"If peace wins in the world, the war I have painted will be a thing of the past. . . The only blood that flows forth will be before a fine drawing, a beautiful picture. People will get too close to it and when they scratch it a drop of blood will form showing that the work is truly alive."
Pablo Picasso, on Guernica
American Guilt: The Modern Orpheus
A single issue defined the production of The Modern Orpheus: what is a filmmaker to do with the troubling, graphic images that the American army captured following their victory in Japan in 1945?
The project began as a meditation on atomic weapons. More focused on the effect of nuclear culture on the American psyche and framed within the American west, the project was interested in seeing America as a labyrinth, coded with a past of violence that lingered in its history that we Americans never fully addressed; however, once I had gathered my footage, primarily from the National Archives in Washington D.C., I found myself driven towards a more empathetic lens.
While I collected images, I found myself appalled by what I had unearthed. These images of the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were so coldly collected. How could any ethical filmmaker agree to shoot images like these? How could anyone approach this work with such nonchalance? Once I entered the cutting phase of production, I found myself focused on trying to find a way to depict these images as they were, to depict them as a whole unobstructed truth.
One of many images collected at the National Archives in Washington D.C., this archival material composed a majority of The Modern Orpheus.
The first thing that I nixed was a sense of patriotism. The historical argument for the use of the bomb in Japan was one that focused on the bomb’s need: the bloodshed of an American land invasion of Japan would be far more destructive than that of the two cities annihilated by the atomic bomb. This argument does not take into consideration the other postures given by the bomb--America’s future of imperial control over the world through and past the Cold War; its posture against and in superiority to the U.S.S.R.; and the cultural obsession toward the commercial and societal uses of the bomb in the post-war era. We Americans can be proud of our victory, but only in the Pyrrhic sense. We won the war, but at the cost of our whole selves, and the America that rose out of the war was a twisted double of the America before Pearl Harbor.
In that sense, The Modern Orpheus had to become a film criticizing the American use of the bomb, built from guilt, a guilt that America has never properly expressed.
The film had to be built from a pair of perspectives. The first perspective is the academic: to understand the bomb from what is shown and what is said, and to accept the perspective’s truth--the radical destruction of two entire cities. The second perspective is the emotional: to comprehend the pain of those we Americans hurt and killed, and in doing so, begin to understand the repercussions of our nation’s acts from a point of empathy.
The Modern Orpheus employs a number of images that were filtered through a method of high contrast color correction. This image particularly is one of the only images that was captured outside of the archive; instead, it was an image that was never used in a failed narrative project.
I structured The Modern Orpheus with this dichotomy, which split into a series of contrasts: the academic/the emotional; the male/the female; the waking/the dreaming. I stole a means of treating images from Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil, as a way to differentiate the two realities, and the high contrast images I built both alienate the audience from what they are seeing, while at the same time forcing them into a heightened emotionality, to shift the images from the documentary images into ones closer to an abstract expressionist take. In this way, I hoped to try to split the distance between the audience and their shame, their ignorance and their unwillingness to address the history upon which their privilege is built.
The final result is the first in a series of films I have made about American guilt. I cannot find any better way to address my nation of origin except to criticize it, to cut the fabric of our history and see if it bleeds.
One of the many images of Hiroshima and Nagasaki following the use of the bomb.
On the History of the project
The media was collected from the National Archives in Washington D.C.; this footage was acquired in fall of 2014 and edited together into a preliminary form in December 2014 as part of Loyola Marymount's film and television production MFA program. That previous film was scrapped and reedited in the fall of 2016, including the addition of a new original score for the film that was written by Elizabeth Erickson.
The images collected by the Americans following their victory in 1945 also included cultural artifacts.
Screenings
Bucharest ShortCut Cinefest - December 2016
Move Me Productions Belgium Short Film Festival
Roma Cinema DOC - November 2016
Woodengate Film Festival 2nd Edition - Winter 2017
High Desert International Film Festival - Spring 2017
Awards
Move Me Productions Belgium Short Film Festival - Semifinalist
Woodengate Film Festival - Best Experimental Film (Nominee)