This Dust of Words

  This Dust of Words is a pro­found film about a tragic life. Eliz­a­beth Wilt­see was an extra­or­di­nary girl who taught her­self to read and write in many lan­guages, includ­ing ancient Greek when she was less than ten. Liz had an IQ of 200 (which may not be the be all and end all but prob­a­bly means she was pretty smart) and stud­ied lit­er­a­ture at Stan­ford in the late 1960s where she impressed her advi­sor with an insight­ful exper­i­men­tal dis­ser­ta­tion on Samuel Beck­ett. After uni­ver­sity Liz pretty much dropped out of soci­ety, trav­el­ling in Europe and around the States, work­ing in libraries and pub­lish­ing com­pa­nies for enough money to get by. She didn’t believe in aca­d­e­mic careers or con­ven­tional jobs or lives — she pre­ferred to read, study and write. Her prob­lems with men­tal ill­ness started some time in her youth (she didn’t like doc­tors but we find out exactly why) and when these wors­ened she even­tu­ally became a home­less per­son. Finally Liz walked into the Cal­i­for­nia wilder­ness to die. This Dust of Words is assem­bled from Liz’s let­ters, plays, essays and unpub­lished novel, from fam­ily films, pho­tographs and from inter­views. The film also includes the thoughts of the peo­ple of Wat­sonville, the farm­ing town where Liz lived in a church door­way and was known around town as the harm­less crazy lady who liked to spend all day in the library. Film-maker Bill Rose (who came across this story when look­ing for a baby-sitter on the Inter­net) approaches the mate­r­ial with a great deal of sen­si­tiv­ity and insight, pro­vid­ing just enough infor­ma­tion to draw a real per­son but not so much as to bog us down in details. This is the story of a woman who wanted to be free but also of the com­mon link between bril­liance and men­tal insta­bil­ity and how dif­fi­cult it is for such a per­son to be taken care of in our society.