Wholphin

AMERICAN OUTRAGE (excerpt from the documentary)
Directed by Beth Gage & George Gage

In the last few years, while we’ve all been busy “Freeing Tibetâ€? and dutifully monitoring human rights abuses against indigenous peoples half way around the world, filmmakers George and Beth Gage have been documenting equally infuriating human rights abuses taking place right in our own back yard. In a nutshell, for the past 30 years the U.S. government has been quietly, illegally, re-claiming land it had previously ceded to Shoshone Indians and then selling it off to various mining interests. Did you know about this? Neither did we. Despite the fact that the United Nations has passed a resolution condemning our government’s action’s against the Shoshone, actions which at times have involved physically roughing up 70-year-old Shoshone grandmothers, most of us have never even heard of this crisis. But after seeing the film, excerpted on Wholphin No. 5, it is hard to deny that it is a crisis of constitutional proportions, and one that, at the very least, deserves it’s own bumper sticker and the most celebrity-packed summer concert tour our nation’s celebritarian actorvists can muster. The following interview was conducted with George and Beth for the issue.

Filmmakers Beth and George Gage.

Q:Watching your film, I kept wondering why it takes an
independently produced documentary film for us to find out about the Dann
sisters?

Beth Gage: We’ve had a similar reaction from most of our audiences. People are amazed that this is going on today, in the United States, and they’re completely unaware of it. This is not by accident. Ed Bradley from 60 Minutes covered the story of the Dann sisters about ten years ago, but the episode never ran. It was deemed too “political.� This country is only too anxious to expose human rights offenses in other countries while ignoring the same abuses going on right under our collective noses.

Q: Did you experience any pressure or unwanted attention during filming from any people in dark sunglasses? Are your phones tapped? Will mine now be?

George Gage: One of the security men that very rudely escorted me off the Barrick gold mine property was the first “policeman� on the scene when Carrie Dann’s car mysteriously blew up later that afternoon. Luckily a young volunteer was driving it, on her way to pick up Carrie, and her fast reflexes saved her that day. A few months earlier there was an unexplained fire in the Western Shoshone Defense Project office. Also, Mary Dann’s death has never really been explained. Probably the most dangerous thing we’ve done is told you.

Q: Can you explain the role that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid played in this drama?

GG: We were told by key legislative staffers that Reid pushed the money bill for the Bush administration —he had at least one meeting with Karl Rove during that time. We didn’t feel it would be dangerous to bring this up in an election year, but it would raise very serious issues regarding collusion between industry and both parties. Reid’s not up for reelection this year so we could not be accused of trying to be political—just telling the story of what is happening. Regardless, neither political party is innocent of the abuses perpetrated on the American Indians.

Q: Do you consider yourselves filmmakers who document activists, or activists who make documentaries?

BG: I’m a storyteller drawn to accounts that inspire or infuriate, of indomitable spirit or gross injustice. George is drawn to powerful stories that offer dramatic visuals. The reporting about the Dann sisters in the New York Times really attracted our curiosity. We just couldn’t understand why the U.S. government was harassing two elderly ranching sisters in the middle of what appeared to be Nevada’s desolate desert.

Q: A friend of mine who saw the film thought the mention of Mary Dann’s death from a fencing accident seemed a little odd. He wondered if there might have been more to that story. Any comment?

GG & BG: We agree with your friend.

Q: When Carrie Dann spoke at the Native American Film Festival, her speech was an admonition against using a lot of toilet paper when going to the bathroom. What other important advice has she imparted to you?

GG: She’s brought so many things to our attention, but particularly the ongoing neglect and destruction of Mother Earth. Carrie and Mary try not to waste anything. When we went “pine nutting� with them, they counted the pinecones as they knocked them off the tree, and when they gathered them up, they counted again, making sure they found every single cone.

BG: Another thing they talk about a lot is “not taking all.� Whether it’s pine nuts that you leave for animals or water for the next seven generations, sharing is an important aspect of the Native philosophy. Their sharing was at the root of their problems with the European pioneers hungry for land. Also, Carrie talks a lot about gold and the damage that’s done to the earth to extract it. When you realize that 90 percent of gold is used for jewelry, you can’t help questioning the rape of the land that takes place in order to extract it.

Q: Do you ever have creative disagreements? If so, as a couple, how do you separate your creative disagreements from your personal relationship and vice versa?

GG: Sure, like when I don’t know an important answer is being delivered in an interview and I’m focusing on someone’s nose hair. You don’t want to be in the editing room when those moments suddenly appear on-screen.

BG: We usually only have disagreements in editing. George can’t stand an unaesthetic shot in the film, and I feel that sometimes it’s necessary for the story to work. Mostly we work together well; our strengths complement each other. We’ve been together so long, we can’t separate anything.

Excerpted on Wholphin No 4, Hershman Leeson’s brilliant, hybrid documentary-film, Strange Culture, in which the FBI mistakes artist, Steve Kurtz, for a bioterrorist, is now available in its full, 75-minute length on DVD from Docurama.

The Washington Post writes, “On May 11, 2004, an art professor in Buffalo named Steve Kurtz awoke to find that his wife, Hope, had stopped breathing during the night. Kurtz alerted the police, and when officers and an emergency medical team arrived they found some strange things in the home: Petri dishes containing bacterial strains. A mobile DNA extracting machine. Windows covered by tinfoil. And a flyer with Arabic writing on it. In post-9/11 America, such artifacts weren’t just weird, they were suspicious. Local officials immediately contacted the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, and the grieving Kurtz, who with Hope had co-founded an artist/activist collective called the Critical Art Ensemble, was plunged into a Kafkaesque nightmare that he still hasn’t escaped.

Strange Culture, a film that uses a mix of documentary footage, fictional speculation and animation to tell Kurtz’s story, does justice to his journey through the legal looking glass, and reinvents notions of nonfiction storytelling along the way. True to the mission of the Critical Art Ensemble, whose members use installations and performance pieces to critique biotechnology and genetically modified organisms, “Strange Culture” ingeniously marries medium to message, resulting in a provocative and often unsettling cinematic hybrid.”

Read the full review here

Buy the DVD here

Serious fans of experimental cinema have a few benchmarks among them – not just a fervent love of unusual work in filmmaking and performance – but good transportation and a librarian’s sense of investigation. You need to be a fucking art detective at times in order to find great events.

There are many established outlets for the experimental world but consistency is difficult. Museums and film festivals are often event based and deal with high profile press and premieres to get folks in the door. Underground microcinemas are great but bills are tough to keep up with and getting the word out to fans across a big city is not cheap or efficient.

Which is why the new venue Light Industry is so exciting. Based in Brooklyn, the multimedia space is being invented by stalwart experimental cinema champions Thomas Beard and Ed Halter. Focusing on a weekly schedule, each event will be organized by a different artist, critic or curator. You may see an artists’ own collection of shorts, or a writer’s favorite lost film, or a collection of silent boxing movies discussed by a curator working in an entirely different field.

“There’s such a rich and varied body of film and electronic art being shown in the city right now, but the audiences for, say, contemporary art or experimental cinema or new media don’t overlap nearly as often as they could and should,” says Beard. “I feel like there’s something really exciting about the prospect of having all this different work under one roof, with the freedom to do things that might not make as much sense in more institutional contexts.”

Even in New York where experimental worlds have flourished. Series like the Robert Beck and Ocularis are defunct, MOMA and the Whitney create a single explosion and push it for months, and the New York Underground Film Festival is having its last fest this April.

“Right now, there’s nothing happening like this on a consistent, weekly basis,â€? Halter adds. “Particularly in Brooklyn, where is where the majority of these artists and curators now live.”

Beard and Halter have been pillars for experimental work for years. Beard is formerly a Program Director of Ocularis and a programmer at Cinematexas. Halter programmed and oversaw the New York Underground Film Festival from 1995-2005, wrote for the Village Voice, currently teaches at Bard College and wrote the book Sun Tzu to Xbox: War and Video Games. Both are currently editing books on aspects of experimental film exhibition – Beard on Live Cinema: A Contemporary Reader and Halter on Small Cinemas: American Avant-Garde Film Exhibition from Ciné Clubs to Microcinemas with Andrea Grover.

All events will take a place on Tuesdays at 8PM in Industry City, an industrial complex in Sunset Park, Brooklyn that’s home to a cross-section of manufacturing, warehousing and light industry. As part of a regeneration program intended to diversify the use of its 6 million square feet of space to better reflect 21st century production, Industry City now includes workspace for artists.

Opening night March 25 features the program “The Blazing World,� compiled by Beard and Halter. Pitting the love-all world of the avant hippie with AA-meeting views of today, the compilation is stunning, from 70s work by Kurt Kren, Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson to a 2007 short by wunderkid Michael Robinson.

Get more info on all upcoming shows at Light Industry: www.lightindustry.org