1_BleAch / 8:52
1a.
*Jose. Every day. I’ll admit, it does look cool on camera though. Come to think of it, I used it a bit in the credit sequence, too. The setup with the microphones in the foreground and lights in the bg…
1b.
We were supposed to shoot these titles* at the Salt Flats. But, there wasn’t a second of spare time for anything non-essential. So, the titles got bumped to the third day. We picked up these shots after shooting the very end sequence in the bus & before shooting “3” up at the tubs. I love how they turned out.
*bleach, /blēCH/: verb - clean & sterilize.
1c.
Check out this cute little bb felt board.
1d.
Two things (two personal pleasures): the fact that the arrow on the board was pointing left & Jose exits right instead. AND, the old-school, StarWars-style transition. SO COOL. #amiwipe?
1e.
This is GoPro footage, shot by Doug actually at the Salt Flats location. Shout out to Joel Terry for letting me borrow his GoPro, again.* I just decreased the saturation to make it b&w.
*When atlantic & I made our millennial manifesto and made our road-trip / movie-making intentions public, joel sent us a care package, complete with go pro. a lot of the (yet unfinished) manifest extasy footage was shot on the very same go pro. that’s sorta crazy.
Oh, & I slowed it down — the clip. Has a cool effect, doesn’t it?
BJB POV emerging from portal tub into the vision-scape…
1f.
At first, I did a couple takes coming out of the water & then grabbing the camera and putting it to my eye, one pretty funny outtake where I put it to my face backwards, disoriented. But then, I think it was Linds’ idea to just have me come out of the tub with it already to my face. And, in the edit, that was clearly the correct choice. When directing & being on-camera at the same time, it’s important to have trusted eyes behind the lens.
1g.
The Salt Flats were the first day of principal shooting, out at the Bonneville Speedway. It was rather cold that day… And, yes — that water in the tub with me was freezing. We’d brought my Pop’s generator with the intention of boiling water with an electric kettle to warm up the water in the tub. Good plan, right? But, we couldn’t get the generator to start. And, at some point Jose tries to put the electric kettle on the open burner of a propane grill, & starts a small fire. All of this happens while I’m stranded out in the tub before the water is poured in. It takes us four hours to get the first shot off — this first shot.*
*We got in to wendover way late the night before, something like 2 in the morning after we got everything loaded into my dad’s trailer that we borrowed pulled by my parents’ suv that we borrowed. doug’s car full. sid driving jose’s beater, also full. There was a moment on the road, way past midnight, a bunch of junk loaded behind me and four loyal friends following me out — that i nearly had a panic attack. This was crazy, I was gripped by it. but jose, he kept me steady. He said to trust myself. trust…
1h.
The Super 8 camera was my Grandpa Burr’s. He’s my only living grandparent, the man to thank for my last namesake. A hard-nosed, small-town, depression-era, ex-principal & football coach. We are not now nor were we ever “close,” But, I do have one specific memory of him teaching me to fish when I was little. And another of him teaching me checkers when my parents were with my brother at the hospital starting chemotherapy. There was an influence there, if mostly silent, if somewhat obscured by awkwardness. I had always known casually that he had an affinity for photography. But, I had never made the connection to my own visual artistry, until my Pop gifted his old cameras to me after cleaning out his storage shed to sell the house after Grandma Burr passed. I am proud to own them, seer devices passed on to me by my father’s father.*
*I think it was a weird little dream of mine as a child to someday participate in the patriarchal lineage - like, it always bothered me thinking my brothers got to keep our last name when I was going to have some unknown other name at some point. I felt as much of a burr as any one of my brothers, & i still do, in fact. The cameras, kind of represent that fact, i guess.
1i.
We couldn’t actually get the Super 8 to work, though. Some batteries were sort of corroded inside of it, & I tried to clean it out. And, Doug tried to load in the film I bought for it after putting in new batteries &… nada. So, Doug actually shot this POV on his GH5 & then colored & textured it to replicate Super 8 black & white film. And, it’s rather perfect.
1j.
Yes, that’s a type-writer sound effect. It’s meant to reference Daisies, again. In a scene (or scenes?), a typewriter sound effect is heard rather randomly over the audio-track. Unexplained & unacknowledged. To me, it was a reminder of the scripted nature of the dialogue, the made quality to the whole charade, reminding us of the wizard marionette pulling the Daisies* dollies strings behind the camera in the places you can’t see.
*an impromptu allusion to the beat poet’s “pull my daisy” film. more ginsberg for you coming up later.
So, the same effect is intended for my typewriter effect. We’ll hear the sound every time our girl* “documents” in the vision landscape, accenting the act of transcription but also highlighting the fact that it’s all fiction. This is the first shot where the audience gets to see behind the scenes — a view of the camera itself outside of the context of our heroine’s live view. Slowly from this catalyst, the spectator will see further & further beyond the curtain of the Great & Powerful Oz.
*a girl in the class i’m teaching used this phrase - “our girl” - to refer to the “her”-type character in her own script. I took a liking to it & use it here to refer to the on-screen me.
1k.
The water at the Salt Flats was perfect that day. Only about an inch deep. Fate — it really was. I went back a few months later & it was totally dried up. Tire tracks all over. That would have been awful. But this day, looking this way… sign from on high.
1l.
The outfit is two-part inspired: Patti Smith, of course — polaroid cover to debut album Horses (shot by Robert Mapplethorpe); and, Annie Hall (& although I don’t know how to feel or talk about Woody Allen anymore, I can’t help the fact that that movie — & most especially Diane Keaton’s brilliant, neurotic performance — changed my life & art forever).
I lied. Three-part inspired, I guess. Because, of course it’s also supposed to evoke a pseudo new-age femme missionary, too.
1m.
We probably did the most takes of any for this first shot. Took us a minute to get it exactly the way we wanted to. Doug, Lord love him, operating two cameras (he’d start the Bolex and then run to get into position for the GH5). And remember, it’s cold outside & the water is freezing by this point. It did start off lukewarm. A few miles away was a gas station with an Indian restaurant attached to it. As luck had it, our producer happened to be Indian. Sid quickly befriended the owners and they heated up a giant tub of water for me that Sid & Jose delivered back to the set. This huge show of kindness & luck at least made it possible — got me in the tub with the water in a way that I could stand it… until it slowly cooled to frigidity.
Each time I dunked back under the water, it took so much self control, so much commitment. But, everybody was there. In the cold. Hours & hundreds of miles from home. For me. So I could do this thing. I had to follow through with what I came to do… no matter how hard or physically uncomfortable it was.
*they gave us a good deal for crew lunch, too!
1n.
The music is by Theodore again. Not written for the film, but poached from the front of a song for his forthcoming album. It was funny to find after we reconnected after a silent period to find that I was working on a movie with a SpaceMan & he was writing music with spacey themes… serendipitous.
1o.
Originally, I had planned to have water in the tub the whole time. I thought we’d keep pumping it with hot kettles of water, heated with the generator. Maybe a little prune-y & uncomfortable, but doable, I thought. Hardcore, I thought.
But, no… Oh, no… HELL NO, when it came down to it. No generator. No time to shuttle giant tubs of water back & forth to the Indian restaurant… And after one shot, I was shuddering. My brain was starting to get fuzzy. After we finished takes for just the first set-up… Jose came and got me out of the tub, wrapped me up, carried me to the car for me to warm up. We turned the heater on & he held me for a minute, & I just knew immediately, just obviously, that I needed to cut the water. I mean, we saw me come up from the water. That was fine, right? It’s a f*cking dream / vision / whatever anyway. I’ll just stand up with wet hair & it’ll be dry when I stand. No rules. I make the rules. I tell Jose to go drain the water & tell the others.
Jose comes back to the car with Doug. He says everyone else was out there discussing how they were going to get through to me I needed to cut the water. No one was going to let me continue to do that to myself all day. I really appreciated that. I asked Doug to get some GoPro stuff & then go ahead and drain the tub — just get some footage of it draining. All I need.
And you know what, it’s really better this way. It really is.
1p.
That chain is sort of the remnant of an aborted idea. I had to drop a lot of details to make the essentials work on game day. But really, I was trying too hard to explain everything. It was clear to me when it came down to it what was essential & what wasn’t. There was a whole part about me being chained to the tub & pulling out keys from my mouth (a lá Meshes in the Afternoon) until I finally find the right key that unlocks the chain. The whole bit got dropped, but I liked the idea of just leaving the chain there (I mean, since I already had somebody affix it to the tub) as just sort of the suggestion that I was chained, without having to over-emphasize it. I still like it.
1q.
I like how you can briefly glimpse the Bonneville Speedway sign in the background here before the letterboxes appear & give us our 4:3 frame, a little Easter egg clue to the world outside the void. This is the only sequence where I use black letterboxes with the black & white film. If you noticed, in the previous sequence, I zoomed in on the black & white film for the illusion of the full frame. I wanted the aesthetics to progress. First, feeling wide open & expansive. Then, somewhat siphoned.
1r.
The knock was a hard sound to get right. How does it sound when one’s knocking from another dimension?? I first tried this one, but it wasn’t quite right, you know? Then I tried this one, & I think it was finally the right fit. Good amount of echo.
1s.
This was perhaps one of the most particular pieces of performance I needed to nail… We did a couple takes here, too, trying to massage out the right reaction to seeing The Door. I wanted Her to look unsurprised — reluctant — guilty, almost. It’s an important shift from the wonder of having arrived & the face-the-music of finding out you’re not alone here. Finally, we ended up putting Lindsey right to the side of camera. I’m actually looking at her as my eye-line for the door during this take, and that warranted the right performance. In her eyes, she helped trigger the well of sadness inside of me, the pain.
1t.
I’m rather in love with the little affectations of the Bolex… they make great transitions, especially for the reveal of the SpaceMan’s Holy, floating, divine door in the vision wasteland.
1u.
Sometime in the early Fall of 2017, before my birthday & discovering Mystic Hot Springs, I went on a little overnight trip with Theodore to Wendover with some of his friends. On the way out, we stopped at the Bonneville Speedway. There was a small film crew out there with a door… a floating door. They had drove the door all the way from Los Angeles. I was obsessed with the door. What a cool idea — what a visual. They let me and B.P. take a bunch of pictures with it, the Posies playin’ in my head: “It’s a definite door to another dimension…”
I remember thinking — on that day I swear to you — “I’m going to come back here one day with my own door, a better door, & I’m gonna film my own portal better than these guys did…”
Now, I’m sure their film was fine… They were super nice. It wasn’t really about them at all. It was just a spark, you know? The image of it ignited my brain & planted the seed of an idea that would combine with all the rest in the TUBcake cauldron.
What’s funny is that the day we filmed, people came by & people took pictures with our stuff like I did with theirs. I even happened to meet a couple of the guys again later, sitting with the Bolex in The Joseph Smith building in Salt Lake after shooting a roll of b-roll for my forthcoming thesis. The camera attracted their attention, so they came over and said hi (as many people do when you carry around an old-school camera). I happened to mentioned I’d shot it out at the Salt Flats in the Spring with a bath tub, and Nick (one of the guys) responded, “And someone was carrying you?!” Yep, they were there. What are the chances? I shared the film with him & he shared some of his pictures with me. There’s sort of a synchronicity to it all… taking turns being spectators & performers, interwoven.
1v.
My Pop — Lord love him — made the door. I tried to handle it myself. I bought a door already on a frame from a nice, old carpenter in Heber named Theo. It was really heavy. I had no where to keep it & no way to make it stand. I broke down & brought it to my Pop. Asked him if he could help me make it stand. Told him, that when I used to go to film school in California & I never saw him, I’d always think to myself that if my Dad were here, I’d just have him build it. And now, I could.
He told me I got the wrong kind of door. This one was solid. It was too heavy. He said he knew where he could get a light one, a hollow one. He said to give him a few days & he’d get me a door that would stand up on it’s own — as if floating. He just wanted to know what color it should be. He’s a saint, really.
I told him I wanted it matte black.* Didn’t tell him I was going to spray paint “HOLY” on it before the shoot. I was a nervous mess in the days preceding. And, I both wanted & needed my parents help in the process. But, I was anxious as all hell being in such close proximity to them trying to do my “art” thing…
In the end, my Pop said the door nearly killed him. I neglected to factor in he’d had his knee replaced not too long ago, & his hands don’t work the way they used to.** He, like, really really came through for me on this one. Once he said he had it — I knew I could count on him. I would have a door come hell or high water. That’s the kind of Dad he always was. It’s true.
*HE LEARNED HOW TO TAKE A PICTURE ON HIS PHONE TO SEND ME A PHOTO OF IT ONCE PAINTED; HE’S THE CUTEST.
**It’s weird when you have to start revising the childhood absolutes we hold as descriptions for our parents. like to me, my dad was the superman kind, build anything, fix anything, lift anything kind. But, he’s fast-becoming the grandpa who spends most of his time in his chair. Or, become is probably more accurate. So, the whole my-dad-could-beat-up-your-dad thing might finally be moot for me (though, I still think some fierce liam neeson adrenaline stays locked inside somewhere just in case i - his baby girl - ever get taken). But, hey — He made a hell of a door.
1w.
This was an important shot to me, the iconography. And, I love the way it turned out. LOVE it, with all the grain & everything.
1x.
Why am I not wearing pants, you might ask… I don’t really know. I just know, I never considered to have pants on. It just, sort of, made sense to me that I’d be in tights. There’s a literal-ness to it — the “caught without your pants on” euphemism for an unexpected & incriminating reckoning. And, there’s just something powerful about first owning the masculine, collared shirt-&-tie configuration. And then revealing the feminine, sexualized lower half, wild with a run in the tights. It’s the coexistence of the two, the simultaneousness that I love…
1y.
I kind of like how you can see the lip of the door here. Not too much to totally break the illusion… but the hint of some kind of smoke behind the metaphorical mirror, seams starting to show.
1z.
Lindsey helped me spray paint the “HOLY” on the door the day of shooting out at The Flats. At first, I thought I’d just spray it on. But, at some point we had the idea (was it hers? was it mine?) to outline the letters with tape and then paint the gold around them. I taped out the letters & then Linds sprayed the gold. The end effect was so much better than imagined. Seeing it there — my door — out on the flats was like the fulfillment of personal revelation — self-manifestation. Just months earlier I’d been there & sort of promised myself I’d return & I’d do this thing my way. And here I was, doing it. I had to recognize.
1A.
See, layers shed progressively. So far, we’ve seen the Bolex on it’s tripod, but he haven’t seen any more behind the scenes, the camera, the curtain… until now. The shift out another level of perspective is triggered by her second act of “documenting” — the second time we entered her Super 8 POV & heard the Daisies typewriter noise, reminding us that it’s all scripted, manipulated, being made before your eyes… So, when we cut out this time we see the whole crew for the first time* (along with the orange cooler** & a well placed apple-box / sand-bag.
*see lindsey standing to the side of the camera, acting as my eye-line to the door, like I said?
**We were using it to store the super 8 behind the tub in the first shot, so i could grab it after i came out of the water. But it kept floating away and you could see it in the frame, anyway. we finally ended up with me just coming up with the camera already to my face and that worked the best, by far. But, if we hadn’t tried to use it, we might not have had it out, and thus it wouldn’t have been in this shot. #sad
1B.
If you look closely, you can see Jose cue me for the knocking of the door…
1C.
Again… I LOVE it. One of my favorite shots in the film. Simple.
1D.
And then to cut out to this shot… that’s exactly the vision. Except… haha… Jose, Lord love him, went out to adjust the placement of the tub. And when he came back… he forgot about the placement of the GH5… And, he stood exactly where the door is placed in the frame. Oh well… it works anyway :)
1E.
So, the idea here is that the door has smote me… the act of recording the door activated the response to be stricken down, to be marked across my flesh… to be humbled before the door.
1F.
This is* Allen Ginsberg reading (ironically) the Footnote to Howl. It was always him. It had to be him. This whole project was conceived with the actual, literal pieces of my personal scriptures. This moment was created with the necessary intention to play out with Ginsberg’s actual voice ringing out.
I look down to see myself afflicted with a literal sore to physicalize the pain I experience, a manifestation also of all my pain, phycological, too, sins, sadnesses, mistakes, sorrows… an aching sore to represent all my personal stuff that Mormonism taught me I’d need an atonement to take away.* My life burden.
Contextualizing this wound with Ginsberg’s words seeks to purify all that is real, all that is natural, all that is and thus is holy. The Footnote continues… “The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand and asshole holy! Everything is holy! everybody’s holy! everywhere is holy!” It’s a blessing, an anthem, a decree. It’s just so me. Discovering Howl made me feel okay as I am.
*I realized just now that my “this is” motif / trope is totally in reference to patti smith’s instagram account @thisispattismith … duh! I knew I was channeling something…She starts every post with “this is…”
1G.
You can’t really tell, but it says “HOLY” on my belly. The “O” being the big, oozing sore. I can’t tell you how satisfying it was to see the pain I feel on the inside ALL THE TIME (literally allllll the time) actually physicalized in a way everyone could SEE on the OUTSIDE of my body. It felt like sanity. *
*But also, sort of like madness, too, as my best friend APPLIES a fake sore and FAKE blood to my tummy in a bath tub out in the middle of the salt flats…
1H.
Collateral under-boob. I mean, I didn’t really mean to show it. But, I really didn’t shy away from showing it either. I mean, it’s there. The pain lives right under there. Naturalized, not over-emphasized nudity is what I’m all about, & what I try to practice. Oddly enough, I rather like that the raciest part of my film is under-boob, because it’s a rather over-looked & under-appreciated slice of the breasts. I’d argue equally sexy if not even sexier than its cousin the side-boob. #shouldWEvote?
1I.
Also, my mood ring… I should mention it. I just didn’t think to mention it until now. I wear it throughout the whole thing (except the end, where maybe I wear the Butt Club ring… I’ll have to check…) Anyway, it’s become one of my main talismans to represent the “new” me — post-Atlantic, ex-Texas me. New, filmmaker-on-her-own me. But, the funny thing is, that Atlantic technically gave it to me. The last care package he ever sent me, several weeks after we’d broken up but before we stopped talking altogether… He sent me an assortment of things. Gifts, writings, pictures, mix CDs… one last a&B thing. In it was this mood ring, too. Along with my favorite sleep shirt, my over-sized Kurt Cobain t-shirt. But, I don’t really ever think about him when I wear them, hardly really associate (except softly, continuously) with him at all. Just me. The new ME.*
*And, mood rings, in general, take me way back to high school, to one of my favorite songs which I always felt (still do) that it described me perfectly, romantically, tempestuously: Reliant K’s “Emotional Girls Should All Wear Mood Rings.” Looking back, I see it as a little sexist. But, it’s still all true.
1J.
My earrings here, I think they’re gold little hearts.
1K.
I like how you can see the blanket in the tub with me here… seeing further & further behind Oz’s curtain…* I also like how orange my hair looks in these color shots, a shocking difference from the black & white. My hair just dried that way that day, too. It got wet with the first shot, then just dried all wild.**
*plus, remember, it was really cold.
**My pop would call my wild, wavy hair “wahooni head” when i was little girl.
1L.
It was not hard to make those cries of pain. They’re real, more or less, a product of channeling in to the pain inside me, letting it pour out my vocal chords, all the day’s anxiety… Ah! I can feel the well of pain within me now… as I type in the dark… wrapped in blankets on my bed… the dark (w)hole inside me. Yeah, that noise describes it… perfectly.
1M.
I love how, when I throw my head back, the shape of my face matches the profile of the mountain… destined photography.
1N.
The first few notes of one of my favorite songs of all time*… It has to literally be this song for this moment. It just has to be…
*Patti Smith’s “gloria” from debut album horses.
1O.
I thought this shot turned out really pretty. Nice, tight grain on the film. Beautiful variety of grays in the depth. Decided to take it full frame again. Our girl opening up again, staring into the Bolex for the first time… seeing, acknowledging an off-screen character for the first time.
1P.
It’s Lindsey. My messenger. My friend-&-savior. Wearing her black hat she later gave to me which has become something of a signature in my look of late. She has a white rabbit tattoo on her face, but it’ll be hard to see it. She is the white rabbit in the story… the metaphorical initiator of my own little Wonderland journey. I’ve come to like how her Nike logo seems featured, too. Just do it… seems to be an unspoken forthcoming mantra.
1Q.
I knew right where I wanted the lyrics to start… so I needed to stretch the song a bit. So, I slowed this section down, accenting the disorientation of the moment of shifting perspectives, our protagonist now seeing behind the curtain… It has a nice effect.
1R.
I made this logo last-minute at the equipment room at the U. Initially I wanted to design some kind of fancy, vintage, legit-lookin’ “logo” printed on like vinyl or something & designed by somebody better than me. BUT, I always have to sacrifice like 90% percent of my ideas to “reality.” So, I just buckled down & made some simple labels. And, you know, I really do like the simplicity of it after all. Necessity is the perfect curb to my grandeur. My version of Coco Chanel’s “take one thing off.”
1S.
BLEACH is both a baptismal reference* & Nirvana reference.**
*isiah 1:18
**Bleach, nirvana’s first album, changed my life when I first heard it. I just felt sort of called to check out nirvana after leaving film school and when preparing to go on the road-trip with atlantic. honestly, it just, like, occurred to me that I should fully discover nirvana. and then bleach became the soundtrack to an important metamorphosis for me. But, i also think of it as a reference to nevermind’s line from “come as you are”… “doused in blood… soaked in bleach… like you want me to be…”
And, that’s not the first time I’ve ever bleached myself at the Salt Flats.***
***after the road-trip and after our stint in utah, me & atlantic took one last tour out to california by way of reno before heading back to texas. ON our way out of town, i wanted to enact some kind of ritual to punctuate the moment and to mark the future as a different set of time altogether - to enable change. somehow i had the idea that we should dye our hair out at the salt flats. that was my idea. so, we did. we brought out water - not enough. bleached first. rinsed, then applied the color. it got dark. we fought. we end up washing it out in the salt water because we ran out. I try to run a blow dryer from the car but blow the fuse of the cigarette lighter. we drive to reno all night, dye running in our eyes.
1T.
I love how the “BLEACH” dissolves over my face, like a pre-baptism across my forehead. My face does what I want it to here, looks humble, gracious, but strong, too, open, obedient.
1U.
Also a favorite frame of the film, certainly my favorite frame of Aaron Moura with the boom pole & his vape pen (making him, obviously, The Caterpillar of the story). We call this “the music video” shot because either Lindsey or Jose first said it looked like we were shooting a music video. It also features my cool, looks-like-an-old-phone lamp.
1V.
Patti’s words are EVERYTHING here… It had to be her literal voice… “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine…” I’ve been transfixed ever since with the idea that I atone for my own sins; I carry the cross for my own pain. The point here is the ritualization of self-saving, self-redemption from victimization, the twisting of weakness into power through ownership of that pain & full frontal acknowledgment of it. It’s a baptism by burning over, a sort of chemical resurrection.
1W.
I decided to play this shot in slow motion & let it play a little longer than one might… I decided to lean in to the fact that at this point, this angle, this length, in HD digital color, you can sort of tell it’s a fake sore…. But, you see, that’s all part of it.
1X.
The vape cloud in this shot is really amazing. Another personal favorite detail. It’s not amazing when Jose blows them in regular places all day. But in this shot, it’s just so awesome for some reason. Got The Caterpillar* behind me, like a real Alice.
*The furry boom kind of looks like a caterpillar, too.
1Y.
I screamed really loud. Aaron Moura flinched, rightfully.
1Z.
The idea is that the BLEACH sends me down into the TUB portal again. The second “washing” thence commencing: