Wholphin No. 5
The fifth issue of Wholphin features an adaptation of Michael Chabon’s short story “House Hunting,” starring Paul Rudd and Zoey Deschanel; the world champion, one-handed, blind-folded Rubik’s Cube master; the ancient art of tree-hanging; an Oscar-nominated animated short; an infuriating expose of the U.S. governments arm twisting, horse thieving assault on two Shoshone Indian grannies; giant paper airplanes; drunk bees; meat puppets; and a short film about Darfuri rebels literally smuggled out of Sudan in the back of a horse cart.
12 films. 155 minutes.
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LINER NOTES
DEATH TO THE TINMAN
Directed by Ray Tintori
U.S.A., 2007Q: How did you shoot the flying sequence in the film?
RAY TINTORI: My cinematographer, Rob Leitzell, built this beautiful Wright brothers-style airplane from scratch and we set it up in front of a rear-projection screen. Up until the last second we kept try¬ing to find footage of treetops flying by or clouds for the back¬ground. Eventually, we were run¬ning out of time and still hadn’t found what we wanted. I grabbed my DV camera and ran from the set to the library at my school. I went into the basement and filmed the screen of the micro¬fiche machine scrolling through newspapers really fast. I ran back to the set and hooked up the camera to the projector and that’s what we used for the back¬ground. It was a really quick, unplanned fix to the problem. But sometimes the stuff that’s the least planned ends up being the coolest. For the POV shot of the crash we took the same tiny DV camera and put it on top of a thirty-foot copper pole. Rob then ran around crashing the thing into an electrical tower for, like, three days. In retrospect, it was incredibly dangerous. But I still don’t think there was any other way to get that shot.
Q:What’s it been like showing the film to different audiences?
RT: The best screening we did of the film was at an evangeli¬cal college in California. I had no idea it was a religious school until about three minutes before the screening started. My first instinct was just to run. I thought they were going to be deeply offended by the film. But they absolutely loved it and really got into all the religious stuff in a way no audience ever had before. They had their own take on the film that just thrilled me. A girl said that when the Tinman embraces Jane at the end of the film, I had made a scene that wasn’t actually about what I thought it was about. She said the scene was actually a very straightforward illustration of God’s love for humanity. I thought that was great. We talked to them for about an hour and a half.
Q: What did you use for visual inspiration when planning the film?
RT: The two films that we talked about the most were The Last Laugh and Don’t Look Back. We also had about three hundred ref¬erence photos that my DP and I had pulled from photo books and Google image searching. I love to collect huge stockpiles of images when I’m making a project and I use them a lot when I’m writing. But other stuff came from more personal experiences. When I was six, my father got a paper cut on his eyeball when he was opening the newspaper. He had to keep both his eyes closed for a week in order for them to heal, and they put a bandage around his head, which made him look like a hostage. Eventually it got too creepy for my mother. She drew two eyeballs on his face, which made him look even stranger. For most of that week he was just this thing sitting alone in total silence with these really eerie unblinking eyes. The whole ordeal made a huge impression on me as a kid, and so I used it for the Meat Puppet character.
DRUNK BEES
Directed by Brent Hoff
Written and produced by Emily Doe
U.S.A., 2007The following is an excerpt from Development of an Ethanol Model Using Social Insects: III. Preferences for Ethanol Solutions by Dr. Charles I. Abramson of Oklahoma State University. We conducted a taste test of commonly used alcoholic beverages with the goal of examining whether harnessed bees consume sim¬ilar alcoholic beverages as humans. The experiment gave us the opportunity to gather additional data on the interaction between bees and consumer products. The alcoholic beverages were selected based upon an infor¬mal survey of popularity in the Stillwater, Oklahoma area. We selected thirty-three different beverages in the category of wines, beers, schnapps, liqueurs, and bourbons. The alcoholic beverages were compared with a 1.8-M sucrose solution.
PROCEDURE
There were 34 groups of 25 bees each. To control calendar vari¬ables, bees from different groups were run daily. The experimental session began by placing the harnessed bee on a platform where it was given a 2-?l “sip” from a microsyringe at 5-minute intervals. The experiment concluded when the bee refused to consume any more of the alcoholic beverage. Each bee was used as a single data point. The carbonation in the beers was removed prior to testing.
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
Table 1 shows the mean ?l consumed (and the standard devia¬tion), the volume of alcohol, and the sugar content. The asterisk represents drinks with a sugar concentration greater than 25 per¬cent. A one-way analysis of variance showed significant differ¬ences among the 34 drinks (F33,816 = 11.65, p <.001; eta2 = .32, power = 1.0). The consumption of the 1.8-M sucrose solution was 45 percent higher than the second most consumed drink—Dekuyper Buttershots. Consumption of buttershots was not sig¬nificantly different from the next five drinks of lower consump¬ tion. All other drinks made a homogeneous subset consisting of at least 18 drinks (Turkey HSD grouping). None of the twenty-five bees in the bourbon group drank Old Charter.
HOUSE HUNTING
Directed by Amy Lippman
Adapted from the story “House Hunting” by Michael Chabon
U.S.A., 2003When my husband and I were looking to buy our first home, we spent about a year going to open house after open house. The way in which he and I approached house hunting was very much like Christy and Daniel in Michael’s story: I was intent on finding someplace with “good bones,” a workable kitchen, enough bedrooms to accom¬modate our future family. My husband was interested only in playing detective, trying to figure out who was selling the house and why—what had gone wrong (or right) in someone’s life that now necessitated a sale. “There’re only male toiletries in the medicine cabinet and the kids don’t seem to have a lot of toys,” he’d whisper to me when we passed on a staircase. “I think it’s a divorced dad with part-time custody.”
At one showing, when I’d wandered off with the broker, my husband called to me from upstairs to come quick. Assuming he’d discovered some architectural feature that made the purchase a no-brainer, I charged into the master bedroom, and found him pointing at the night table. “I had that exact clock radio as a kid,” he said.
When I picked up Michael’s story collection Werewolves in Their Youth, “House Hunting” was the first story I read, entirely, I confess, because of its title. I felt an immediate connection with its characters and subject matter, and its ending completely sur¬prised me in the same way some Maupassant or O. Henry stories fall into place at the very last moment.
I’d never given any thought to directing a film before I read Michael’s story. I was working as a writer/producer in television, and viewed short filmmaking as a kind of stepping stone to the kind of career I already had. But I kept seeing the story play out in my head and began to think of how I might adapt it into a film. Having produced a network series for many years, I had an embarrassment of riches at my disposal: access to agents, actors, crew members, camera and editing equipment, film stock, as well as post-production facilities at Sony, where I’d been based for nearly ten years. I figured it was now or never. Through my own agent, I found my way to Michael’s agent, which led to a phone conversation with Michael. He was insanely incredibly gracious and nonproprietary about the story. When I asked him if he’d ever considered beginning the story earlier, establishing the couple and their marital dynamic a few houses before they arrive at the final house, Michael said simply, “Why don’t you try it?”
So I did. I created the vignettes at the first two houses, so that Daniel and Christy’s arrival at the final house is the culmination of a longer and more trying day of house hunting. It’s a bit of a red herring, this; it makes the story seem as if it’s exclusively about the young, shaky marriage. It allowed me to establish the broker’s odd behavior over time, so that his and the newlyweds’ personal lives collide and resonate only in the last seconds of the film. In Michael’s story, the couple has a history with Mr. Hogue—he’s an old family friend. I left that out so that there was no possibility of Daniel and Christy prematurely concluding why this man has brought them to this particular house.
My one regret about the film is that, by virtue of its not hav¬ing a narrator, it does not contain this passage: “There was nothing safe at all about marriage. It was a doubtful enterprise, a voyage in an untested craft, across a hostile ocean, with a map that was a forgery.” It was specifically this observation of Michael’s that made me want to make the film—to juxtapose the poignantly optimistic gesture of house hunting with the dawning reality that a house itself is not necessarily a home. —Amy LippmanAMERICAN OUTRAGE (EXCERPT)
Directed by George Gage
Written and produced by Beth Gage
Excerpt edited by Emily Doe with Brent Hoff
U.S.A., 2007Q: Watching your incredible film, I kept wondering why it takes an independently produced documentary film for me to find out about the Dann sisters and this injustice that has reached all the way to the UN.
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? Please explain. 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 meet¬ing 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.
MADAME TUTLI-PUTLI
Directed by Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski
Produced by the National Film Board of Canada
Canada, 2007Q: Where did this story come from? Is this the film you set out to make?
CHRIS LAVIS & MACIEK SZCZERBOWSKI: It isn’t at all what we set out to make, but having said that, we don’t remember what we set out to make. For sure it was meant to be more positive and whimsical, but somewhere in its third year it took a turn for the macabre, then into paranoia and relentless dread. That had every¬thing to do with the reality of our lives descending into madness from being too long estranged from sunlight and the company of positive, whimsical people.
Q: The puppet for Madame Tutli-Putli seems eerily human. Too human (by which I mean more human than some people I know). How was this achieved?
CL & MS: Any “humanity” that the puppet projects on-screen is being assisted or amplified by the audience’s own brains. We have a friend who believes that people who love silent films are essen¬tially narcissists who reincarnate themselves through the char¬acters, and this may very well be true. But credit must be given where it is due, to the amazing contribution of special effects art¬ist Jason Walker. He developed a new way of leading the eye through bewilderment into understanding and was uniquely talented for the task, being both a master portrait¬ist and animator in his own right. Humanity entails unpredictability, and we’ve found that if you wish your puppet to ever surprise you, you would do well to find her a muse. For us it was Canadian actress Laurie Maher, whose elegance and haunted beauty gave form to the performance of Madame Tutli-Putli in every frame.
Q: Where is Tutli-Putli now?
CL & MS: In a tiny black coffin.
Q: Why did you name her Madame Tutli-Putli?
CL & MS: The answer lies somewhere between wily plagiarism and inspired serendipity. Also, we liked saying it; it gave us an early clue to her personality.
Q: Have you yourselves had existential or out-of-body experiences?
CL & MS: One time, with Lakota Indians in a sweat lodge for twelve hours, singing in the mysterious language of peyote.
Q: You’ve both done a lot of multimedia work (music videos, illustrations, broadcast design, and the serial comic strip, The Untold Tales of Yuri Gagarin), did “Madame Tutli-Putli” begin as an animated film?
CL & MS: Yes! Some ideas require that they be made as an anima¬tion just as some call to be drawn with a pencil and others to be sculpted by knife. We always let the story dictate its medium, and this was certainly the case with Tutli from the first moment we saw her move in our minds.
Q: The sound design is amazing. Could you tell us a little bit about how it was done?
CL & MS: On this project we pulled in our two great friends David Bryant, of Godspeed You Black Emperor! and Set Fire to Flames, and Jean-Frederic Messier, the creative head of unbelievably good Momentum Theatre in Montreal. They worked their asses off and brought in some of the greatest musicians in our country, record¬ing in truly innovative, experimental ways. Pianos were burned and all.
Q: Are you eager to make another animation?
CL & MS: Never quite like this. Animation is a great method to pull off an illusion, but there are others, and we’re much more interested in finding new fusions between them than in becoming purists of any single school.
PIECE BY PIECE
Directed by Sachi Schuricht, Emma Thatcher, Grace Rathbone-Webber, and Isaiah Allekotte
Produced by West Side Filmworks
U.S.A., 2006SACHI SCHURICHT: Before making the film, I viewed speedcubers as really smart guys with a perhaps abnormal obsession with a strange hobby. After making the film, I found that many speedcubers are really smart guys, abnormally obsessed with solving the Rubik’s Cube—but I realized that they are as diverse as the rest of us. Some are young; some are old. Some work at Kmart; some work at Google. Some are tattooed; some are only six. They are all wicked cool.
Emma Thatcher: It has been so strange to see more and more cubes show up around me, especially at school. There are cubing clubs rising up everywhere! Whenever I see someone solving it I just laugh to myself because I have met people who can put their times to shame. I feel proud that I have been able to meet and learn from the masters of the cube. The cube culture is definitely on the rise again and it is very exciting to be part of its resurgence.
Jeff Castle of West Side Filmworks: When the students at my workshop decided to make this film, two thoughts came to mind. First, I wondered how a Rubik’s Cube could hold audi¬ence attention for ten minutes. I was also worried that none of the filmmakers could solve the cube or had an interest in solving the cube. But my concerns never materialized. The cube, it turns out, is a great central character. The colored squares, moving around at record-breaking speed, have a hypnotic effect on the viewer. And we were totally surprised by the great crunching and scraping sounds picked up by the shotgun mic. As for our team’s disinterest in the cube… One by one, as we met the cubers and lis¬tened to their stories of cube addiction, each of us fell prey. Every week someone new showed up for work with bloodshot eyes. “You bought a cube, didn’t you?” And then a sheepish “Yeah.”
ECHOS DER BUCHRÜCKEN (PARTS ONE AND THREE)
Directed by César Velasco Broca
Produced by Cormac Regan
Distributed by Ouat MediaSpain, 2004, 2006KINKY HOODOO VOODOO
PART ONEIt is the year 1997. Pre-human Saturnians have created a work camp for Spanish preteens. A Saturnian trade union decides to check the items produced in the site. In the meantime, an Ang¬lo-Saxon community on Earth receives increasingly perplexing reports. Historians from both civilizations are bewildered by the situation.
“Kinky Hoodoo Voodoo” was shot in the year 2000 in Valga¬ñón (La Rioja), in the same camp where the director used to spend his summer vacations as a kid. For ten days, Velasco Broca and his crew slept at the very same tents you can watch in the short and shot the film as a kind of activity with the kids at the camp. The main role is played by Rodrigo González, an eleven-year-old kid, and the Saturnian humanoids were played by thirteen members of the technical crew, including the director.
The short had a budget of about six thousand dollars.
AVANT PAVANT PETALOS GRILLADOS
PART THREE
The third and last panel of the Echos der Büchrucken audiovisual tryptich, inspired by a tale by Elier Ansgar Wilpert.Pre-production began with a $20,000 budget (half of that would go into developing the film and blowing it up to 35mm for¬mat) and the following goals: finding a mestizo bodybuilder; con¬vincing seven other bodybuilders to pile on top of each other and agree to have jelly spread over them; recruiting a group of blind persons; locating some ruins, an industrial laundry, a classic car, and an hypnotist; splashing a sculp¬tor facing an effigy of Philip K. Dick with twenty gallons of blood; and obtaining filming permits from the Casa do Brasil, the Madrid Costume Museum and the Ciencias de la Infor¬mación college at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid.
The man with over forty gallons of liquid poured on him in the last shot of the film plays his role in a state of hypnosis induced by the Iranian mentalist Arthur Rowshan, who purposely took a flight to Madrid that very same day from Barcelona.
Silvio Samuel Saviour, who plays the main character in the short, is one of the most famous bodybuilders in the world: he is the former Absolute World Champion, Mr. Olympia, and Mr. Universe. He speaks eight languages fluently and studied Aero¬nautical Engineering.
The extraterrestrial with the exploding eye was played by the director, Velasco Broca (nobody else wanted to risk it).
See more at: reganvelasco.com
ONE DAY WITH THE S.L.A.
Directed by David Martinez and Shane Bauer
U.S.A., 2007DAVID MARTINEZ: Shane, I know this is your second trip to Chad and Darfur. How was this trip different from your last one?
SHANE BAUER: In some ways it all felt so familiar, but in other ways it was incredibly different. Last year, all the destruction I saw was about three years old. This time, most of the remains of bombing, looting, and burning we saw was just a few months old. The government has stepped up the violence in a pretty sig¬nificant way. The other major change is that the rebel movement has splintered like crazy. Last year there were three factions, now there are more than fifteen.
The time that I felt the difference the most was when we were stuck in Bir Maza for five days waiting for a ride to get back to Chad. We had to turn down one truck after another because they would be passing through the territory of the rebel faction that signed a peace agreement with the government. Last year, they were the ones to take me into Darfur. This year, if they saw us they would have arrested us and put us in a Sudanese jail.
DM: Shane, looking back at the footage from Sudan, I see a lot of what look like they were difficult times for us and the folks around us. There we all are crouched under a plastic tarp in a torrential rainstorm, cover¬ing our gear as a sandstorm descends, riding a horse and cart for seven days through the Sahel on our way out. And yet I never remember either of us complaining or griping about it. We just went along. Why do you think that is?
SB: Nothing seemed all that difficult at the time. Okay, maybe the beating sun at high noon after we had been on the horse cart for six hours was an exception. For the most part, though, I just felt like we were going with the flow with what was around us, liv¬ing like everyone else did. I guess we didn’t really have a choice, but I wouldn’t have done it any other way. I think the main reason that it didn’t seem grueling was because everyone always pulled together to get things done. We constantly remarked to each other how the culture in Sudan and Chad was the opposite of our own. I remember a few times when you got frustrated about people not letting you “pull your own weight.” In Sudan, there are so many pressures against going it alone. Everyone is in it together. Everyone shares the burdens and rewards.
When we first started on this project, you expressed some res¬ervations about getting involved in a film about Darfur. You said the issue was already too “spun.”
DM: I was definitely apprehensive about getting involved. You and I both feel that the Darfur issue has been taken up by many groups for the wrong reasons. There are folks that like a simple conflict with a clear “good” side and an even clearer “evil” side, especially if the latter are Arabs, or the Chinese government.
The question becomes: why is this conflict receiving so much atten¬tion? Darfur as a global media and solidarity issue is often used by the West to divert attention from places where they—specifically the United States—have lost all legitimacy as a pacifying, civilized force. Of course I’m talking here about Iraq, Palestine, and most recently Lebanon and Somalia. Basically everywhere. So why does the one country in the region where the U.S. has little or no influence become the human rights issue of our time? I think that the global power game for Africa cannot be overlooked here.
Remember Condoleezza Rice’s statement about the Israeli bombing of Beirut: “Perhaps these are the birth pains of a new Middle East”? No one has suggested that about Darfur, and they won’t, because when it comes to Africa the West wants to be seen as a savior and a liberator, when that has never, ever, been its role, in Africa or anywhere else. Mahmood Mamdani’s essay “The Politics Of Naming,” about the Darfur solidarity movement in the U.S. is essential reading for understanding all of this and is highly recommended.
SB: So you don’t believe in foreign intervention in Darfur at all?
DM: That’s not what I meant; one very constructive type of intervention would be to kick the World Bank and the IMF out of the entire continent of Africa for good. Those two institutions are responsible for as much dev¬astation on the continent as any war. Then the international debt of every country in Africa should be erased. I didn’t come up with these ideas; they have been proposed for some time. The group 50 Years Is Enough has some good literature that explains all this much better than I can.
While we’re at it we should also close every U.S. military base on the planet, and then prohibit Bono from traveling to Africa ever again…
But still the question has to be asked: What if foreign military inter¬vention is the only way to halt the violence in Darfur? What if the only answer is one that involves troops, air power, and force of arms? In that case I think you and I would both agree that it should definitely not be the U.S. or NATO that performs it. That would only make things much worse in the long run. What about you, Shane, what do you think about intervention?SB: This is something I’ve struggled with ever since I first visited Darfur. Like a lot of leftists in the U.S., I was always opposed to military intervention because I see how this country constantly uses it to push forward an imperialist agenda. I am still opposed to U.S. intervention, anywhere.
But being in Darfur has led me to question whether it is justifiable to be principally opposed to all military interventions in any situation. You and I both know that everyone we met in Darfur wanted intervention. I would be lying if I said that if I was in their position, I wouldn’t want the UN to intervene so the government stopped bombing my village and sending in its militias after me and my family. Very few people in this country have any idea what it’s like to be hounded by militias or live under constant threat of having their villages bombed. To say that nothing should be done about that is arrogant, privileged, and wrong.
So yeah, I think there should be intervention in Darfur by countries that don’t have ulterior motives. Still, it is important to understand the problems around intervention. Many Darfuris see themselves in the throes of a revolution, fighting for political and economic justice. A peacekeeping mission is going to make their ability to keep fighting for those things very difficult. Peacekeep¬ers will probably keep the government from bombing villages, but in a weird way it will also help the regime keep its hold on power. With thousands of troops on the ground stopping fight¬ing from all sides, politicians will be able to relax a little more in Khartoum and will have no reason to concede to the rebels’ demands, which most civilians strongly support.
What is better: a major decrease in violence against civilians, or to continue fighting until they get the political and economic justice they deserve? That is a complicated question, one that I don’t think anybody can answer but Darfuris themselves.MONUMENT VALLEY FLIGHT ATTEMPT
Directed by William Lamson
U.S.A., 2007Q: How did you get the airplane out there? Was it strapped to the top of a car or assembled on location? What was made it of?
WILLIAM LAMSON: The plane was made of half-inch foam core and wood. I have a ’91 Honda Accord wagon that the eight foot plane just barely fits into, and I actually drove cross-country with it, from N.Y.C. to L.A. But that plane was destroyed while shoot¬ing another video in Joshua Tree, so I ended up having to build another one for this video.
Q: Did you do more than one take?
WL: I did two takes. It took about forty minutes to retrieve the plane and then get back on top of the mesa, not to mention the fact that the plane was getting pretty beat up.
Q: Where is it now? Can it still fly?
WL: It probably could still fly, but in Santa Fe, after shooting another video, I decided that I did not want to drive home with this mangled plane obscuring my rearview mirror, so I destroyed it.
Q: How did you find that location? Where was the camera?
WL: Monument Valley was kind of an obvious choice. Since the proj¬ect is about grand human ambitions/failures, the location refers to both the heroic actions that take place in John Ford Westerns and the idiotic schemes that Wile E. Coyote would attempt. So I knew I wanted to shoot it there, but I found this specific mesa quite by chance. I approached several Navajo Indian guides in the parking lot of the Monument Valley visitor center and asked them who would take me up to a mesa where I could launch this plane. They started talking about getting permission from the tribe leaders, and I was feeling pretty down on the whole thing until one of them suggested I talk to Daniel, a Navajo Indian whose family had land on a mesa ten minutes away. Daniel agreed, and half an hour later we were loading rocks into the back of his pickup, so that the tires would grip the steep incline up the backside of the mesa. Once on top, it was clear that this cliff was perfect, since it jutted out away from the rest of the mountain and was slightly lower, enabling an elevated camera angle.
Q: How many types of paper airplanes can you make? Have you ever tried that Star Trek Enterprise one? That one is hard to make but flies really well if you do it right.
WL: I can probably make two types of paper airplanes, though I am only sure that one could fly. The Star Trek one sounds cool, but I have stayed clear of complicated designs ever since a humili¬ating experience in my second-grade paper airplane contest. My homemade plane design went straight into the ground. If only there had been an award for the shortest route to Earth.
Q: On the surface your work seems to be playful and humorous, and yet many pieces strike me as having a deeper undercurrent of wistful poignancy. It’s like your art is a symbolic homage to the ongoing futility of human ambition. Here’s my question: If I went around talking like that, could I become an art critic? And while we’re on the subject, what is the most obscure review your work has ever received?
WL: I think you have a new calling. Most obscure review, that’s a tough one, since the vast majority of the “press” I am getting come from blogs, and it’s hard to say which would be the most obscure. I remember translating a Japanese blog once which described my work as “nonsense videos.” Not sure if that was the correct translation, but it’s definitely my favorite.
Q: Would you describe yourself as a video artist?
WL: Not really. Since I make videos, photographs, and sculptures, I am actually starting to see myself as more of a performance art¬ist, since that is what underlies all of the work.
Q: How do you feel about the concept of scarcity in art?
WL: I have mixed feelings about it. I have no problems with the fact that photography, video, printmaking, and any other media that can be reproduced infinitely must be made artificially scarce for the art market to function. However, what annoys me is the artificial scarcity created around the reproduction of art for view¬ing purposes as opposed to ownership purposes. The Internet should have made this problem go away, but galleries and muse¬ums have continued to restrict the availability of reproducible art online, probably because they are worried that it will prevent people from going to see it. I hate this, and it’s especially the case with video. Often galleries will show JPEGS of paintings, sculptures, and photographs because it’s clear that it’s not the same thing as the actual work, but rarely do you see them show anything but a still from a video. A still is not the video, nor is a low-res QuickTime, but the low-res QuickTimes give me a much better idea of what the person is doing than a still does. I make all of my photographs and videos available online because I want people to see them, and I love that it does not cost them anything! It’s free to enjoy in a Web-based context. If people want to own it, then they have to deal with the art market and the high prices that it demands for ownership. But as long as we have the Internet, seeing a reproduction should remain free.
Q: What are you working on currently?
WL: Right now I am working on a series of short video actions in my studio that involve exploding balloons, BB guns, and bananas. It’s all I think about.
Visit williamlamson.com for more.
JOHN “KUNG FU” WANG
Directed by Dan Vest
U.S.A., 2007Q: How did you first hear about Mr. Wang?
DAN VEST: He is an avid Mah-jongg player and often plays at my wife’s home game.
Q: I heard he is not at all hesitant about using his tree-hanging/headlock skills in the real world. Is that true?
DV: He definitely has a reputation for brutality in and out of the ring. This includes some real-world fighting—mostly justified, some¬times much less so. (He laughs when he tells the story about when he broke a man’s ribs for cutting in line.) But John claims this reputation comes mostly from the demonstrations he gives at martial arts events. He says that when you demonstrate a technique publicly, sometimes the volunteer will resist your technique. “This leaves only two options: 1. Your demonstra¬tion will fail, or 2. You have to use actual force. If you use actual force, sometimes people get hurt.” Needless to say, he wasn’t about to let his demonstrations fail.
Q: Were you ever worried for your safety during the filming?
DV: Within a few minutes of meeting John for the first time, he decided, without warning, to demonstrate his headlock on me. That was frightening. When you’re in that headlock, he has your entire body under his control and it feels like your head is in a vise or under an three or four times, for a few seconds each time, and you could see that his arm was already about to start bleeding.
Q: Did you ever look it up to see if this was actually a real ancient mar¬tial arts technique?
DV: Not with much success, no. It is a rare technique that is exclu¬sive to the Shuai-Chiao (Chinese wrestling) system that originated in the Baoding region of China. But John’s credibility on this point is difficult to dispute. He is a disciple of the legendary Grandmaster Chang Dong Sheng—a.k.a. “King of Chinese Wres¬tling,” the “Iron Butterfly”—who was famous for the same move. John has demonstrated the technique in tournaments and seminars worldwide. He is universally acknowledged as among the greatest teachers and practitioners of Shuai-Chiao in the world.
Q: What’s your next project?
DV: A documentary short on metal detecting: “Beep. Beep. Dig.” It’s not any more exciting than you imagine, but it’s a lot funnier.
Interview with John Wang, subject of the film
Q: What else have you invented besides the right mouse-click that we might know of?
John Wang: Mirror inverse function in an interactive graphic system; graphic highlight adjacent to a pointing cursor; object movement feedback; twenty-seven others.
Q: What’s the best way to get out of a headlock?
JW: Use your free hand to pull back your opponent’s forehead; Spin your body to drag your opponent down; Hold on to his waist to pick him up; Pull on his knee and push him forward; Step in front of him and throw him over.there’s nothing you can do but hope that when he throws you, it’s not onto something hard.
Q: Have you tried it yourself? Is he exaggerating the whole “arm tearing and bleeding” thing?
DV: I did, and I was immediately glad I had done so out of my subject’s sight. I was unable to lift myself up at all, but the mere attempt was painful. I saw one of his lower-level students practice
JOHN “KUNG FU” WANG
Directed by Tom Dale
U.K., 2007Q: Why drums?
TOM DALE: I was always quite curious about what motivates some¬one to hit things for pleasure, which in some ways is what drum¬ming boils down to for me. When I’m watching drummers in bands I often find myself asking questions like “Do drummers feel the lack of a strong father figure” or “Is this all about asserting their alpha status over others?” I had always associated drums and playing them with a kind of primal release that is even now, for all our sophistication, present within us. Normally when you play the drums, the harder you strike them, the stronger they kick back and the louder they sound. So I wanted to see how the use of an unnecessary amount of force on them would rearrange things not just in terms of their form but also in our empa¬thy for them as the receivers of this beating. Action films have accustomed us to the dispensableness of people and property, so I wanted to see if I could use destruction in a way that would make the consequences of this action explicit. Setting the drums up in a forest was not only for practical reasons but also to locate all the forces in this work together: nature, hunting, predators, etc. The thunderstorm that occurred during filming is all the more welcome and apposite in this context.
Q: Are you a musician?
TD: Funnily enough I used to be a drummer, but I can’t seem to find my drums at the moment.
Q: Where did you get the gun? Who did the shooting?
TD: Over here in the U.K., you need not only a gun but also your own land to shoot on, so I befriended a farmer, which is no mean feat, and suggested to him that we shoot a drum kit.
He seemed keen to shoot anything with a pulse and was only happy to oblige, although he did ask if the reason that I wanted this drum kit shooting was because it was dangerous.
Farmer David and I tucked into the Pearl kit with a shared gusto. I hadn’t really done much shooting before and was a little reluctant to do any, but after the shock of the first shot wears off you soon find yourself stepping up again pretty quick. This was both a relief and a little disconcerting for someone coming from a family of Quaker pacifists and conscientious objectors. But I guess it is also appropriate considering my reason for making the film was just this. I find myself more and more in agreement with Werner Herzog’s view of nature not necessarily being some¬thing having a benevolent equilibrium.
Q: Your marksman drags a bit on his high hat. The drummers in my old band often did that also. Why is it so hard to find a good drummer?
TD: Well I think that’s been well documented in Spinal Tap. They are very combustible people.
Q: How many guns did you use? Of what caliber? And how many bullets were expended?
TD: Farmer David and I were both “packing,” so I think that means two guns. In metric it was a twelve bore shotgun, which I think in imperial is the equivalent of an M16. At least that’s what the farmer told me. We “relocated” 125 cartridges into that kit.
Q: What was the distance from gun to drum? Where did you shoot this?
TD: Not far enough as far as the kit is concerned. Probably about ten meters. We shot it out in Essex, just outside London, where this kind of activity blends into the surroundings.
Q: Did you have a permit?
TD: Let’s just say that if it’s paperwork you want we can find you some, okay?
Q: Who is your favorite drummer?
TD: I was hoping you would ask that. They are as follows: John Bonham on Physical Graffiti, Tony Williams on E.S.P. and Filles de Kilimanjaro, Mike Bordin on We Care a Lot, Billy Cobham on Birds of Fire, and Zakir Hussain on Natural Elements… Shall I continue?
Q: I understand you are about to release a five-DVD numbered edition of the full version of “Shot Drum.” The edition will sell for ten thousand pounds a piece, correct? Where can interested collectors buy it?
TD: The bold and forthcoming collectors can march right up to my website, www.daletom.com, and contact me through there. The shy romantics can contact the Raster Gallery in Warsaw at www.raster.art.pl.
Q: What’s next for you?
TD: I’m currently making fire—in roughly the size and shape of a figure—walk. I’m then filming its progress from nature’s realm into that of technology and the city. This is a continuation of the questioning in the drum piece that also stems back to a film I made in 2006 called “Five Interlocking Rings” which was a col¬lage of footage from the Olympic opening ceremonies of the last twenty years or so. I’m also about to finish a rather drawn out film about Evel Knievel, who had a talent for drawing our attention to the difficult challenges that life throws up and then traversing them. He is a clear example of how in the wrong hands the idea of simple solutions to complicated problems can begin to look like those of the national socialists.
FILMMAKER BIOS
Ray Tintori is a 24-year-old director from Brooklyn. “Death to the Tinman” was his undergraduate thesis film for Wesleyan University’s Film Studies program. The film premiered at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival where it received an Honorable Mention for Short Filmmaking. It also played in the South by Southwest Film Festival and New York Film Festival, among others. His previous film “Jettison Your Loved Ones” premiered at the 2006 Slamdance Film Festival. Mr. Tintori currently resides in New York where he is writing his next film, as well as writing scripts for other people’s major motion pictures, and directing music videos for pop groups like MGMT.
www.raytintori.comChris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski
Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski recently completed their first professional film, Madame Tutli-Putli, produced by the National Film Board of Canada. In addition to their role as filmmakers, Chris and Maciek wear many hats-as animators, sculptors, collage artists, screenplay writers, and art directors. In 1997 they founded Clyde Henry Productions, a Montreal-based film and production company specializing in multimedia, stop-motion animation and visual effects. They have received acclaim for their award-winning illustrations, music videos and broadcast design, and provoked a cult following for The Untold Tales of Yuri Gagarin, a serial comic strip published in Vice magazine.
www.clydehenry.comAmy Lippman
Amy Lippman was raised in Los Angeles and San Francisco. After graduating from Harvard College, she won the Mademoiselle Magazine fiction award, and began writing and producing for television. She co-created the long-running FOX television drama “Party of Five”, as well as the series “Time of Your Life” and “Significant Others”. Her short film, “House Hunting”, based on the story by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and screened at festivals all over the world. She most recently wrote and produced the HBO series “In Treatment” and wrote an adaptation of Galt Neiderhoffer’s novel “A Taxonomy of Barnacles” for Revolution Studios.
Westside Filmworks
West Side Filmworks provides specialized instruction in filmmaking for students ages 15 through 19. We are located in the Saul Zaentz Media Center in Berkeley. Our small summer workshops focus on documentary filmmaking. Students work alongside Academy Award winning producers and directors to create focused content for reels, college applications, and festivals. West Side Filmworks was created by Jeff Castle and Jigar Mehta. Jeff is currently the Program Director of Video and Broadcast Production at Albany High School in the East Bay. Jigar, a graduate of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, is a video producer for the New York Times.
For more info visit:
Sachi Schuricht is a student at Colgate University in central New York, studying Psychology, Philosophy, and Film. She is excited by the fact that she has no idea what she will pursue after college-perhaps academia (just kidding), perhaps filmmaking, perhaps professional speedcubing.
Emma Thatcher is a senior at Carondelet High School in Concord, California. She is planning on majoring in film production in college with the hopes of pursuing a career in the film industry. In her spare time she enjoys watching movies, camping and playing guitar.
Grace Rathbone-Webber is a student at UC Santa Cruz planning on majoring in film. She hopes to follow this path to a career in the film industry.
Isaiah Allekotte is currently studying film production at Chapman University in Orange, California. His best time for solving the 3X3 cube is 7 minutes, 28 seconds (while using the little instruction booklet). Since making this film, Isaiah has gained new admiration for puzzle-solvers of all kinds.
David Martinez and Shane Bauer
David Martinez lives in San Francisco where he makes movies, writes and plays music. His most recent film is called 500 Miles To Babylon about Iraqi civilians and independent journalists in occupied Baghdad. www.graffitifilms.com, or simply moleverde@riseup.net.
Shane Bauer is a freelance journalist, photographer, and Arabic speaker living in Oakland, California. His work has been published in the US, UK, Canada, and the Middle East in publications such as The Nation, The San Francisco Chronicle, Aljazeera.net, and others. He can be contacted at shane@shanebauer.net.
George and Beth Gage
Beginning in the 1970’s, George and Beth Gage, as director and producer respectively, made hundreds of television commercials, including two honored in the U.S. CLIO Hall of Fame. During that time, they also produced and directed two theatrical feature films, “Skateboard” and “Fear in a Handful of Dust.” In the 1990’s they moved themselves and their company, Gage & Gage Productions, from Los Angeles, California, to Telluride, Colorado, to focus their energies on films with a social conscience. Since then, working together, they have produced six documentaries, including most recently, “American Outrage”.
Serge Labesque
Serge Labesque, originally from France, was a meteorologist before moving to California. He now lives in Glen Ellen, CA, and is a Technical Director with Kreysler and Associates, a manufacturer of composite products. As a passionate beekeeper, Serge maintains bee colonies in Sonoma County. His goal is to maintain bee colonies by relying on the natural strength of local strains of bees, by completely eliminating the need for antibiotics or chemical compounds for pest and disease control, and through techniques that allow beekeepers to be self-sufficient practitioners. Serge is an active member of the Sonoma County Beekeepers’ Association and was the recipient of the Western Apicultural Society 2006 Thurber Award for Inventiveness.
César Velasco Broca and Cormac Regan
The author of an unsettling work, César Velasco Broca made his debut as a director with Footsie, a multi-awarded short that garnered him recognition in the Spanish underground scene. Currently, as part of his work with Cormac Regan at Regan & Velasco Inc., he combines his cinematographic work with the production of advertising spots for some of the most prominent Spanish agencies. He also finds the time to manage the electroacoustic music label Batan Bruits. Velasco Broca’s main obsessions are Spanish folklore, extraterrestrials and fetishism.
Cormac Regan obtained a journalism degree at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid and worked in the field for several years. Regan has also founded Setpoint, a cinematographic locations and production services company which has worked in campaigns by Nike, Playstation, Vogue, Redbull, Atlético de Madrid, etc. And finally, he is the associate producer of Nacho Vigalondo’s first feature film - Los cronocrimenes (Timecrimes).
www.reganvelasco.comCarson Mell
Arizona native Carson Mell currently lives in Hollywood, California. His short films have been screened at Sundance, CineVegas, and the Los Angeles Film Festival. You can see more of his work at www.carsonmell.com.
Dan Vest
Dan Vest studied Logic and Philosophy of Language for several years in graduate school before he realized that he couldn’t care less about the problem of meaning for demonstrative expressions, and that he didn’t give a shit about the soundness or completeness of so much as a single algorithm. So, filmmaking is him doing something that he gives a shit about.
William Lamson
William Lamson is a Brooklyn based artist who works in video, photography, performance and sculpture. He received his MFA from Bard in 2006 and his work has been shown at P.S.1, The Brooklyn Museum, Pierogi Gallery and the Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe among others.
www.williamlamson.comTom Dale
Tom Dale was born on the edge of the English lake district in 1974. He is an artist who reluctantly became involved with film making when he was offered a job editing promos for an American film channel after he had finished a 2 year arts scholarship in Warsaw, Poland. Currently, he works with both objects and film, and is never more satisfied than when these mediums conspire to both complement and undermine one another. His videos, sculptures and installations have been shown through out the UK, Europe and most recently in the U.S.A. at the Getty Museum, in the show “Reckless Behavior.” His work is held in a number of public and private collections.
www.daletom.com