THE WAYFARING STRANGER

a work in progress
‘ I’LL SOON BE FREE OF EARTHLY TRIALS,
THIS BODY REST IN THE OLD CHURCH YARD…’
RUINS OF THE HENRY HOUSE, BULL RUN
George N. Barnard, 1862
Inspired by Wayfaring Stranger, an anonymous American folk song, perhaps about a wandering, itinerant preacher and William Faulkner’s short story, Mountain Victory, about a weary, defeated soldier returning home after the Civil War, I have developed this film project as a cinematic adaptation: a synthesis of song and story.

This film melds the two characters into one Wanderer, whose journey is portrayed in three short narrative vignettes. In each section, the wanderer passes through a different environment and faces a different conflict on his journey home. These environments, created from a cinematic collage, are constructed from composites of live-action, animation, optical printing and other experimental techniques, reflecting the characters own internal projections onto the world. I am interested in visualizing an abstract world of imagination, emotion, memory and mental aberrations woven into the fabric of a nominally neutral, physical world. This is an important theme for me, developing cinema as a shared form of subjective reality: a projection of internal perception.

Basically, the composition of Faulkner’s narrative allows me to visualize my subjective interpretation of the song, not as a literal illustration of the text, but rather an experience of the unsung aspects of the song. This includes the translation of feelings, and the musical tones, rhythms and textures into abstract visual terms.

This project, as a cinematic triptych, provides a structure for visual and aural experimentation. Working as a team on several films with Jake Mahaffy, we have jointly amassed an arsenal of antique and homemade equipment and developed alternative techniques for unique hand-crafted imagery, impossible by digital or conventional methods. These involve a synthesis of forms and subtle, hybrid effects that advance the significance of film as film. Employing old hand-cranked cameras, homemade optics and in-camera effects, animation, hand-processing, and optical composite printing the film will reinvent the aesthetics of early photographs involving various anomalies and deterioration.

For example, one of the recurring images, in various degrees of distortion, throughout the film, is an onrushing horse. This moving image, reconstructed from a series of century-old still photographs is a depiction of distended time. On film, it becomes a powerful scene, consolidating scattered images into an experience of the unified, relentless onrush of time.

This is a very important project for me personally. I’ve long been interested in rural American folk culture: everything from local histories to barn architecture to folk art. And folk music, born of hardship, also represents a form of artistic redemption. A sense of catharsis, transforming sorrow and suffering into art, is something I want to capture in the film.

Not all wanderers are lost...
plate 631 from Human and Animal Locomotion VIII, Eadweard Muybridge