First Look: "A Spiral Way"

Here is your first look at the latest Tropic Pictures short film! The title is "A Spiral Way." To be completed in Spring, 2015. More details soon!

First Look at "A Spiral Way"

https://vimeo.com/115124341

"The Disappearance of the Grackles" Discussed, Plus Poetry

It is an honor that the new Tropic Pictures short film "The Disappearance of the Grackles" will play at CentralTrak Gallery in Dallas on December 4 and will also be part of the Dallas Medianale in January, 2015.

In this clip from a screening and poetry reading at Malvern Books in Austin, I discuss the film before reading a few poems.

Film discussion plus poetry

Film Review: "1972"

My article on the Sarah Morris film 1972 has been published at Glasstire. http://glasstire.com/2014/11/07/sarah-morris-1972/

Collaboration: Or Fruitful Misunderstandings

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.  

A Short Film is NOT a Calling Card

I reject the idea put by certain indie gurus and distribution strategists that one ought to think of one's short films as calling cards for feature films, or the more likely alternative, a creative or technical position in advertising. 

I think of my short films as complete works. I submit them as works of art. That is to say, the skillful remnants of psychological and spiritual processes -- my own and those of my collaborators. Beyond the ranging subject matter of each film I've made, each one stands as an allegory for the drive to make subversive contact with the world. By saying "subversive" I don't mean aggressively troublesome. I mean it like a situation of working underground. It is exploring the status quo from underneath, searching some oddity or hasty patch job to push against and upset things on the surface, if only for a brief moment. The goal is that the viewer will experience a spell of unsettledness in his our her routine, a thrilling sort of disturbance, and will glimpse some crack in the fabric, an interruption through which new information shines.

I say with much emphasis that the "something new" isn't the film itself.  I'm committed to this notion that, in addition to the images, stories, and poems that make up the subjects of these films,  each film is an allegory for more ambitious drives. The "something new" is arrived at when the audience is hospitable to these drives and reads the film not only for its content but the stuff outside its content -- messages traveling outside the form, alerting the viewer's regulation instincts that something is pushing, pulling, trying to distort the status quo. And the effect of this displacing interruption is, if one is open to the experience, an interesting ride. Best result is when the trip arrives at delight, even though the passage might first pass through gritty places and haunted ones.  

Is this big talk, or tough talk? I don't think so. Any literary or visual artist, no matter his or her level of skill, will cop to sending messages about the psychological, spiritual, and physical processes that travel on a layer just above the matter of the thing he or she has created. The inner drives of the individual or individuals working in collaboration are somehow present and interacting with the object, and this interaction is the messaging stuff that converts the object into art.       

And so why are filmmakers judged on matters of distribution and revenue? It is a situation prolonged by many festivals, as often as not festivals that call for "truly independent" or "maverick" filmmakers. Too many short film programmers are wearing a coat of two colors -- clashing ones. The programmer shows one side of the coat to micro budget filmmakers (those truly independent types) to lure entry. More specifically, the entry fee. The second color is flashed once the program is set; it is a lure to audiences. The business of "truly independent" and "maverick" falls away in favor of shorts that model the filmmaker's feature-length film or advertising ambitions. The "unteachable" stuff of the artist, that is the way of examining foundational moods and drives with surprising images  rather than all too familiar ones, unusual articulation, shot duration that doesn't fall in pace with established patterns -- all this gets overlooked for filmmakers rich enough to afford the vogue tools, such as the sepia or tobacco-toned filters employed on EVERY interior, not matter the mood, high contrast treatments added to any action sequence, even if it is just throwing a softball, and tri-toned coloring effects that can invest any film with the over-calculated quirkiness of a bank card commercial. Doesn't matter the banal storytelling, so long as it looks like something that might play for the bank ad or at the multiplex, and you're in.

I should immediately add that I participate in festivals and have done so for years. Many festivals do serve a civic purpose, and I identify with the ones that rate visionary aspects of motion pictures over commercial ones. Too often the trouble is that festivals want to expand. More venues, more sponsors, that sort of thing. I don't understand why growth of a festival is explicitly linked to the overly familiar interactions, editing beats, and "cinematic" looks of TV commercials. Why this idea that anyone making a short film aspires to an aesthetic status quo? 

Someone looking for fresh ideas in movies is right in one's decision to survey short films. We've hardly come to the end of the line in ways to convert feelings into meanings though motion pictures. You'll probably see a more focused look at contemporary values and rigorous experimenting in a program of shorts than one of feature films. And the best place once can find this sort of thoughtfulness on display is at smaller festivals, or curated events at galleries or museums. Beware those large institutions that boast "truly independent" or "maverick" ambitions; more often than not the short films in those programs trot out the emotion levels and imagery out of commercials you by pass with DVR.     

I realize I've been speaking in blanket terms and in a general way. But thanks to digital distribution and video-sharing sites, the reader may easily compare the latest short film winners at the institutional festivals with the inspired achievements of outsiders. I think the chief difference is that recent winners at institutional festivals work from a drive of earnestness, a feeling of wanting to belong - - and to be seen in that belonging. There is no strangeness in the vision, no play.

To play is the thing (If I may rework the phrase). Thomas Aquinas remarks that there are two kinds of act which have no ends outside themselves: contemplation and play. Most of us will agree that contemplation is essential but not gratifyingly cinematic. But play IS gratifyingly cinematic. I'm bored with the earnestness that gets laurels at festivals and want to see more play in shorts programming. The value of play doesn't depend on established traditions or even futurity. The sort of play I'm talking about here is intellectual play. Serious play. A sense of wonder that  has a subversive relationship with customs and traditions. Again, I am not speaking of an aggressively troublesome temperament. Rather, a temperament that presses against exclusivity to make a hole. An interruption that lets more light in.       

My rating for a good short film is one that stands fine on its own, not a feeling of a highlights reel. One that, like play, is its own sort of act. It is a complete work and not simply a calling card.

Anyone wanting to learn more about my projects, please visit the Tropic Pictures web site. Or find Tropic Pictures on Facebook.

Fundamentalism

Does two make a trend? I recently heard back from two festivals that, although the festival screeners liked the characterization and experimentation involved in my short film A WELL-PROVED HELPMATE, they felt the subject matter was all wrong for their festivals. The subject matter in question is folk preaching.

One of these festivals understood the character of Pontain Mitchell to be a Christian whack job, and took the movie as a spoof of Christianity. The other festival thought the movie too much like a sermon and advised me to consider entering only Christian content festivals.

A WELL-PROVED HELPMATE has had some success at festivals. It is not my intention to pout about two recent rejections.  In fact, I'm grateful for their honest summaries. I hope this blog entry allows me to reverse what appears to be a tend in some unanticipated judgments about the movie's content.

The movie is about a fictional character named Pontain Mitchell, who is a folk preacher. Pontain shows an uncanny gift for spiritual language. But only when he goes behind a curtain. He even has a different name behind the curtain - - 'Jabez'. Pontain can't explain why he, himself, must be hidden for Jabez's words to come forward. His gift divides him and makes him a peculiar figure in his community.

The authority invested in folk preaching isn't university or seminary. The authority is in the improvisational ability of the speaker and how effectively the speaker turns the listener inward to a meditation on foundational images.

Folk preachers often appear a villains in movies, standing in the way of tolerance and intellectual progress. Pontain, on the other hand, presents folk preaching as an aspect of intellectual history. His crisis in the movie is brought by a division. This division might read as wackiness or trouble. Indeed, Pontain doesn't seem stable in the polite sense. But he is open to searching himself and studying his traditions as a way to come to finer ideas about living in the world.

Exploring ancient traditions and stories of the world, whether Gilgamesh or Genesis, is important nourishment for the rigors of keeping pace with the acceleration of societies in our own time. Pontain isn't backwards for looking back at traditions and foundational images. He's worried about staying relevant, staying "whole" in the present tense.  I think of him rather in the tradition of Peter of Blois, who wrote in the twelfth century:

"However dogs may bark at me, and pigs may grunt. I shall always imitate the writings of the ancients: these shall be my study, nor, while my strength lasts, shall the sun find me idle. We are like dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants, by whose grace we see farther than they. Our study of the works of the ancients enables us to give fresh life to their finer ideas, and rescue them from time's oblivion and man's neglect."

You can find an online screener copy of A WELL-RPOVED HELPMATE here and by visiting the Tropic Pictures web site, www.TropicPictures.com.

 

Leading Other Lives

 Advocate,  a Dallas magazine,  profiles "serious moonlighters" in the August issue.  It is a feature about performers and writers and their often very different day jobs. My pleasure to be one of the featured multi-taskers in the Lake Highlands edition (Pg.34).

Link: http://www.virtualonlineeditions.com/publication/?i=218390#{"page":0,"issue_id":218390}

The Twenty-Two Hour Day

I have a full-time job and when I'm not there I 'm writing, shooting, or editing. It is a lively pace but can be difficult. As often as we can, my wife and I try to join our activities. On certain mornings she goes rowing on White Rock Lake, often starting out before dawn. Sometimes I drive out with her and take my camera.

These early morning shoots at White Rock Lake serve two short film projects. One is called TZANATAL, which is a collaboration between me and video-makers Jason Crow and Miles Ryan. TZANATAL is the examination of a miracle. More specifically, it focuses on the moment  when the awe in an awe-inspiring event begins to fade, and people go back to their routines. It is interesting to me that a time of awe is not sustainable. The status quo may be cracked open but it heals quick. Glorious or awful events only keep their shape a little while before the mind straightens them in memory, correcting course for a rational, "normal life." The second project featuring White Rock Lake has the un-cheery but striking title, THE PURITAN WAY OF DEATH. The voice over is a narrative poem that plays with some of the water and desert imagery in Puritan intellectual history -- some of the very ideas that lead to the start of this country.  For desert imagery, I am planning a day of shooting in Wichita Falls, a town that the arid plains will probably reclaim in my lifetime.

I'll put more about these new short films in later blog posts. What I want to discuss today is the pace of filmmaking and maintaing unrelated, full-time employment. My job type job is in retail. The plus is that I never have to take work home with me. I am free before or after shift to make movies. But the pace of balancing both often requires at least one day a week when I am woking nearly 24 hours.

I choose not to work an entire 24 hour day. For me, there is something demoralizing in it. I want the sense of one day ending so another can begin. A sense that life is not all work or not all striving to make films that get noticed. Not to say that every day is toil or joyless. I do enjoy the work of poetry and filmmaking, and, as I mentioned, my wife and I often coordinate activities - - a special pleasure. Nevertheless, there is that one day a week when I feel the need to work double-time, as it were, in order to move projects toward completion.

On the day the above video still was taken, I woke with my wife at 4:50 AM. I got my camera gear together, she her rowing gear, and we were both at our business at White Rock Lake before 6:00 AM. I shot at the lake for a couple of hours, then returned home to pick up the drone, a 4-propellor outfit that flies one of my GoPro cameras around. The city is extending the Katy Trail near my house and, although the work is not complete, a wonderful pathway between the trees has been created. I fly the drone through the trees to good effect. My work here takes about an hour.

Back home, I download the lake and drone footage. I start experimenting with the footage for the projects that I mentioned. I limit myself to an hour on this work. There is a larger, feature-length film I want to make. I vowed to do at least one thing a day toward realizing this project. And so I spend some time on the script.

By this point my wife is home from a post-rowing coffee outing with friends (this story occurs on a weekend.) We spend a bit of time together. But then I have to get ready for my job in retail. That shift begins at 3:30 in the afternoon.

When I come home from shift, it is nearly midnight. I catch up on correspondence (always tying to add to my mailing list) and then do some more work on my script. When I'm too tired to write, I look at pictures - - the footage I shot that day. Both the raw footage and the edited footage - - looking for things I may have missed on the first go. Soon enough, it is 3:00 AM.

Next morning I will be up at 8:00 AM to see my wife off to work and then look at footage again before my shift starts at the store at 11:00 AM.

Mine, of course, is not a unique situation. All the artists I know have day jobs and often those jobs are in unrelated fields, which disallows opportunities for serving employers and muses at once. I write all this down as experience, not complaint. Unless I miss my guess, mine is a typical portrait of the artist working in the U.S.A.

Tropic Pictures Now On Facebook

I Hope you will visit the Tropic Pictures Facebook page.

Mapping Paradise

Happy to have recieved a laurel today from Bare Bones International Film & Music Festival. My script for an un-produced short film called MAPPING PARADISE was an honorable mention. I'm grateful for the consideration - - big thanks to the organizers!

Invention v. Status Quo

I have a new article up on Glasstire. Here is an excerpt, which follows an idea put by W. H. Auden in his essay "The Dyer's Hand."

"If I make a drawing, then I am, in a sense, committing a political act. I’m communicating to my managers that, at that moment, I am not being managed; I am revealing an aspect of my own conscience in an improvisational way. If I invest my drawing with the authority of my managers, by, say, keeping to the middle-of-the-road expectations of advertisements and the familiar terms of social media, then I am turning myself over again to the status quo. I have not left the norms of control even though the original intention of my drawing was to carry myself past those parameters."

Please see the full article here.

Full House at the MAC

I'm grateful for the turnout this past Wednesday night at McKinney Avenue Contemporary - - standing room only! A fun and thoughtful night of movies, food, and conversation. This was the line-up: THE MOCK DESTRUCTION OF THE WORLD; DIOGENES; OTHER WOUNDS; WHEN THE WORLD WAS GREEN; A WELL-PROVED HELPMATE.

Up next: THE MOCK DESTRUCTION OF THE WORLD  and A WELL-PROVED HELPMATE go to Snake Alley Festival of Film in just a couple of weeks. This will be my first time at the Snake Alley Festival,  which is in Burlington, Iowa. Snake Alley has terrific buzz and I am looking forward to getting there.

For more about the films mentioned, please visit the Tropic Pictures site.

More Festival Updates

2014 is a terrific year for Tropic Pictures! Both A WELL-PROVED HELPMATE and THE MOCK DESTRUCTION OF THE WORLD are headed to Snake Alley Festival of Film in June.

Earlier this year, HELPMATE showed at Flathead Lake International Cinemafest. OTHER WOUNDS played at Magikal Charm Festival and at Wildcatters Exchange.

As for writing, the HELPMATE script was accepted at Richmond International Film Festival and the script titled MAPPING PARADISE was accepted at Bare Bones International Film and Music Festival.

Nest Wednesday, May 21, Tropic Pictures is showing five short films at The McKinney Avenue Contemporary in Dallas.

I'm grateful to each of these festivals and venues, and I look forward to making progress on new projects this Summer.

For more about the films I mentioned. Please visit www.TropicPictures.com

At The McKinney Avenue Contemporary, May 21, 7PM

I am excited about the upcoming screening of short films at The MAC in Dallas.  I'll be showing two new films, A WELL-PROVED HELPMATE and THE MOCK DESTRUCTION OF THE WORLD,  plus earlier works: OTHER WOUNDS; WHEN THE WORLD WAS GREEN; and DIOGENES. Please visit www.TropicPictures.com for plot details and festival information. Run time is about an hour. Event is free. Come for delicious snacks at 6:30 PM. Screening starts at 7PM.

The McKinney Avenue Contemporary is located at 3120 McKinney Ave. Dallas, TX 75204.

Open Archive

My review of "Open Archive," an exhibition devoted to five performance artists is the featured article at Glasstire.

The Voice's Folds

Glasstire has published my review of The Voice's Folds, a program of experimental films. Here is an excerpt:

The Voice’s Folds, a program of eight experimental short films by Morehshin Allahyari, Michael A. Morris, and Jenny Vogel, had a single screening, recently, at the gallery Two Bronze Doors in Dallas. The narrative of each film is literary and personal, and is presented as text or voiceover. The pictures are stylized; they allude to but do not necessarily describe the words we read or hear. The tension that arrives from this willful disconnect of word and picture is the aspect that defines these films as experimental. A set of objects, a situation, a landscape, or a chain of events become the formula of a particular emotion, one that is tonally similar if not completely descriptive of events in the narration. Throughout The Voice’s Folds, words and pictures travel their close but separate paths to a common goal: connect the viewer to the artists’ experiences concerning place and lifespan.

Please see this LINK for the full article.

An Evening with Karen Kevorkian & Richard Bailey: Richard Bailey

Poetry Reading at Malvern Books, Austin, TX

I'm very glad to have had the opportunity to read new poems along with my friend, L.A.-based poet Karen Kevorkian.  Our event was Friday, April 11 at Malvern Books in Austin, a glorious book store devoted to small presses.  We had a very good tun out - - big thanks to everyone who attended. And much appreciation for the folks at Malvern Books for their hospitality.

The Mock Destruction of the World

I'm excited to report the completion of my short film titled THE MOCK DESTRUCTION OF THE WORLD.  It will introduce you to Tommy Roach, an unusual toymaker, who finds grace in malfunction and creativity in decay. 

Pictorially, a science fiction story plays out that features the decay of nature, as described by glorious autumn colors, and the gleam of an automated modernity, as described by the sheer light bouncing off glass and steel, and peculiar glow of boulevards at night. Tommy's toys come to life, as it were, through lo-fi means. His voiceover is a mix of fanboy sci-fi enthusiasm, Anthropology 101, and a thoughtful, cosmological vision.

It is entirely a work of fiction, but plays around with a documentary feel.

This marks the third short film completed in just over a year. For more about other projects, please visit www.TropicPictures.com.

I'm presently involved in the preliminaries of my first feature film. Long stretch of road, ahead. But I'm excited about it.

Festival Updates

I'm thrilled to report that the short film "Other Wounds" will show on February 20th at Anthology Film Archives in NYC as part of the Magikal Charm Festival.  Last fall, "Other Wounds" showed at the Downtown Tyler Festival, which was a lot of fun to attend.

"A Well-proved Helpmate" showed last month in Montana at the Flathead Lake International Cinemafest. The script for "Helpmate" was a finalist at the Richmond International Film Festival.

I have a new article in the online arts journal Glasstire that discusses Paolo Sorrentino's "The Great Beauty" and is also a call for more site-specific art works and happenings in my home city of Dallas.
Here is a excerpt:

"Dallas, like any city, possesses landmarks capable of bouncing light in such a way, directing wind in such a way, cutting a figure against the sky in such a way as to summon an awe experience. Sometimes a lucky commuter will catch this sight on his or her own. An encounter with a group of artists making a sign to such phenomena will involve several more commuters in the experience. I argue Dallas-based artists can and should reclaim “awesome” with events and happenings that alter ordinary commuter time into periods of luminous details."

Please find the full article here:

"The Great Beauty" and a Call for Awesomeness in Dallas