WAR TO END WAR: Joie de Guerre

War to End War: Joie de Guerre, 2018

Featuring manipulated footage from Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory & G. W. Pabst’s West Front 1918, as well as excerpts from Johann Strauss’ Emperor Waltz. The waltz was composed in honor of the newly formed alliance of Austria’s emperor Franz Joseph I and Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II.

Joie de guerre (joy of war) is a conundrum best illustrated by a quote by Henry Kissinger, “By war alone can we acquire those virile qualities necessary to win in the stern strife of actual life.”

ELDORADO

Made of footage from Glengarry Glenross, Bonanza, news footage from three major hurricanes and forest fires occurring during production, and news footage of the 2010 BP oil spill.

El Dorado, the fabled lost city of gold is also the name of a luxury Cadillac, and first prize in David Mamet's Glengarry Glenross real estate competition. Bonanza was a term used by miners to describe a large vein or deposit of ore. The fictional Ponderosa Ranch of the TV show Bonanza was near the Comstock Lode discovery that began the silver rush of 1859.

“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”
-Ronald Wright

BEWARE OF FLOYD THE BARBER

A cautionary tale of repressed tensions in small town America, Beware of Floyd the Barber is based on footage from the classic TV program The Andy Griffith Show, and inspired by Hitchcock and the Nirvana song Floyd the Barber. Set in small town America, The Andy Griffith Show featured an eccentric group of likable characters, and evoked nostalgia for an idealized simpler time.

NEW FILMS FOR ANTARCTICA

I've been working hard on new films that will be included in my first feature Antarctica. Each of these short films hopefully will be shown in film festivals and micro-cinemas while the feature is being developed. Projected date for the feature is 2019 or 2020.

Still from Boating Song,  2016, 04:18

Still from Stagecoach, 2016, 05:20

Still from MEOW, 2017, 03:21

Still from The Starving Class, 2017, 02:57

ANTARCTICA

Little Jean-Pierre Leaud from 400 Blows is still running.  Only the frames of film that contained him have been hollowed and scratched. He is still running to escape a damaged past, but the damage has multiplied and exploded into a post apocalyptic dystopia. He is no longer running to an ocean he has never seen, but to the only hospitable location left. The melting continent of Antarctica.

Antarctica is the first chapter in what will become a feature length experimental film. Each chapter will be self contained, but together they will create an epic journey across erased and scratched frames of cinematic history.

ELECTION YEAR

A meditation on politics and the political beast formed by footage of the first nationally televised debate. The debate is known for displaying their differences through the power of appearances, but news accounts also claim they presented remarkably similar agendas. They both emphasized national security, the threat of communism, the need to strengthen the U.S. military, and the importance of building a brighter future for America.

TALL TREES IN MARSEILLE

Tall Trees, a film about a 1914 bank robbery in Sedro-Wooley, Washington will have its European/ French premiere at Festival Images Contre Nature in Marseille. Nine photos from a scrapbook my father kept about his father Emrys Hughes, pictured with the gun tell the story of the fate of the robbers.