by Jamie Stuart
I recently watched my 2001 short film
Triumph of the Will, Part II for the first time in a couple of years.
TOTW2, as I often refer to it, has the distinction of being the first film that I ever shot and edited digitally. In fact, the digital shooting of it is inherent to the short's aesthetic: Half of it is 16mm, the rest is Mini-DV. It was interesting to experience how far I've come since then, on a technical level.
TOTW2 was initially developed in early 1997. After spending the previous year trying to get no-budget features off the ground, a friend suggested we go back to our roots and just do a simple 16mm MOS short. I thought it might be interesting to try and dramatize something completely mundane like cooking a hamburger. The original title was
Saturday.
Having recently bought the laser disk of
Slaughterhouse-Five, Bach's Arioso was stuck in my head and I wanted to set the images to it. However, I didn't know the name of the music. If I recall correctly,
Slaughterhouse-Five didn't actually list the individual pieces used in the film -- it simply credited the performance to Glenn Gould. I went over to the Virgin Mega Store in Times Square and started shuffling through the Bach CD's, not knowing what I was looking for. The clerk asked me to try humming the melody. I did. He didn't recognize it, but suggested I try The Goldberg Variations. I went with the Charles Rosen over the Gould, probably because it was cheaper.
Unfortunately, upon playing the CD, I found that the piece I was looking for wasn't there. One of the numbers did sound somewhat similar in its basic progression, but Variation #3 was significantly faster-paced than what I was thinking about. After listening to it repeatedly, I settled. The changing of the tempo obviously would affect the visual language of the short, and it soon became more complicated as I sought to reference the quick-cutting style of modern commercials. The premise would now play out as such: A slacker scrambles together the money to make lunch, only upon cooking it he realizes his pet cat and iguana are hungry too, so he gives the food to them; shortly after, at the park, while finishing a cup of coffee bought with his remaining change, somebody walks by and drops money in his cup as if he were homeless.
Needless to say, the short was never completed. I shot for one day, I think, with a friend starring in it, but the results weren't to my satisfaction. Furthermore, I was out of money.
Five years passed without the completion of a single film, the last being in 1996. The indie movement had gone belly-up, and film and processing just cost too much. Additionally, my parents had officially divorced and remarried, so they didn't feel much like investing in any of my efforts.
After spending most of 2001 working one day a week as Jami Bernard's assistant, I decided it was time to return to the abandoned short. I storyboarded it from scratch (and memory), changing the original ending by adding a chase sequence that climaxed not with him rewarded but being corrupted instead. I cajoled a few bucks from my parents (pitting them against each other), and raised the rest through plastic.
For the lead, I had two actors I'd known from theater camp as a kid in the back of my head. Both were great at comedy, and I knew they were in NY somewhere. Then, randomly, just as I was putting the production together, I bumped into one of them on the street. This person I'd previously known simply as Jon McGovern was apparently now billing himself professionally as Jonny McGovern: The Gay Pimp. He had a website and was performing throughout the Village as a sort of gay comedic Justin Timberlake. While I was utterly baffled by all of it, I cast him anyway because I knew he'd handle the physical comedy really well. Onward.
A week after 9/11, I rented a 16mm Arri-BL for $300, while the owner cuntingly demanded holding onto my BowerBook as collateral. The shoot was scheduled for one and a half days of interiors and one day of exteriors. Sadly -- as these things go -- midway through the exteriors, it started to rain. Realizing we were done for the day, somebody pulled out a joint and we had our wrap under Hell Gate Bridge.
Anyhow. The dailies looked great. I knew I'd gotten what I needed to. So far. Now, I was faced with the problem of finishing the damned thing -- and I was broke and moving out of my apartment. Somewhere during this transition, I realized that I wouldn't be able to finish the short as I'd intended in 16mm, cut on a Steenbeck flatbed. If I was going to finish my first short in five years, I was going to have to shoot the remainder in DV and edit on my laptop with the new Final Cut Pro 2. And that's exactly what I did.
The final shoot took place three months after the first on a wind-tunnel December morning by the East River. The only reason I was able to convince everybody to show was because I told them I was applying to the American Film Institute in Los Angeles. The actors all arrived late and completely hung-over (it was Sunday morning). Because the entire short had been storyboarded, we picked up right where we'd left off. And without having to change film reels or tape-measure the focus, an otherwise all-day shoot was completed in two hours. Subsequently, after getting the 16mm transferred to DV as a favor (for a 6-pack of Guinness), I scammed a bootleg of FCP, and without any prior tutorial, I edited the entire short in two days.
The final touch was to change the name from
Saturday to
Triumph of the Will, Part II. I wanted to give it an ironic happy title, but a I realized that nothing would ever beat
TOTW, so I co-opted it. Aside from the title symbolizing what I'd gone through to finish it, I esoterically decided the conceptual connection was in how they both dealt with the corruption of ideals. (I've also suggested at times that much as Leni Riefenstahl's
Triumph of the Will raises the great question of whether art can be separated from politics,
TOTW2 sought to question whether an unrelated piece of art would be damned simply by using its title.)
Looking back on the short, it's obviously guerrilla -- but guerrilla in a way not seen much anymore: 16mm guerrilla. Yes, the switches between film and DV are obvious, but the visual storytelling holds regardless. If I were to shoot it now, it would certainly be more polished -- more natural lighting, smoother dollies, plus I wouldn't have needed to maintain a minimum 5-ft. focal distance as was required for the variable prime on the BL. Among other things.
Truth is, I have gone back and tweaked it a few times since it was initially completed. It's one of those pieces that's good for what it is -- yet it could always have been better (what couldn't?). If nothing else, this was the film that set me on my digital path.
Filmmaker Jamie Stuart has developed shorts for several years through his production business, The Mutiny Company. Working almost entirely on his own, Stuart has carved out his own niche in the film community, documenting the festival environment with experimental shorts for Movie City News, Filmmaker magazine, Focus Features and others. In this series of columns, Jamie examines the way that new technologies have aided his personal adventures in filmmaking. Read his last entry here .