I'm excited about the completion of a new short film titled THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE GRACKLES. It is the result of a writing collaboration between Jason Crow and me, a visual collaboration between Jason, Miles Ryan, and me, and a musical collaboration between Brian Tomerlin and Andrew Chapman. Here's the kicker: not once were we all in the same room together. The closest we came was a discussion over coffee between Jason, Miles and me -- which was rather brief.
Collaboration is difficult. I think the tension and misunderstandings that occur in a collaborative work are necessary for the betterment of that work. Collaboration is not group-think, but rather the collective input of individuals acting as individuals. Individuality in art is one engine that gives art its strength.
There is something in every art object that resists being made. The conversion of feeling into meaning requires physical shaping -- some cutting and pounding. A chief role of the director is to cut and pound. The tension with collaborators comes from turning the idealized form in the minds of individuals into the sensible, serviceable form that exists to serve the narrative. The narrative ought to maintain each separate spark of inspiration that brought the collaborating individuals together in the first place. But the thing with movies -- or the thing with my understanding of movies -- is that they are for public consumption. The constructed narrative -- the thing shaped by cutting and pounding -- trumps the private spark of the individual. I think it's true of any art that's shared: service to the public spirit overrides service to the individual artist or individual artists working in collaboration.
Here is a bit of information about how we worked together. Jason Crow (producer / co-Writer) is capable, from a flat-footed position, of launching into a far-reaching dissertation about Grackles as a species. His intense interest in the natural world is contagious. He was moved to document what he knew about Grackles in the spirit of altering typical perceptions -- a species so common as to be overlooked, or the species as a nuisance bird. I proposed this scenario: what would happen if all the Grackles disappeared? And the project left the dissertation realm for the story realm. It is now a short film in three parts: a dream sequence, followed by a story about absence -- the strange disappearance of all the Grackles in the world, followed by the story of their unexplained return, which describes the moment when a feeling of awe begins to fade from an awe-inspiring event, and people go back to their routines. I have a pronounced interest in moments after some catastrophe or joyous occurrence has broken through the status quo and seems to have upset the flow of time, when, soon after, those heightened feelings settle down again and somehow people find their way back into routines. Wonder, perseverance, and routine are fascinating aspects of human nature.
Miles Ryan (Producer / co-Editor) sorted through a large amount of Grackle footage shot by Jason, who is interested in following the birds and documenting their wondrous flight patterns, and assembled a dynamic and fascinating sequence. That sequence stands as the opening dream sequence of the finished film. Jason delivers the voice over narration. He works in an impromptu manner. He makes notes, but speaks largely from invention. He and Miles worked hard culling down Jason's numerous thoughts on record into the manageable narration we hear in part one.
For my part, nothing exists in a movie before it is text. I write everything down, in screenplay format, employing poetic language. It is from the text that I get ideas about images, transitions, and shot duration. I wrote narration for parts two and three and had Jason over to my house to record it. I shot images from my small screenplay independently, and yet was always cognizant of what Miles had assembled. Miles, like Jason, is an improvisational thinker; he recapitulates images and existing footage by instinct. Whereas I am a method man.
I mentioned tension is necessary in collaboration. But by "tension," I don't mean animosity or even argument. Differences keep things from getting too smooth, from resembling something made from group-think. Jason, Miles, and I have different processes. We didn't make the film we each had in mind as individuals. We made a film that describes our thinking as individuals in collaboration, and the result, I feel, is something special. The narrative has become its own thing, and is now available for public consumption.
The music is a very important part of the narrative. Music for the dream sequence was composed and performed by Brian Tomerlin. I love this music because it isn't the etherial type music one usually hears when watching a dream sequence. It is highly mechanical, which serves the broader narrative in a special way. For Part two and three, I employed Andrew Chapman, who scored and performed for two films I made that have gone to festival. I love the way Andrew works. What follows is text from an email I sent to him in the early stages of his compositional work. We wanted to preserve the aptness of Brian's work, but also create something new -- music to invite a certain system of emotions specific to story developments in parts two and three.
"The movie is a down is up, up is down sort of scenario. It is about a moment soon after a miracle, when the awe effect has faded and people start to go back to their routines. Here, the miracle is grackles disappearing, then returning. All in all, sort of a strange thing to rate a miracle, and yet no explanation for the occurrence.
A miracle or awesome event, if you've experienced one, breaks into your life and throws over the status quo. An up is down, down is up sort of perception. As a way to explore this, the movie has topsy turvy elements.
The dream sequence shows cityscapes, industry, and employs highly mechanized music, complete with whirs and thrums you might hear on a factory floor - - stuff your wouldn't ordinarily associate with sleep or dream activity. The next sequence, an awake sequence titled "Absence," seems quite dreamy in comparison. There is space and light and a variety of growing things and natural colors. One would expect more visual hints of bleakness and blight for the situation of a species falling off the earth, but nature goes on, intrepid. There are no animals of any kind, but somehow the world seems entirely like itself, no real differences for the absence. The last sequence is "Return". But has no fanfare, no rainbows or other marvel signs. Just commuters going to work, grackles in the parking lot - - not what you would expect from a miracle, just normalcy.
The dream music has a quality of "otherness" about it, but it frustrates ideas about sleep and dreaming. The absence segment may suggest an elegiac tone, but should also be subversive and frustrate that tone - - spin against the way it drives, so to speak. The return segment might suggest triumph, but should also act subversively against such a tone. What has happened is one mystery among countless mysteries in time that only moves one way. As beautiful as life is, and as dangerous and curious, we are all stumbling forward, mounting prominences just as we suffer jags and drop offs, somehow leveling off into routine, until a time when all our routines come to an end. And that is what the final line is about. How to stress the importance of life without overemphasizing or turning life into a purely mental activity, over-thinking the amazing situation of life to the point of abstraction, reducing it to strips of images and ambitions in the mind."
Is Andrew's music the aural equivalent of theses ideas? No -- thank goodness!! Andrew, acting as an individual, made his own informed and inspired choices about the music, just as Brian had done.
THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE GRACKLES is, in my mind, a small triumph of collaboration. A sum greater, and somehow much different, than its parts. I'm glad to report viewers can make up their own minds about this soon enough. On December 4th, The film will play in a program that features theses excellent filmmakers and media artists: Paul Bryan, Colette Copeland, and Michael A. Morris. The program is part of a series called Next Topic at CentralTrak gallery, Dallas, TX.
