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| Issue #32 |
GhettoBlaster Magazine: Music, Film, Culture
Film Association for Cultural Equity's Nathan Salsburg
Summer 2012
By Caroline Losneck
Many of the most important
people in our history seem to have FBI files, and in the case of Alan Lomax,
this includes folk documentarians.
Despite a 1940-1960 FBI open
file on him that states “Neighborhood investigation shows him to be a very
peculiar individual in that he is only interested in folk lore music, being
very temperamental and ornery. ... He has no sense of money values, handling
his own and Government property in a neglectful manner, and paying practically
no attention to his personal appearance. … He has a tendency to neglect his
work over a period of time and then just before a deadline he produces
excellent results,” Alan Lomax is perhaps the most significant figure in the
arc of ethnomusicology, documentation and folk traditions in the United States
and beyond. He also is the man behind extensive recordings of some of the
greats and folks recognized as the backbone of American music like Jelly Roll
Morton, Big Bill Broonzy, Bessie Jones, Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly and Muddy
Waters among many, many others.
The big news is that in
February of this year, the Alan Lomax Archive and the Association for Cultural
Equity (ACE) launched the massive ACE Online Archive, the result of over a
decade of the restoration, digitization and cataloging of Alan Lomax’s life
work in documentation, research, and sweeping appreciation for folk music and
oral traditions.
The ACE Online Archive includes
nearly 17,000
free full-streaming audio field-recordings, totaling over eight hundred hours,
collected by Lomax between 1946 and 1991; scans of 5,000 photographic prints
and negatives; sixteen hours of vintage radio transcriptions; and ninety hours
of interviews, discussions, and lectures by Alan Lomax and his colleagues.
Future plans include adding Lomax’s 1954–55 Italian and 1985 Louisiana
expeditions and several of his collections made under the auspices of the
Library of Congress; among them his 1937 Haiti and Eastern Kentucky
collections.
It simply doesn’t do it justice to call The ACE Online Archive a
repository of Alan Lomax’s collected songs, field-recordings, photographs and
documentation. It seems much more fitting to describe the ACE Online Archive as
the manifestation of the relentless dedication Alan Lomax had to convey the
artistic achievements of local cultures and normal people or perhaps better
yet, an unparallel aural slice of folk history. If you’re interested in oral
histories, like Story Corps and This American Life, whose missions are to
realize and document the extraordinariness of ordinary people, Lomax can
probably be considered to have been the precursor to this approach, too.
Pandora, you ask? He even had early ideas about how this might look, too. Lomax
was a pioneer documenter of traditional music, dance, tall tales, and other
forms of creativity in the United States and abroad and he amassed one of the
most important collections of ethnographic material in the world. One of his
lifetime goals was to create a public platform for the folklore, oral history
and expressive culture so that they could be enjoyed and studied. Alan Lomax
wasn’t a perfect person, and there have been criticisms over the years about
how he handled copyrights and financial compensation to some of the musicians
he worked with – although repatriation was always a part of Alan Lomax’s work
and vision. To date, the Association for Cultural Equity has completed
repatriation projects in Como, Mississippi; St. Lucia; Granada and Spain and
other locations where he recorded people. Alan’s daughter, Anna Lomax Wood has
made the returning of recorded material back to the communities and places of
origin an important focus of ACE’s work.
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| From the Alan Lomax Collection, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress. Used by permission of the Association for Cultural Equity. |
Born in 1915 in
Austin, Texas to Bess Brown Lomax and folksong and poetry collector John Avery
Lomax (who was arrested for recording cowboy songs), Alan Lomax spent most of
his 87 years on the planet relentlessly guided by his notion of “cultural
equity”, or “the right of every culture to express and develop its distinctive
heritage” and his Association for Cultural Equity is still dedicated to this
mission. One
of the things I’m most struck by the ACE Online Archive is that it’s free. It’s
essentially a free museum pass to anyone with access to a computer, and you
don’t need a curator or expert to interpret what you see and hear.
Recently, I was fortunate to have the
opportunity to ask Nathan Salsburg, the Association for Cultural Equity
Research Center Editor and editor of the Alan Lomax Collection audio, photo and
video collections about all things Lomax. Salsburg has been with the Archive
since 2000, and he is the production manager for the album releases on Global
Jukebox, not to mention an accomplished guitarist, archivist,
writer and producer in his own right. I met him while he was completing a
Residency at Space Gallery, a nonprofit art space focused on contemporary,
emerging and unconventional arts, artists, and ideas in Portland, Maine. Here’s
the interview.
NS: Lomax was obsessed with folk music — obsessed with seeking it out, documenting
it, exploring it in its local context and, later in his life, understanding it
in its global context. He
worked himself to the bone, beyond exhaustion, for over sixty years in over
twenty countries and nearly half the United States. That
he made not only so many recordings but also so many great recordings remains a wonder to me, and I've been working with
his collections for nearly twelve years.
In a
fundamental way Lomax was the right person in the right place at the right
time. He was the son of folklorist John A. Lomax, who was one of the first
voices speaking up for the preservation and documentation of African American
folk music (and not just the spirituals) as a native American art form, and
Alan started recording with him when he was 18. That was in 1933, when the
halcyon days of pre-war commercial recording were just winding down, and Lomax
the younger was able to have first-hand experience with living folk song at the
same time he could get his hands on all the great rural American music that was
being pressed to commercial disc — and appreciate and not denigrate it, as many
older folklorists did. And as he blazed his own trail as a documentarian of
expressive culture, new developments in media rose to meet him, both in terms
of his own recording gear — from acetate and aluminum disc to reel-to-reel tape,
then stereo tape, then video tape, and, by the time he retired in 1996 at the
age of 81, Digital Audio Tape — and in the broader media space. The rise of
national broadcast systems, the invention of the LP, and, of course, television
making the promotion and distribution of recorded folk song considerably
easier. Over the course of his career, in addition to affiliations like that he
had with the Library of Congress, he worked with the BBC, CBS, PBS, RAI,
Atlantic Records, the Mutual Broadcasting System in all manner of public
productions. None of this addresses the cultural upheavals that took place from
1933 to 1983, the fifty years when he did the bulk of his field recording.
CL: How did Alan Lomax
characterize himself? Was he an academic or more or less a normal dude who
loved music and folk traditions?
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| From the Alan Lomax Collection, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress. Used by permission of the Association for Cultural Equity. |
NS: Lomax was by and large and autodidact, and as such he
made his career up as he went along. His longest institutional affiliation was
with the Library of Congress, from roughly 1933 to 1946. It wasn't until around
1970 that he received any academic support (from Columbia University for his
research into the relationship between performance style and culture), and in
1983 he founded the Association for Cultural Equity with space for the offices
let very cheaply by Hunter College. So he was by no means an academic, though
he was most certainly a scholar. I imagine he would have called himself a
"researcher," but he really wore so many hats that one term just
isn't adequate.
CL: Alan
collected songs and material for the Archive of American Folk Song (Library of
Congress) but after the funding was cut off, he continued to collect
independently. Are there differences between his recordings from both periods,
specifically in terms of independent collecting vs. commissioned recordings?
NS: Not really. His interests, at bottom, were always the
same, although the outlets for the material changed, depending on who was
supporting him — and in that he was never totally "independent." For
example, his 1954-55 Italian recordings were made with the support of the BBC,
for which he produced a multi-part broadcast on Italian traditional music upon
his return. His 1959-1960 "Southern Journey," as he called it, was
the first stereo field recording trip ever made, as Atlantic Records supplied
him with a newly released, state-of-the-art two-track recorder, funded the
trip, and released eight LPs of the material Alan collected.
CL: Is it really true that
the Association for Cultural Equity (ACE) is streaming more than 17,000 tracks
recorded by Alan Lomax, including music from Britain, Ireland, the US, the Caribbean
and the former USSR?
NS: It's true! That number is comprised primarily of the recordings Lomax
made after he left the Library of Congress in 1946 to 1967, when he last
recorded on audiotape, in the Dominican Republic. But it also includes a number
of radio shows produced, hosted, and/or written by Lomax in the 1940s to many,
many hours of discussions, lectures, and interviews by Alan with a vast
assortment of ethnomusicologists, anthropologists, musicians, choreographers,
otolaryngologists (no kidding) for his performance style research. I actually
can't give you an extra hour figure for how much audio is streaming online, but
it's well over 1,000 hours worth.
CL: Do 5,000 hours of sound
recordings, 400,000 feet of film, 3,000 videotapes and 5,000 photographs really
exist?
NS: That is everything that made up what
we call the Alan Lomax Archive, again, compiled or collected by Alan between
1946 and about 1991. A lot of that material Lomax amassed for his research; for
example, the 400,000 feet of film constitutes one of the largest (if not the
largest) privately held dance film archives in the world. None of that,
however, is available online, although there are encouraging signs coming from
our colleagues at the Library of Congress (which acquired the Archive's
original media in 2004) about digitizing the footage. The 3000 videotapes are
made up of 400 hours of footage that Lomax and a crew shot in the American
South from 1978 to 1985. It ended up being edited into five films that aired on
PBS in 1991 as the American Patchwork
series, but as there's just gobs more than was used in the film, I've been
editing discrete clips and uploading them to the Archive's YouTube channel
which can be seen at: youtube.com/user/alanlomaxarchive.
All
the photos Lomax shot between 1951 and 1967 are, in fact, available through the
ACE Online Archive.
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| From the Alan Lomax Collection, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress. Used by permission of the Association for Cultural Equity. |
CL: Of all the
artists, musicians he interacted with over the depth and breadth of his long
career, who are the people Lomax was most influenced by?
NS: Jelly Roll Morton; Woody Guthrie; Lead Belly, Eastern
Kentucky union activist Aunt Molly Jackson; Bessie Jones (of the Georgia Sea
Island Singers); the Arkansan balladeer Almeda Riddle; the Scottish Traveller
singer Jeannie Robertson; Alabama's Vera Ward Hall (a washerwoman and
tremendous singer of sacred and secular pieces alike); Big Bill Broonzy... to
name a few. All of these artists were adept at synthesizing collective
traditions with remarkable individual aesthetics that made their material very
much their own without obscuring the traditional elements that bound it to the
place from whence it came.
CL: What
musicians/ethnomusicologists/documentarians, past or present, do you think were
most influenced by him?
NS: I'll argue that Alan Lomax had a bigger effect than
anyone else on shaping the public's consciousness of and care for intangible
cultural heritage — and I don't just mean folk song, but vernacular ritual,
costume, food-ways, stories from ghost tales to tall tales, toasts, jokes, oral
histories, on and on and on. And with both his British recordings (1951-1958)
and the export of his earlier American material to the UK (Lead Belly, especially),
Lomax played a central role in laying the groundwork for the British folk
revival that created the Beatles, the Stones, the Kinks, etc. He similarly set
the stage for the urban folk revival on our shores in the 1950s and '60s, which
for its part gave rise to the folk and blues festival scenes of the '60s and
'70s. And his work popularizing and promoting traditional American music was a
formative model for what's now called "public" or "applied
folklore," which can be seen at work in heritage events like the
Smithsonian Folklife Festival and Jazz Fest. Lomax was one of the first to
really do folklore, as a vocation,
instead of just studying it.
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| From the Alan Lomax Collection, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress. Used by permission of the Association for Cultural Equity. |
NS: Indeed, it is. ACE has been piloted for the last 15 years by Alan's daughter and only child, Anna Lomax Wood, who initiated and oversaw our radical transformation into a digital archive. That digitization has allowed us to provide a level of public access to Lomax's collections that would never have been possible as a strictly physical repository. And "preservation" doesn't just mean making digital transfers of the original media and then sending it to the Library of Congress for safekeeping in perpetuity.
We’ve
collaborated with a number of regional archives on repatriation projects,
disseminating Lomax's sound recordings, photographs, and video footage to over
20 repositories all over the world, to ensure that the communities that created
them can access and engage with them locally. These partnerships have ranged
from the macro - for example, the Center for Black Music Research at Columbia
College (in Chicago ) received digital copies of the entire 1962 Caribbean
audio and photo collections (60 hours of recordings and 1100 photographs) to
the most micro: last year we sent ten of Lomax's recordings of Scottish
coal-miners to Scotland's National Mining Museum.
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| From the Alan Lomax Collection, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress. Used by permission of the Association for Cultural Equity. |
CL: We’re all
digital now and that’s partially what makes it possible to bring the Lomax
Archive alive again, and yet, I wonder about making the case that culture tends
to flat-line when we experience it over the computer screen. What do you think?
NS: That’s an argument for making sure traditional expressive
forms are valued and nurtured on the local (and physical) level, where they’re
bound to various lifecycle events, ritual observances, social pastimes, which
is fundamental to our mission beyond just free and public access online. So
many fundamental aspects of our lives have been or are in the process of being
digitized; my hope is that the joy and strength derived from making and
sustaining art together communally will keep our mass flat-lining at bay.
CL: What are
the best parts of your job there at ACE?
NS: The access that I’ve been granted to the material is one of the greatest blessings of my life; to keep three hard drives on my desk containing well over 1000 hours of Lomax’s recordings is a gift like none other. For the last several years I’ve been running our YouTube channel, serving as the general editor of our online photo and audio collections, and I’ve also compiled a number of our releases, physically and digitally, which was my dream for years; to be charged with an amount of curatorial license is a deep honor. If that all sounds hyperbolic, I’ll admit it is.
CL: What are
you dying to share with us about the Alan Lomax collection, musically speaking?
NS: Needless to say, there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of gems, but I’ll give you just one for now: a session featuring the singing and metal-tub banging of an octogenarian former roustabout named Charles Barnett in the Northern Neck of Virginia. The stuff is just hilarious, touching, bizarre, and sublime.
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Alan was a self-described “song hunter” as he
traveled to the dance halls, prisons, churches and towns and now it seems that
we can all be modern day digital song hunters. If you have a
few spare hours, uh, days, no make that a lifetime to spend listening to some
of the best folk recordings (such as a West Kentucky Baptist Congregation as they sing
the Psalms or to songs recorded on a 500-pound machine) then head on over to the free ACE Online Archive at http://www.culturalequity.org/ and
immerse yourself in history.
Many thanks to
Nathan Salsburg for conducting this interview even though he was taking a trip
to Russia to speak at a conference. Salsburg curates the Twos & Fews recording imprint, maintains an index
of online vernacular music resources at his blog, roothogordie.wordpress.com,
and contributes music writing to the Louisville Eccentric Observer. In 2011 he released
"Avos" (Tompkins Square),
an album of acoustic duets with Chicago guitarist James Elkington, and a solo
guitar record entitled "Affirmed" (No Quarter).
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| Issue #30 |
GhettoBlaster Magazine: Music, Film, Culture
Film/TV DragonSlayer
Winter 2011
By Caroline Losneck
If you are expecting to be transported to a fantasyland with wizards, medieval castles and dragons when you go to see the documentary Dragonslayer, you will be disappointed. Then again, there is something deeply prescient about the title’s suggestion that danger, opposition and a dragon that needs to be slain lurks somewhere in suburban sunny Southern California.
Dragonslayer, the 74-minute much-hyped documentary (it won the Grand Jury Award for Best Documentary Feature at SXSW this year 2011) is by 35-year old
Film/TV DragonSlayer
Winter 2011
By Caroline Losneck
If you are expecting to be transported to a fantasyland with wizards, medieval castles and dragons when you go to see the documentary Dragonslayer, you will be disappointed. Then again, there is something deeply prescient about the title’s suggestion that danger, opposition and a dragon that needs to be slain lurks somewhere in suburban sunny Southern California.
Dragonslayer, the 74-minute much-hyped documentary (it won the Grand Jury Award for Best Documentary Feature at SXSW this year 2011) is by 35-year old
Director Tristan Patterson. It is his first full feature film. Set in the suburban Fullerton, California (about 35 minutes outside of Los Angeles) Fullerton is a town with an important railroad, agricultural (Valencia oranges) and oil history, but like many American cities, it is now defined by its fair share of foreclosed homes, empty spaces and lost youth. Fullerton, California was also an important place for the Orange Country Hardcore punk scene (a fact that isn’t lost if you pay attention to the main character’s t-shirts throughout the film.)
If there is a subtext to the film, it is that Dragonslayer is a raucous reflection on American Economic collapse more than a film about skate punk culture, teen drug use or the marginalization of unemployed American youth. The film lovingly focuses on Screech (twenty-something Josh Sandoval) a mostly homeless former professional skateboarder, punk and new father. The opening scene shows him working hard to clean out an abandoned backyard pool in order to skate it. Throughout the film, we get unfiltered access to Screech in both intimate and compromised moments of his life: while he is falling in love with a new young woman, waking up in the backyard of a sympathizer who agrees to let him sleep in a tent in his backyard, skating in competitions and pushing his infant son in a stroller. This is made possible by Patterson’s brilliant decision to give Screech a mini hand held Flip camera to capture his life when the crew wasn’t filming. The final result is a hybrid of homegrown footage (that only Screech could pull off) mixed with numerous beautiful cinematic shots by cinematographer Eric Koretz.
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| Photo Courtesy Tristan Patterson |
One idea that has been on my mind since seeing Dragonslayer is that leading man Screech can best be seen as an indicator species, a biological term that explains a large animal species that indicates the overall health of an ecosystem. As the most sensitive species in a region, indicator species can act as an early warning or harbinger for what is to come. Screech is obviously street smart and yet appears to be hustling around life to maintain his place in the increasingly doomed social, cultural and ecological landscape around him. Where are the jobs and opportunities? Isn’t this sunny southern California? Where is the limitless growth and expansion that was promised? Why are there so many abandoned homes and bleak landscapes? Screech might not only be a punk skateboarder but also an indictor of where our economy and country is heading and where we’re all going to get our next meal from (the dumpsters) if things continue going the way they are.
I was able to speak to director Tristan Patterson about the film, how it is being received, and where things are heading.
Ghettoblaster: Can you talk a little about the editing process for the film?
Tristan Patterson: Editing was hard, and it felt endless. (When all was said and done, there was about 80 hours of footage shot by his film crew on their camera and an additional 15 hours of footage shot by Screech and Company on Flip cameras.) It was kind of like, when I was shooting the movie, I could draw on lots of references. When I got into the editing room, there was nothing. And so we had to find our own lens with our own footage. It was painstaking; I was in the editing room for a year straight.
The challenge then was combining the different styles of footage into the appropriate ratios.
Screech’s footage was, perversely or paradoxically, easier to edit than ours. It was difficult finding a balance, a rhythm, and figuring out the structure, the topicality of what the movie would feel like.
Ghettoblaster: What were some of your specific considerations?
TP: The goal of the movie was to be authentic to a specific moment in time in a brand-new way. Editing was about trying to figure out a new and appropriate language for how to achieve this. There was nothing I could point to and say, “this film will feel like that movie, so we'll edit accordingly.” I was constantly considering how the movie would accurately convey this moment in Screech's life, but also be a cinematic experience. I also felt deeply indebted to him for allowing me to document this moment; I wanted to the film to be similarly courageous.
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| Courtesy Tristan Patterson |
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| Courtesy Tristan Patterson |
Ghettoblaster: Can you tell us more about Screech?
TP: He is a lost punk kid. When I first met Screech, he was like poetry. Shooting the film was amazing. Every time we’d go out and shoot, there’d be a reveal. When Screech said, “meet me at the drive-ins” it turned out to be a historical (and dying breed) of Drive-In theatre in a beautiful and bleak landscape. It was a collision of ‘”God, I want to shoot there” and filming what goes on there.
GhettoBlaster: If you were a teenager now, would you be like any of the young people in the film?
TP: No, probably not! But there is interest in youth on the precipice. One of the things about being young, is the past is irrelevant and the future is fucked. It's a really universal experience to be a kid and feel like the only moment that matters in life is right now. But I'm also interested in this idea of the punk generation— that we are now actually living in what they called the "Decline of Western Civilization." It really does feel like we've hit a tipping point. Suddenly the idea of youth trying to figure out how to live their lives in the present tense becomes interesting and essential, as opposed to when I was a kid when maybe it just felt like a passing fad before reaching adulthood.
How the fucks are kids making sense of this insane moment we're all stuck in now? I'd much rather experience Screech try to make sense of the world than listen to some talking head try to explain it to me. It's like, enough already. If it's not action, you're just talking shit. Stop pontificating. My feeling is we need culture that's radical for brand-new times. At least Screech doesn't spend his days bitching about all the ways things are fucked. He rides skateboards through the detritus and hustles for food money. There's nothing hypocritical about that. That kind of guilelessness is in short supply these days and I think it's refreshing to witness.
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| Courtesy Tristan Patterson |
Ghettoblaster: Do you think the film resonates with people around the country? Will it resonate with the folks in the Occupy Wall Street Movement?
TP: What is interesting to me is that not only kids feel this way, but that everybody in this country feels this way now. The film is a little bit like dealing with Western civilization where we asked what it is like coming of age in the movement, when the things you claimed when you are young now might have a much larger resonance. In California, these suburbs used to be the frontier of infinite possibilities, now it’s decay and abandon. We wanted to make a movie about that feeling, and not really sugar coat it.
There’s always been this iconic idea of Southern California’s youth. It’s interesting. There is an appetite to see – it’s perversely healthy to see a vision of what life can feel like here that is authentic. It’s not propaganda.
Ghettoblaster: Can you talk about the Drag City Records and how they came to release the film?
TP: They distributed Harmony Korine’s last movie. I’ve worshipped the label; I think they are totally authentic and uncompromising. It felt like a really good way to put out the movie.
Ghettoblaster: Dragonslayer features indie labels Mexican Summer and Kemado Records (including Best Coast, Bipolar Bear, Children, Dungen, Eddy Current and the Suppression Ring, Golden Triangle, Jacuzzi Boys, Little Girls, Real Estate, The Soft Pack, Saviours, as well as DEATH and Thee Oh Sees). What is the role of the music in the film?
TP: I wanted to create tracks – a little like a demo. It was like assembling a cut out, then going into something that takes hold, or crystallizes the moment. I was trying to build a movie out of moments that feel authentic, and that takes you somewhere. Each track was a layer.
The idea was, because there is a verite level to the film, that some of the music you hear is what Screech would listen to. And then, I wanted to give the movie it’s own music. When I was editing, I started to combine Screech’s music with my music. All of it felt a little stale. It’s hard with youth culture and West Coast skater culture. It’s a little of a “lovers on the run” movie, where instead of escaping the wall, they escape paradise. That led me to Mexican Summer, really great California garage rock. I decided that it should have music that is being listened to right now.
Ghettoblaster: How important to you, or your desired aesthetic, was Fullerton? What if Screech had lived in LA? Would it have made a difference to you? Would you still have made the film?
TP: Inland California is basically the entire point of the movie. It was the landscape of the future, the ultimate place in America where people with dreams moved to start families and try for the good life, and it's now rot and decay – just vacant suburbia. And that's everywhere, not just California. It's where the 99% experience reality—wall-to-wall chain stores, office parks (if they're still open for business), shutdown factories. Let's call it like it is: we've been living in a Ponzi scheme that just collapsed. This is where Screech lives, this is what the future of infinite possibility has left him—a broken place, a broken home, broken prospects in life—but his life, in moments, is beautiful. That's why I see the movie as a celebration. It's desperately trying to answer the question of how can we find beauty when we're surrounded by this rot and decay? We've all been sold out. But here's this worthwhile, talented and deeply original kid finding beauty in the world. He's filled with optimism when he should have more to complain about than all of us. He's not sweating it, so why should I? Personally, I'd like to seem him sweat it a little more, but then again, I'd like to sweat it a little less.
Ghettoblaster: Can you talk about the really interesting – and somewhat creepy - intersections of Reality TV, YouTube and documentary film that are happening? Like, how are they different? Are they blending? Does this relate to your film?
TP: The idea was really to create something new. I was thinking a lot about this generation and that they are getting raised on reality TV and YouTube. Like everybody else, I am definitely susceptible to reality TV. In a way, the idea was to combine these two truths, and create something that feels authentic.
I remember seeing this montage that closed out Laguna Beach. All the kids were lip-synching the words to the same song that was (supposedly) blasting simultaneously in all their sweet rides. Perfect product placement. It's an incredible teen dream realized: we're all listening to the same exact music in the same exact moment and we all know all the words. Also, we exclusively travel in limousines. Who doesn't want this so-called reality?
Then you watch YouTube. There's this girl named Kiki Kannibal. She posted these clips of herself dancing in her bedroom. She looked beyond sad and lonely, but she was expressing herself completely for all the world to see, and because she was 14 that meant dancing to music, and because she was 14 that meant 1.4 million hits and stalkers literally ruining her and her family's life. Now she's trying to capitalize with a jewelry line!
For me, the intersection of Laguna Beach and Kiki Kannibal is that both negate reality in modern terms, one because it claims to be reality but is actually the highest articulation of manipulation, the other because it's a totally unconscious act of desperation made by someone with a secret motive. Whether she knows it or not, she's looking to capitalize. She wants to be famous, even if she hasn't considered what that really even means.
So the question becomes: how are we experiencing culture today? My idea was, let's tune in to actual experience. Let's use the terms of these mediums, and actually be quite confrontational. I'm going to shoot a movie that's ‘reality television.’ I'm going to give my subject a flip-cam and it will aesthetically look like something you see on YouTube. But Dragonslayer will resemble neither of these things, because it will have stakes that involve life as people actually experience it. More to the point, it won't have an agenda, its subjects won't have an agenda, and it will be more compelling because of this.
As for documentaries, I'd say they are probably the least interesting of the three mediums to me for the most part. At least there's unapologetic wish fulfillment in something like Laguna Beach and Kiki Kanibal had art in her when she videotaped herself dancing alone in her bedroom, even if she did want to be famous. Their motives are actually cleaner in my mind than a lot of documentaries I see. It's very rare to see a something that doesn't have the aesthetic approach of a propaganda film. But then again, it’s very rare to see anything these days that doesn't have an agenda beyond it's own existence. It's getting exhausting, watching all these things with ulterior motives. When I watch anything, it's because I'm interested in having an authentic experience that's not contrived. I'm not interested in getting hustled.
If there is a film tradition that Dragonslayer belongs to, it is a documentary with dystopian themes, suggesting lost souls in lost landscapes. The modern day American twist on this troupe might very well be lost souls in lost landscapes in what was supposed to be the American dream.
Before wrapping up the interview, I ask Tristan how he thinks the film will be looked at in 20 years? “It's really nice to think it will be looked at in 20 years,” he says.
