Secrets is a continuation of my work with regional imagery, but unlike my two previous films about Louisiana’s French Acadiana (L'Acadie,1979, and Après-midi,1981), it combines scenes of real events with fractured fictional narratives. Its unconventional organization and treatment of subject matter are designed, not to perpetuate pleasant and bucolic notions about the culture of French Acadiana, but rather to penetrate the world of psychic conflict that exists behind ordinary appearances. Technically Secrets uses the stop-motion effects of rephotography to transform, distort and stylize the tempo and flow of pictorial content. Structurally, the film employs a form of visual rhyming, an effect that is achieved by numerically nesting discreet clusters of imagery. As a result, each of the three main parts of Secrets is subdivided into three episodes with the second and third episodes further divided into trisected phrases of repeated action. Bilingual titles are used throughout the film to dramatize the imagery, to indicate the passage of time, and to establish a sense of location. The first and third parts of the film, which are fictional, bracket the second part of the film which contains non-fictional scenes. Secrets, then, mixes improvised fictional sequences and local film footage of real events with the intention of creating an incongruous, suggestive and equivocal time line.

In this sense, Secrets employs a dialectical process, by-passing the conventional limitations of fictional and non-fictional structures and producing a surrealistic context for the development of form and meaning.

Notes taken from Robert Russett: A retrospective survey, University Art Museum, University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1989.