Richard C. Ledes

Although I grew up in an ostensibly uncomplicated “white American family,” it was in fact riven with issues of race and class that were further complicated by beliefs that mental illness is transmitted by blood. The issues of race had to do with categories that are largely dormant today but continued to play a role in my family. My father’s parents were Pontian Greeks from Asia Minor who immigrated to the States in 1923 when members of the Christian population not killed in the genocide were expelled from Turkey, and, in turn, Greece expelled its Muslim population. My father’s family were poor and immigrated into a Greek community in the Bronx. The early 1920s was also the time when the Klu Klux Klan reached its peak popularity in the United States and part of their animosity was aimed at new immigrants from Southern Europe, including Greeks. My mother’s family from Baltimore Maryland belonged to what was known as the “Social Register,” a list of reputedly elite families of the city. Their politics were what was known as “Nativists,” opposing the immigration of families like my father’s. Her family’s inclusion in this apparent castle of privilege–into which my father who graduated from Yale wanted entry–was undermined in two ways that haunted my mother. Her family had lost its financial security and her brother was hospitalized as a schizophrenic for ten years in a veterans hospital after WW2. Eventually he was hit by a train near the hospital, either accidentally or as an act of suicide. According to the racial theories of eugenics that were widely popular at the time and were believed by her family, my mother’s brother’s illness meant she carried schizophrenia in her blood and could transmit it to her offspring. Because she was condemned by her own blood’s imperfection, she was able to marry the man she loved. Her schizophrenic brother's name was the one that was his father’s and that I was given, Richard.

Alongside the importance for me of any political or social issues has been a focus on aesthetics, on creating art that structures experience in a liberating and ultimately playful way . Two of the feature fiction films I have made, Adieu Lacan and V13, have been based on the writings of Lacanian psychoanalysts analyzed by Jacques Lacan, one of the leading intellectual figures of the 20th century. As my prolonged interest and engagement with psychoanalysis might suggest, I have been interested in the role of chance and irrational connections based on affinities of light, sound or movement, on following these out and seeing where they lead. Only through the deepest respect for these irrational elements am I able to complete my works.

June 9th, 2025 Athens.