Confederation Park (1999) film still [Enlarge in New Window]

Bill Brown: Mountain State

Bill Brown likes to travel. Meandering across the variegated landscapes of America from his home in Lubbock, Texas, the 32-year-old filmmaker has visited the reputed UFO landing site in Roswell, New Mexico, and traversed the lengthy Trans-Canadian Highway. He's visited decommissioned missile sites in North Dakota and wandered around the hills of Point Pleasant, West Virginia. But more importantly, he's made movies about his travels, creating an eminently unique body of work marked by stunning visuals and a personal voice, and hovering stylistically somewhere between ethnographic study, idiosyncratic travelogue, and critical essay.

Between 1988 and 1992, Brown studied filmmaking in Harvard University's Visual and Environmental Studies Department, known for its emphasis on "old-fashioned documentary film production," as Brown puts it, where filmmakers such as Bob Gardner served as Brown's mentors. "It was exactly the right sort of program for me," the filmmaker notes. "I didn't know anything about nonfiction filmmaking - my experience with movies was either the standard PBS-style documentary or traditional narrative films, but when it became clear that there was this huge genre of essay films, it was very exciting, a revelation. I'm still working through that enthusiasm."

In 1994, the filmmaker traveled west to earn his MFA in the live-action filmmaking program at California Institute of the Arts where he studied with James Benning, a structuralist filmmaker who shares Brown's affection for the American countryside. "From the get-go, I was interested in landscape," confesses Brown, who adds, as if it explains everything, "I'm from Texas." He continues: "Landscapes are like relationships - I think I've fallen in love with landscapes. Some are inspiring, and some are uninspiring. But in general I guess this fascination with landscapes has to do with trying to square geological history with human history, to look at all this stuff that's around us and visible but mute. So I guess my ongoing project is to figure out what it is about landscape that gives me goosebumps."

Working in 16mm, often with black-and-white stock, Brown says his projects begin with a question, some hook that will give him a reason to visit a place and begin shooting footage of it. With Roswell (1994), Brown was intrigued by New Mexico's desert vistas and the town's UFO folklore. For Buffalo Common (2001), Brown chronicled the dismantling of missile sites in North Dakota, alongside larger issues of war and economic decline. And for his latest half-hour film supported by Creative Capital, Mountain State, Brown is traipsing around West Virginia, tracing the history of a local legend--The Mothman, who reputedly haunted a town on the Ohio River in the 1960s. "There's this whole body of weird uncanny events that never make their way into the traditional media - things that happen to a community or town and then get forgotten," says Brown. "The creature called The Mothman is a part of that." First spotted in 1964, The Mothman has been described as a large, winged man in more than 100 sightings, and while the figure recently graced America's movie screens in The Mothman Prophecies starring Richard Gere and Laura Linney, you can bet that Brown's more vernacular approach will tap directly into the eerie recesses of our cultural mythology.

Brown's images, which frequently show the landscape void of inhabitants, are strangely evocative and embody a sense of intense longing. Part of their power is that they are indeed filmed images rather than video. "There's a certain depth and saturation to the film image that I don't see in the flat, sterile video image," explains Brown. "I like grain and the way the image breathes, and there's this strange organic dynamism in the form of grain. I guess I fetishize the alchemy of the whole process - strips of silver that are stained by light and somehow become images . . . it's very magical and romantic."

In addition to shooting beautiful, resplendent images and recording live sound, Brown also speaks in voiceover. "Text and language are incredibly important to me," he says. "I don't know if it's an effort to make the landscape speak, some feeble attempt to give it a voice, but I haven't figured out any other way to make these films without voiceover." Which is a good thing, because Brown's particular voice, with its quiet tone, colloquial familiarity, and moments of sublime poetic phrasing, endow his films with their singular power. Indeed, to say that Brown is one of America's leading new cinematic voices is true, both literally and metaphorically.

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THIS PROJECT'S CATEGORIES: Film / Video > Film / Video | Americana | Fantasy & Myth | Religion & Spirituality | Southwest / Pacific | 2001