Still from War, 2004 [Enlarge in New Window]

Jake Mahaffy: Free In Deed

For filmmaker Jake Mahaffy, his work isn't about self-expression. It's not about style or the audience, either. "It's about a specific subject expressing itself in as clear and efficient way as possible without intention," he says. "I don’t want to turn it into art. I want to let it be itself."

And then Mahaffy, a native Ohioan, gets really excited: "If I could do that, can you imagine?" He visibly lights up at the prospects of a film where "reality imposes itself" and where the story "comes out of the image, and not the other way around," as he puts it.

A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design and the Russian State Institute of Cinematography, where he studied in 1997, Mahaffy speaks passionately about the cinema of French auteur Robert Bresson (A Man Escaped, Pickpocket) and the art of Russia. "You look at Solzhenitsyn, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, even Pushkin and the icon painters—all of their work is morally based," he says. "One of the things I see when watching Bresson or [Andrei] Tarkovsky is there's something profoundly moral, not good-or-bad preachiness, but a transcendent purpose to their work."

Those who saw Mahaffy's 2004 debut feature, War, at the Sundance, Rotterdam, Stockholm, and Edinburgh film festivals made immediate comparisons to the work of Russian master Tarkovsky, acclaimed for such intensely spiritual, abstract films as Stalker and Solaris. But Mahaffy doesn’t want to be pigeonholed, citing a range of inspirations that are just as apparent in War, from the Pennsylvania landscapes of painter Andrew Wyeth to the elegantly composed films of Peter Hutton. A dystopian elegy for a fading America, War revolves around a few isolated characters looking for work in an abandoned rural landscape.

Currently, Mahaffy is preparing a 35mm feature-length film, Free in Deed, to be filmed near Oil City, Pennsylvania—near where he shot War. "That's what's important: the environment, nature, architecture, space, weather," he says of the location. Supported by the Creative Capital Foundation, the film stems from a disconcerting philosophical premise of a returning scapegoat: "What would happen if a man who has been sent off carrying away some people's sins eventually comes back?"

Mahaffy has grafted this provocative framework onto the real-life story of an eight-year-old autistic boy who was smothered to death by a small Pentecostal congregation in the hopes of healing him. "I want to understand and make a film that does not justify, but somehow reconciles the conflicts that occur between one's individual perception of truth and practical, physical facts," Mahaffy writes. "How could a man choke a child to death for an hour and a half, the entire time believing that he was helping him?" As he explains, "There's the idea that the claim and the deed are somehow interchangeable, but they're not. All that matters is what you do. There can be freedom through action." Mahaffy says the project is not about an isolated incident, but reflective of a contemporary reality where "individuals and nations believe and profess one thing while actually doing the opposite."

With a screenplay polished at the Sundance Screenwriter's Lab, Mahaffy is looking to shoot the film later in 2006, using a mix of professional actors and members of the local community around Oil City. But his guiding concern won't be filling some preconceived story or theme. "War became better than my intentions," he says, "because I couldn't do what I wanted to do." With Free in Deed, he hopes to make another film where his own limitations and the reality of the situation are the key to its success. "I'm not so bothered about making a good movie," Mahaffy says. "I want it to be the right movie."

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THIS PROJECT'S CATEGORIES: Film / Video > Film / Video | Americana | Environment | Mid-Atlantic | 2005