film – Ken Rodgers

May 18, 2013

On Film Versus Digital

Betty and I are off venturing in the foothills of Northern California on the beginning of another screening tour. One of the things we like best about traveling like this is how we get to see so much of the US that we might not be able to visit otherwise. We get to meet people we probably would never have met. We get to shoot video and take photographs. We get to SEE.

The last few days we’ve conducted a prolonged and detailed discussion about film and video and photography, something we seem to do a lot. Each of us is toting around multiple cameras and we have been taking in and recording what we have discovered. Beside our screenings, paramount on the agenda have been a couple of days shooting photos in the Mono Lake Basin and Yosemite country. We are old travelers in this part of the world but remain amazed and hypnotized by nature’s variety. Tufa tubes like soft, crumbling teeth, and new aspen leaves the color of Bearss limes, snowy peaks far above the tree line, ice on the high meadow tarns, spots of dirty snow (it’s a dry year here and the portents are for FIRE).

Tufa at Mono Lake in Sketch Mode on Samsung, Camera 360. Copyriught Ken Rodgers, 2013

On Wednesday, Mono Lake wore a variety of hues, some like high mountain lakes in Idaho, some reminding me of the Mediterranean off the southwest coast of Majorca in the channel between Isla Dragonera and the fishing village of Sant Elm. Besides dental imagery, the tufa formations reminded me of hoodoos in the south of Utah and as Betty says, the ancient remains of Roman villas on the west coast of Italy.

In Yosemite, the moisture content is dangerously low and the threat of fire will hang over the Sierra until major rain/snow shows up and drops heavy doses of relief. Despite the lack of snow, the meadows are the color of fresh mornings and the waterfalls thunder and thump, throwing echoes into the walls of the canyons.

Some of the conflict between film photography and digital photography just got resolved around our outfit. We used to shoot film. Then we put our old Pentax K1000 film cameras away with all the lenses and the accoutrements of a past artistic age and moved on to digital cameras which we have to upgrade. Upgrade. Upgrade because the ones we own right now just…they just don’t….they just can’t…we don’t like….

We got our K1000s reworked, renewed; bought some film…yes it still exists…and we’ve been taking photos of the country with our new old cameras. Black and white film is our milieu and that means it is about form and shape and shades of gray. It’s also about planning the shot, thinking of aperture and shutter speed and light, things that you think of too with digital, but film is finite in a number of ways—how many shots on a roll, how much they cost—not like digital where you just throw away what you don’t like at no apparent cost, although I suspect that with the act of shooting a photo there is a cost in time and effort and something more that cannot be regained, something about artistic moments lost and never again showing up. Because each moment, each shadow, each glint of light on a distant piece of quartz, the osprey pair on the tufa formations, the coyote at Glacier Point, the mule deer in Yosemite Valley, all these things in composite will not occur again, just the same way, in our short lives. Too, with film there is something very satisfying about the sound of the film advancing and the click the shutter makes when you take that photo. Digital doesn’t do that although they try to make the cameras so that they might sound that way. But it is not the same.

We still shoot digital too, and especially if the scene, like Half Dome over the rush of Merced River rapids, is about the vibrant colors of May in the mountains, yellows and greens and blues, not black and white and gray. We use our cell phones too and shoot both still and video. Hopefully we will look at what we have created as not just shooting photos for the act of shooting photos, but shooting photos for the aesthetic. For what it means, whether black and white or red and blue, or digital or film or….

September 12, 2012

On Tippah County, Mississippi and Boston’s North End

I am sitting here in central Maine thinking about radiant hardwoods that glow like neon in the waning light of evening. Brilliant, possessive reds and oranges and yellows crowd my inner vision, but we are in Maine too early, so the only colors here are summer green and the hinted ends of the maples barely kissed by the cool lips of autumn.

When I last blogged, I promised to be prompt with reflections of our travels, but the travel itself has battered us a bit and our schedule of BRAVO!’s film screenings, although heady and satisfying, have drained us of energy.

My last blog was created in Memphis, Tennessee on August 20, 2012, and since then we have motored east and north approximately 2700 miles over 23 days including a trip to one of my paternal ancestral homes in northern Mississippi where we bought fat red bell peppers from a retired school teacher at the farm market in the parking lot of the old Tippah County courthouse in Ripley and visited with the historical museum director about families with the last names of Adams and Banta and Rodgers.

We spent a day with a Van Dyke-bearded National Park Service Ranger at the Chickamauga Civil War battlefield in northwestern Georgia, just a few miles south of Chattanooga, Tennessee. The ranger was a man caught in a love grip with history, and he dramatically sashayed and bent and swayed and delivered other gesticulations about history, life and death on the battlefield.

The heat stayed away as we journeyed east and we were refreshed as we drove through the fog on the Blue Ridge Parkway of North Carolina, recalling books like Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain, a story of the Civil War and that dire tale certainly slipped and bobbed in my brain as we cast our eyes on the gorgeous layers of ridges that ran off east and west, the greenery seething with the mists. I recalled, too, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ novel The Yearling about a young boy and his pet deer named Flag. The deer population in the Blue Ridge country is prodigious (as we saw it) and the harsh nature of the epiphany of Rawlings’ story seemed to fit right in with the Civil War milieu that is still so important in the American south of 2012.

In Washington, DC, we stayed with Betty’s cousins Chuck and Donna Dennis and journeyed to Richmond to visit our old friends Lee and Betty Plevney. We attended a Khe Sanh Veterans reunion where we again screened BRAVO! to over 130 enthusiastic viewers. We journeyed to Colonial Williamsburg—a most wonderful place—and toured the Revolutionary War site at Yorktown and the archaeological dig at Jamestown where Virginia’s first settlers managed to survive. Old tales from high school literature about John Rolfe and Captain John Smith and Pocahontas erupted into a time capsule reality as we trod across storied ground by the waters of the wide James River where they lived their lives with osprey and belted kingfishers and fiddler crabs.

Then on to Boston through rural Pennsylvania and New York. We again screened the film and enjoyed a tour of Boston from our wonderful host, Marie Mottola Chalmers, who snaked us through the delightful warrens of the red- bricked North End, redolent with the history of Paul Revere and the Old North Church, Samuel Adams and Faneuil Hall, the Boston Tea Party, the Boston Massacre, Peter Agoos’ modern sculpture titled “Art Imbalance.”

Boston Tea Party, Chickamauga, Civil War, Yorktown, Khe Sanh, Boston Massacre; it seems I am encapsulated by war. Is it only me, filled up with a memory of death and mayhem, who lives in the cocoon of war?

We are now in Calais, Maine, pining for the colors of fall. But we are early and the weather is quite balmy and so, it seems, we need to head north. On to Nova Scotia and Cape Breton.

March 23, 2012

On Baltimore, Deruta and Graffiti

If your back’s against the wall, turn around and write on it.

From http://www.graffquotes.com/

Like a war zone. Coming into Baltimore on Amtrak as the late October sun sneaked over the southern horizon. Barbed wire and concertina on tops of fences. Graffiti. On walls. On railroad cars moored on the spider web of tracks. Hopper cars, gondola cars, tank cars, all paint slashed, zig-zagged, tagged. Bombed with spray cans. Railway passenger cars, too. Busted windows and street art rage spray painted all over the sides.

As we chugged on towards Dover, Delaware, I wondered why the cops failed to halt the property damage. Some of the graffiti was interesting to look at. Some I tried to cipher. I even admitted to myself…some of it was almost…beautiful.

A year later, looking for majoliche ceramiche, Umbrian pottery at Deruta, Italy. Graffiti scraped on a long wall buttressing basketball courts just outside the old gate. Wild and nonsensical. Or so it seemed. A brown wall breached with white and red and black. Overhead sullen thunderheads. I wondered if any place was safe from the vulgarity of graffiti.

We parked the Vauxhall and sauntered up for cappuccini and biscotti. Wandered tight, winding streets, gazed off the top of the hill at the vineyards and groves that marched off in all four directions. We hunted pottery and found it. Back and forth we darted, shop to shop, as thunder boomed to the northwest.

At the little chapel in the middle of the bustle of evening commerce, doors creaked open. A swell of farmers and their dressed-in-black wives, their skin burnt by the Umbrian sun. Then a procession out the gate and past our waiting car.

As we sat in the Vauxhall and pondered the moment, the funeral wound down the hill. And the graffiti slashed on the brown wall, enunciated something. What? About life? About death? I didn’t know. The sullen clouds glowering overhead. Slashes of lightning shattering the black sky.

In search of explanations, Betty and I screened the film Exit Through the Gift Shop in hopes of understanding graffiti as something more than property damage. We wish to understand the phenomenon. But what we viewed was a quirky piece with quirky people who earn fabulous livings off their fame as bombers (graffiti artists.) They market their rebel images through art galleries and sell mass produced paraphernalia like t-shirts and coffee cups that display their famous tagger iconography.

What I saw in Exit Through the Gift Shop wasn’t the graffiti scrawled in the Baltimore battle zones bordering the railways, nor the ragged and tortured art on the wall beneath the sullen Italian thunderheads. The stuff in Exit looked more, and seemed more, like a case of anarchist, populist, angry post-modernist tagging co-opted into the world the artists originally started out to destroy. These taggers became what they set out to annihilate.

After viewing Exit, Betty and I watched the film Bomb It, by the documentary filmmaker, John Reiss. This film was more what I expected, a worldwide look at the phenomenon of tagging, or bombing. What one participant calls the largest art movement in the history of the world. Rage against wealth, restraint, dictatorship, the law…everything from raw and vulgar lingo to sophisticated assessments of culture in the 21st century. Instead of selling their graffiti art through the museum gift shop, these painters brave jail, fines, falling off of moving freight cars, off the sides of buildings, roofs. They leap onto overhanging porches and scramble up drainpipes, their long artistic arms making loops of defiance, the colors of rage.

Bomb It was much more what I wanted. A look at something that is endemic worldwide…Berlin, Rio, Tokyo, Los Angeles…even Boise. Something property hates…how Marxist can we get, trashing private property.

We all thought, when the wall in Berlin came down, that maybe Marxism was defunct, dead, caput; but no, it lives, every day and every place whether the result of petulant rage from the youth of an over-stimulated society of consumers or defiant rage from a stomped-on lower class. Marxism lives, as graffiti art, whether we like it or not.

Now, when I think about that train trip through Baltimore as the sun came up, or watching that funeral procession in Deruta, I understand more why the stuff was up there in all its ugly panorama. The way it glared sullenly, like those thunderheads, the way it menaced me like the barbed wire in Baltimore.

When I see graffiti on the electrical box, the sidewalk, the sides of apartments, stores, houses, I will have to take notice. Even though I won’t like it, the message that it sends will grab me by the metaphorical lapel. I should listen but I can’t. If I do, I may be forced to renounce what I am—an anti-Marxist.

But then again, I might stop and look closer and say, “Now that’s art!.”

October 14, 2011

The Cave of Forgotten Dreams

When I was a kid in southern Arizona, I went caving and spelunking with a guy who was a middle school teacher in the town where I lived, Casa Grande, Arizona. We walked into basalt cave mouths in the Silver Bells and Silver Reef Mountains, and into our own little Sawtooths. We sniffed around for the scent of gas as he told us about canaries in coal mines. He was from coal mining country. We pitched rocks down mine shafts that had claim markers that looked like they were still maintained by prospectors. The rocks clicked and clacked and often we heard the rattle of diamondbacks climb out of the shafts. I wondered if they were albino rattlers or if they climbed out at night just like the ones we killed with forked sticks and shovels. I wondered if they captured and swallowed kangaroo rats and other small things, wrens, and such. Sometimes there were windlasses and big containers that would lower you into vertical mine shafts, but I was always frightened to go down in. The possibility of snakes scared me, and the thought of the ropes breaking scared me too, and that I might end up dying down there while the teacher and his two sons ran back to town in an effort to find someone to save me.

I have always had a primal fear of going into the bowels of the earth and admire miners with the way they go miles down into the tunnels that wind and penetrate below the surface. Likewise, I admire the men who go into caves and search below the earth for life and remnants of life.

Last Wednesday night, Betty and I went to see the Werner Herzog documentary film titled, The Cave of Forgotten Dreams. The film is available in 3D but our art house theater didn’t have that option, so we watched the film in two dimensions. Earlier this year, I heard Herzog talk about the film and one of the things he said was that it was the only film he would ever make in 3D.

But even in 2D it was impressive. The cinematography was outstanding from beginning to end with some very odd frame composition that worked, I think, to help set on end our modern arrogance about how smart we are. The cave, Chauvet, which is in southeastern France, is mostly off limits to anyone but scientists studying the geology; or the Paleolithic era information about cave bears and wolves and cave lions and horses and bison; or the astounding artwork, some as old as thirty-five thousand years. Human activity inside the cave presently is limited so the film crew was restrained as to the types of lighting and camera equipment they could employ. What they created is truly a fine work, particularly given the limited gear they could take into the cave.

All great films have obstacles that must be overcome by the characters on the way to reaching goals and in this documentary, the physical restraints and the restraints imposed by the French government become the obstacles that must be defeated. Herzog, who narrated the film, gives us this information right up front so the requisite tension to keep us interested is created.

What is on the walls of Chauvet are astounding paintings at least twice as old as anything previously discovered on this planet, and the likenesses were amazingly correct, not primitive like some of the old Hohokam rock scratchings that we used to find in the caves of southern Arizona, but sophisticated artwork displaying not only the fauna of the time, but fauna behavior that included breeding and hunting. The cave paintings included great, stunning murals of horses and bison being hunted by lions and bears; and wooly rhinos fighting each other. I think I was doubly stunned because of what the images told me about the intelligence of the people who created this ancient art. When T. S. Eliot came out from viewing the sixteen-thousand-year-old cave paintings at Lascaux, he is reported to have said something along the lines of, “We haven’t changed a bit,” and I could see that, I could see what he meant, as if Picasso or Klee or Matisse or de Kooning had been down there, painting away, or at least their spirits encaved in the bodies of Cro Magnon man.

I also liked the music in the film. It was often melodic and spiritual like the milieu it described, especially at the end, where the narration takes a holiday and lets the camera work. The fine lines of the cave drawings along with the choral voices allow us to step back into our racial memories, our racial minds, and contemplate the long run of humanity on this planet. They allow us to ponder what is possible, what might come to pass.

At one point in the film, Herzog takes us out of the cave and on a cinematic sojourn to the University of Tübingen in Germany where a large exhibit of small sculptures of Venus and animals of the Paleolithic era is housed. We get a clinical analysis of these artifacts‘ relationship to the paintings at Chauvet (evidently they are all from the same time period, give or take five thousand years) and how Cro Magnon could carry on so advanced a concept as paintings and art while his neighbor Neanderthals were not capable of creating anything of the sort. All of this was interesting, but to me, felt as if the magic created by the paintings, their rendition in Herzog’s film, and attention to the power of art were all defeated by the measuring stick-and-caliper outlook of the sciences of studying ancient peoples.

I was glad when that train of thought ended and we returned to the magnificence of the paintings, what they said about my ancestors’ intelligence, their powers of observation and creativity. Some of the paintings are five thousand years older than others, so the time frame in which the cave was used as a ceremonial site, but apparently not lived in, is as long as the history of the written word in our Homo sapiens sapiens sub-species.

Given my innate fear of caves, I sat and wondered if I would go down to look at these images and I have to say yes, I would. In the film, Herzog points out that he and his crew often felt as if they were being watched by the ancients, and he remarked that the anthropologists, the geologists, the paleontologist also had the same sensation, so maybe my old fears are not without grounding in the human psyche.

I would definitely recommend that you go see this film. It is a visual masterpiece, and to boot, stimulates the imagination. The Cave of Forgotten Dreams will force you to ponder various issues, how far apart we are from the artists who created the Chauvet paintings, and how alike we are. They were smart, as smart as the men who built the windlasses that lowered miners down into the vertical mine shafts that we investigated in my youth. As smart as we are now. Not yet with the tools that make us what we are in this time, but smart enough to understand the world they inhabited and to record and interpret what they saw.

September 20, 2011

Skywalker Ranch Redux

Tonight Betty and I and a few other people, mostly the employees of Skywalker Ranch, will view our film, Bravo! Common Men, Uncommon Valor, at Skywalker Ranch in the redwood country of West Marin county, northern California. Last month we mixed the film there and now we return not as a client, but in a different role, the role of presenter. What is particularly gratifying is that Skywalker Sound invited us to do the screening.

It is very warm here in Sonoma County. Too warm for our pleasure, but it is not unusual for a heat wave to bubble up this time of the year in this piece of geography. At night the peepers crowd the air with their warm melodies and the scent of harvest sweetens the air—apples, grapes. The bounty of the normally fine climate.

We showed the film on Sunday afternoon in Santa Rosa to our donors, old friends and acquaintances, new friends and acquaintances. Betty and I were nervous. Would they like it? We think they liked it. People seem to look at us with a different kind of regard now. We are gratified.

One of the unforeseen results of folks viewing the movie is that they borrow the pathos of the film and apply it to their own losses. A mother dies and her surviving children and spouse draw on and gain solace from the wisdom of wounded warriors. Tonight’s Skywalker Ranch crowd should be younger and for the major part, they will not know us and to boot, they will be folks affiliated with the craft and latest technology of filmmaking in this eleventh year of the new millennium. What will they think of these age-old stories and the way we’ve employed them in the movie? Some of the techniques we have used for the wedding of sound and interview are unusual and we wonder if we will hear some “You can’t get away with that,” or even some complaints.

We are a little nervous.

September 16, 2011

On School

Last weekend Betty and I spent our Saturday and Sunday in a classroom for nine hour days to learn more about making movies. And we are taking a regular college class at Boise State on how to become film producers, this after having produced a film.

Sitting in the classroom, I thought about class and school. More than once in my life I vowed I was through with it. When Mrs. L made me sit in the corner for blacking M’s eye in the fifth grade and when Mr. N popped me on the ass with his special-made paddle with the holes drilled in it when he heard me use an expletive or when I got kicked out of high school for a day-and-a-half when I was a senior because I wouldn’t tuck my shirttail in, I swore I would blow off school as soon as I could.

It took me thirteen years to complete the requirements for my BS in Business Admin and more than once on that journey, I quit Arizona State University in disgust, cussing dumb professors who didn’t have a clue about the real world. Intermittently, I joined the Marine Corps, I got a job, I got married.

And after getting my MFA at 53, I said that was probably it. But it wasn’t, and here I am again, jamming up my life, hanging with kids young enough to be my grandchildren, learning from them about a life I never could have imagined back in 1965 when I escaped good old Casa Grande Union High School.

The essence of education is my ability to sponge up energy…creative and intellectual energy…from those I am around. Faculty, students, you name it, all have something I want, and I try to see if I can absorb it. Often I can’t articulate what it is I am after, like air, it’s just out there, waiting for me to inhale.

If I think back on it, I can see all kinds of things I’ve learned in life from the formal and semi-formal education process:
How to see Dick and Jane run, how to shoot a rifle, a shotgun, how to take the part of a clown in a Shakespeare play, how to use a compass, complete a balance sheet, use a dictionary, compose in Latin, read Italian, understand the relationship between hydrogen and helium, how to drive a tractor, how to throw a grenade, how to scan a line of poetry, how to judge the liberal nature of John Stewart Mill…on and on. Classes about how to bust up anti-war demonstrations and how to properly cuff an AWOL sailor, how to niche Chesty Puller into the mythology of the Marine Corps, how to set up a special interest political party, how to understand what causes the weather, how to write a good short story, how to artificially inseminate a cow. And now, learning about how to run a movie set, break down a script, shoot a scene, put together a proposal seeking half a million dollars so Betty and I can make another documentary film.

It makes me chuckle and then shudder when I compare that with grenade-throwing class. Standing in a hole at Camp Pendelton, the mist still hanging on the oak-crowned hills to the north, a grenade in the right hand, an instructor behind me. My heart pounding like an oil pump gone berserk. His words, not the least bit soothing. My worries; am I going to kill someone? Kill me?

Quite a range of things I’ve learned in school. And it isn’t over yet. I’ll still be swearing off classrooms when I’m ninety.

On a different subject, Betty and I are off to California for private screenings of our feature length documentary film, Bravo! Common Men, Uncommon Valor. I will be blogging about the experience as we move through the next two weeks.