repertory audience would be seeing when the collection premiered in New Orleans last week, besides the films being rare. It was a packed room anyway. The ten Ganz & Streeter shorts that make up America: Everything You’ve Ever Dreamed Of were met with shocks of laughter and stretches of stunned silence, depending on the mood of the moment. The individual films weren’t produced with a unifying theme or intent in mind, but since they were made with such a small, consistent crew in such a short period of time, they end up forming a singular mosaic picture of 1970s America — especially the white parts, the very white parts.

America: Everything You’ve Ever Dreamed Of is at its strongest when its shorts are hitting on a common theme, illustrating a postcard advertisement for The American Dream as a prepackaged plastic commodity. The opening short “The Best of Your Life (a.k.a. Sun City)” plays like an early prototype for the recent surreal retirement community doc Some Kind of Heaven, inviting the audience into a 3D brochure to gawk at all the uncanny weirdos who reside within. The other standout shorts in the set also work as ironic advertisements for the kitschiest corners of American monoculture: a novelty sex resort in “Honeymoon Hotel,” a Christian Nationalist death cult in “Risen Indeed (a.k.a. Campus Crusade for Christ)”, an elevator music studio in “A Better Day in Every Way (a.k.a. Muzak)”, a finishing school for adults in “Woman Unlimited”, and a billboard advertisement painters’ studio in “Sign Painters (a.k.a. Signs)”. It’s in these ironic snapshots of microwave-dinner America that Ganz & Streeter land their biggest laughs, likening retirees’ synchronized workout routines to soldiers Sieg Heiling their Fuhrer and infiltrating anti-hippie Christian activist circles who believe Communists to be Satanists engaged in a literal holy war. At the same time, they find a way to mock institutions instead of laughing at individual interview subjects. Later documentaries like Grey Gardens & Gates of Heaven would soon take on a similar project to much wider attention & acclaim: recording sweetly humanist interviews with ordinary, everyday weirdos like you & me, who happened to have gotten wrapped up in fascinatingly unreal scenarios.

Any one of those on-topic shorts could land as someone’s personal favorite in the collection. Personally, I laughed the hardest at the robotic corporate speak of the “Muzak” and “Sign Painters” docs, as straightlaced business suits passionlessly explained how they’ve turned once artistic mediums into uniform, sellable products. The candy-colored splendor of the “Sun City” retirement home tour and the women’s-mag “Honeymoon Hotel” ad is also undeniably enticing, making for the most visually striking and spatially disorienting selections in the bunch. It’s the other, “off-topic” shorts in the collection that really make those works stand out, though. You don’t get a full sense of just how uncanny & inhuman the collection’s portrait of American culture is until they cut away from the Norman Rockwell postcards to black & white snapshots of real people struggling with real problems in real environments. In “Help-Line” & “Y.E.S.,” desperately lonely people on the verge of making life-ending decisions re-establish tenuous human connections via phone call. In “Bowery Men’s Shelter,” New York City alcoholics and discharged mental patients find a temporary place to sleep between psychotic episodes & binges, barely limping along to the next day. The furthest-afield inclusion is “Hoi: Village Life in Tonga,” which leaves America entirely for a quiet anthropological study of indigenous Tongan social life. It was the very first film that Ganz & Streeter shot together and, while it doesn’t fit in tonally or thematically with the other shorts in the collection, it does help contextualize their countercultural-outsider approach to American anthropology in the more idiosyncratic shorts. Not for nothing, but “Hoi” & “Bowery Men’s Shelter” are also the only films in the collection in which non-white subjects are interviewed, making for some politically productive tension in their contrast with other subjects, like the prayer-warrior fascists of “Campus Crusade for Christ”.

If there’s anything especially remarkable that Ganz & Streeter achieved with these short-form American anthropologies (besides conveying a clever editorial eye for selecting environments & industries worth documenting in the first place), it’s in their avoidance of outright condescension. The uncanny, hyper-American scenarios they captured on film range from conceptually funny to outright evil, but the people who are trapped within them are consistently charming regardless of their participation. The nation’s cultureless rituals have made fools of us all, and so we can only feel warm comradery with our fellow fools who’ve fallen into its strangest crevices. That warm humanism is especially apparent in the closing short, “A Trip Through the Brooks Home,” which expands on an interview with a married couple who live in the Sun City retirement community profiled in “The Best of Your Life.” It’s very simply a guided home tour, but there’s a pervasively sweet awkwardness to the husband & wife at the center of it, recalling the Mitch & Micky folk singer duo of Christopher Guest’s A Mighty Wind. It’s that generosity towards its subjects that makes America: Everything You’ve Ever Dreamed Of such great theatrical programming, as you can hear individual members of the audience being delighted by one isolated character quirk at a time. Hopefully, it’ll be more widely available soon, both in theaters and at home, since it’s both a useful historical document of vintage American kitsch (especially when juxtaposed with genuine American suffering) and a godsend for cult cinema freaks who’ve already rewatched similar human-interest docs like American Movie, Vernon, Florida, and Heavy Metal Parking Lot too many times to count.

-Brandon Ledet